The Read: Peter Turchin, End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration
Friday's Child Is Loving and Giving (But Maybe Not This Time)
Why did I get this book?
I’m not sure, actually. I know I read someone talking about how excited they were going to be to read it, and it did sound at least somewhat up my alley. (I suspect it was Brad DeLong, but perhaps not.)
Is it what I thought it was?
Not really? It’s much more in the vein of Diamond, Harari, Pinker etc.’s universal histories than I expected.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
If I teach my course on what’s wrong with universal history as a genre, maybe I’d swap it in for one of those other books.
Quotes
“All complex societies go through cycles of alternative stretches of internal peace and harmony periodically interrupted by outbreaks of internal warfare and discord.”
“The social pyramid has grown top-heavy. We now have too many ‘elite aspirants’ competing for a fixed number of positions in the upper echelons of politics and business. In our model, such conditions have a name: elite overproduction. Together with popular immiseration, elite overproduction, and the intraelite conflicts that it has engendered, has gradually undermined our civic cohesiveness, the sense of national cooperation without which states quickly rot from within.”
“After all, the primary mover of the Wars of the Roses was the horrible degree of elite overproduction in England circa 1450. Until it was somehow resolved, the conflict couldn’t stop, except due to sheer exhaustion. But then it would simply be replayed again when a new generation, not immunized against violence, took over. For a disintegrative phase to end, the structural conditions that brought it about need to be reversed.”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
I have no problem with what I take to be the two basic ideas here: first, that contemporary American political discord is fundamentally a consequence of the current configuration of social hierarchy where too many people are chasing too few stable professional opportunities in a tournament economy at the same time that there is “popular immiseration”, that is, people who are not even eligible to compete in the tournament economy feeling more and more squeezed in terms of really basic access to health, food, shelter and services. Second, that there is a cyclical dimension to this kind of situation that is fairly recurrent.
I have a huge problem with the huge overselling of these two fairly basic arguments in the form of a universal history, which at times verges on this panel from Matt Groening’s old Life In Hell comic, the one on the 9 Types of College Professors.
There’s probably a gentle, low-key and very provisional way to explore an argument in which too many people chase some form of formal elite status and create a kind of imbalance in the human ecology of their society in the process (or are created by that imbalance) and there’s some form of tumult or uprising that resets that ecology. This book is not that gentle account: it strenuously insists that this is a universal cycle with rigidly deterministic parameters that describes all complex societies in history (despite the fact that the author almost entirely references Western Europe) and that contemporary America is explained entirely by this cyclical dynamic.
You know how you get someone to pick nits? By building a trembling, fragile fortress out of a million nits and insisting that they are made of iron and marble. That is when I cannot help but start marking the margins of a book with remarks like “you can’t quantify this”, “where’s the footnote for this?”, “relative to what?”, and “Dear Hari Seldon: I thought psychohistory didn’t apply to individuals”.
The basic problem I have is that Turchin’s central concept, “elite oversupply” or “elite overproduction”, requires some kind of relatively fixed ratio for it to have any weight as a universal concept. But at almost all times, what he does is argue that when there is sociopolitical unrest in a society, that indicates there must be elite overproduction, which he then confirms by presenting evidence that there were more elites at the point of the unrest than there were at some point previous to the unrest. There’s no specific ratio of elites-to-nonelites that he presents as invariably spelling trouble.
He also finds way to bracket off some examples of unrest as being about external factors (war against another state, etc.), he generally doesn’t apply the idea consistently to violence within an elite, and overall doesn’t lock down his definitions of anything in a way that justifies a universal framework. He has a zillion ways to cross off exceptions so that they don’t invalidate what he’s presenting as a kind of historical law. What’s an elite? Is it just an income or wealth differential (and thus, when do you cross into elite from non-elite)? No, the way that Turchin works it, elites are basically title-holders, e.g., they’re people whom the state or some quasi-official institution say are special. It doesn’t matter if the title actually confers some specific wealth or advantage (hence, he thinks that cases where there were increasing numbers of people with noble titles in France resulted in the relative impoverishment of the nobility overall that this also constituted ‘elite overproduction’, but he isn’t including in his account of this elite overproduction the growth in wealth among urban merchants and other urban elites who were the people buying those noble titles, which is why there were more nobles. Why aren’t the urban groups who were becoming wealthier ‘elites’ in the same sense, to be included in the count? Because the title is what matters. Why is the title what matters in thinking about numbers of elites relative to the rest of society? Because something something social cohesion which is what makes nations and states hold together which I think also means something something the meaning of titles, their cultural prestige. Only is culture prestige something that is subject to scarcity and oversupply? Maybe, but not in the same way as something like “ownership of land”.
Shorter version in the US context: why is a person with an advanced degree who isn’t making very much money an elite and a car dealer making three million a year in personal income from their business not an elite? Turchin gets this point for the contemporary U.S. but in trying to universalize it he’s often forcing comparisons or ignoring major differences.
I just don’t think you can have a ratio that’s fairly fixed that says “this many titled elites, oversupply; this many, just right”. It amounts to a Goldilocks argument when it’s universalized, a series of declarations that at this point a given society is just right, and at another point, it’s oversupplied with elites. That requires explaining away social conflict or unrest that happens at the just-right points as trivial, externalized, or exceptional and emphasizing it at the oversupply as entirely caused by the oversupply. The cycles are also weirdly variant in how long they take in ways that Turchin has no universal explanation for (because there couldn’t be).
