XIII. More complicated calculathig machine constructed by

J. H. Miiller (1782).
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tions, on interpretations of holy texts, or on cabbalistic multiples of the basic number six or the magic number seven. The Babylonians spoke of a period of 3600 years, and the Jewish historian Josephus Flavius who lived in Rome during the first century a.d. tells us that ancient time was divided into periods of 600 years each.
The Sirius-cycle of 1461 years, the great astronomical dis- covery of the Egyptians, also led to the introduction of mytho- logical and cyclical ideas of time: whenever the cycle was about to run its full course, the Phoenix would rise up in India — or, according to another version, in the north — to return to Egypt where, after having been burned to ashes in the Sun Temple at Heliopolis, it would be resurrected to new life. Within every 1461 years, not only heavenly but also terrestrial processes followed one another in rhythmical succession. Another Egyptian cycle consisted of 36,525 years, i.e. a hundred times as many years as the year has days. Once this cycle was completed, the golden age was said to recommence on earth.
The Greeks added little to oriental notions of time. They, too, were constantly searching for the Great World Year, the rhythmical unit of world history. From Plato's day, we know of a world cycle of 700,000 years, at the end of which everything starts all over again, and a later authority from the second century a.d. tells us that the Great World Year lasts 9977 ordinary years. Though the sceptics of the Platonic Academy rightly objected that such long periods were quite useless for all practical purposes of predicting the foreseeable future, the problem of the kyklos — the great cycle — continued to occupy the greatest minds of Greece. Thus, in spite of his famous parable of the river that could only be entered once, Heraclitus' "flux of becoming" was cyclic rather than linear. In the divine fire, opposing worlds consume each other, only to arise anew like the Phoenix. Similarly, the Pythagoreans symbolised the cycle of becoming by the wheel of re-birth. Acpording to Plato, the "perfect" number which governed the "cycle of divine creation" was at one and the same time the basis of morals. Thus man was enjoined to live according to the system of numbers listed in the Republic^ and elaborated in his Timaeus,^ where we are told that
1 Plato: The Republic, VIII. * Plato: Timaeus, 47a.
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man's gift of vision comes direct from God so that, as he beholds the cycles of the heavenly bodies, he may apply them to his own thoughts to which they are intimately related (Plate 15). Aristotle, approaching the subject from a mathematical and physical point of view, came to very similar conclusions. According to him, all perfect and durable motion was circular.
Whatever mental reservations Plato and Aristotle may nevertheless still have had on this subject were completely overruled by the Stoics, who were to exert the greatest in- fluence on Greek and Roman intellectual life for more than 500 years. The Stoics believed that events recurred in an identical rather than a similar pattern, and took this belief quite literally. Thus we may read that "if the stars return to their position, a new Socrates and a new Plato will arise, and every individual will be reborn into the same circle of friends and fellow- citizens to suffer the same fate and to carry out the same activities. Every town, every village, and every field will be re-created just as they were".^
History repeats itself
With the rise of Epicurus, this philosophy met its first serious challenge. The Epicureans rejected the notion of the Great World Year and the doctrine of eternal rebirth as rank super- stition. To them every man was a unique individual, and it was precisely for this reason that human life had value and signi- ficance. Now, if millions of individuals live unique lives, history cannot possibly repeat itself. In this way Epicurean philosophy may be said to be anti-historical, for if nothing can be gleaned from the past, it is best to live for the day alone.
It has been said that this stress of the uniqueness of the individual is a common bond between the Epicurean and early Christian philosophies. However, this apparent similarity is extremely superficial, since Christian philosophy is by no means fundamentally anti-historical. True, it rejects the idea of re- birth on earth, since life on earth, of which history deals, is not eternal but is followed by the life beyond, but there are never- 1 Nemesius: De natura homin. Chap. 38.
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theless historical parallels which generally result from man's sinfulness. Thus the earliest Christian philosophers, above all St. Augustine in his De civitate Dei (The City of God), expressed clear