To compare, the number of variables involved in estimating “carrying capacity” of a particular environment in relationship to a particular organism or species is huge but it’s not infinite, and any population biologist or ecologist who wants to take a shot at saying “here’s the carrying capacity; here’s where a species would be beyond the capacity” couldn’t just say “Um, whenever you see animals dying, that’s when they’ve gone beyond carrying capacity”. Nor would they say that all organisms have roughly the same kind of population dynamics with reference to carrying capacity: some species in some environments routinely outstrip carrying capacity and have a dieback, some don’t; sometimes that’s intrinsic to the species (R-selected species v. K-selected species, for example) and sometimes it’s some relational dynamic involving the environment, other species, and so on.
His whole approach also requires him to very weirdly normalize the political unit that he takes to be oversupplied or just right—to use states as the unit when they aren’t even remotely unified and when social cohesion between peasants, urban populations and the nobility (in the case of medieval and early modern Europe) isn’t a thing across the whole of ostensibly “national” territory. If the theory makes any sense as a universal, it has to be fit to actually existent political economies in the past. He’s talking about France or England at times when he should be talking about much more regional or local territories.
That leads to super-weird claims, like the “Age of Revolutions” in England in 1830 being the same “disintegrative phase” ending in England as the French Revolution was in France. Wait, why not have 1830 in England be the beginning of the same disintegrative phase as 1848 in Germany? The middle of one? Ah, but wait, England got out of the French disintegrative phase but “somehow managed to avoid state breakdown”. (This, he promises, shows that you can get out of disintegrative phases without disintegrating.) Sometimes the cycles are fast, sometimes the cycles are slow. Sometimes you get out of them! Sometimes you just have to go through them. They’re always elite overproduction, even if a society doesn’t have a titled elite, but there’s no telling what exact amount of an elite is an oversupply because it’s not clear what exactly that’s relative to. The amount of parchment available to print degrees on? The number of peasants in the villages? The amount of money in circulation? Sometimes you’re stuck with only one wife, so your numbers of wives doesn’t make you an elite, but in polygynous societies, wives do the trick right up until there aren’t enough wives, at which point? Overproduction! Disintegration! Immiseration of the one-wived.
All cases fit his argument because he’ll make them fit; no cases complicate his argument, because they can’t. The model predicts a deterministic outcome, except for the times that it doesn’t, which always means that someone saw a way out and avoided the danger. Unless it means that the old people got tired and stopped fighting but the disintegration was still ongoing until later on. The model applies to the whole of society but actually no, it’s really just agrarian life. Urban elites are included unless they’re not.
The fudge factor that really drove me nuts is the idea that what’s threatened by elite overproduction plus immiseration is cohesion and legitimacy. I’m sorry, but medieval European society and early modern European societies were not experiencing precise 50-70 year cycles of cohesion and the loss of cohesion in precise correspondence to demographic and economic cycles in a way that was comprehensive across all social tiers and in all locations simultaneously. Even in far more ‘simultaneous’ modern nations, cohesion and legitimacy are not precise qualities nor are they consistent ones across the whole of a national population or even within much more specific social networks or locations.
As my marginal complaints mounted, I kept looking to the footnotes to find that a substantial amount of the time, Turchin is footnoting himself, primarily a book called Secular Cycles that he published in 2009. That was important from my point of view because he was making very specific empirical claims like “the nobility in France grew enormously” in a particular century. I wanted to know if Turchin either improbably had done his own detailed research on the demographics and economy of Western European societies from the 12th Century to the 17th Century or at least what secondary scholarship he was citing. So I had to troop off and look up Secular Cycles, and I was at least relieved that there was a fair amount of research there (and also, frankly, that the claims being made were less universal, less strident, and less monocausal). At the same time, the secondary work that Turchin and his co-author rely on in that book comes from a pretty narrow historiographical vein, almost all of it pre-2000. (LeRoy Ladurie, for example, is heavily cited in the French chapters.) But at least there’s evidence and the model is qualified and its limits are acknowledged.
Reading Secular Cycles made me feel better, at least, but it also made me feel that the cycle that drives someone like Turchin towards making more and more glibly universal and thus unsatisfying claims, to the point of those claims being fit to everything as monocausal explanation, are bad cycles. They satisfy a particular customer base—often, unfortunately, Big Tech executives, glib policymakers and Thomas Friedman—who will then spam the public culture with their new favorite explanation of everything and then push some simple intervention that doesn’t fix much (or makes things worse). As far as that goes, the things he’s recommending (in Chapter 9) aren’t terrible (Chartist England and mid-19th Century Russia) in that they involve democratization and egalitarian reforms, but they show the same selective measuring sticks about what counts as a solution to crisis and what doesn’t, what counts as having too many elites and what counts as having just the right amount, and so on. There’s nothing wrong with the basic characterization of Trumpist America offered here, but there’s also nothing strikingly original about it either—the originality comes from the claim that we’re just going through a universal cycle that affects all complex societies, and that just doesn’t work for me at all in the way that Turchin serves it up.
I really do not think I have read it...
I do think (a) there is probably something very worthwhile in Turchin, (b) but when I try to understand it, I bounce off of it...
Brad
I have not read the book, but every time I read Turchin I want a description of elite overproduction that is not just reducible to population growth. Obviously the ratio of US Presidents/person has shrunk considerably over time, but this would just imply permanent crisis. So if that's not it, then there has to be something that _creates_ more positions for being elite, but what is it?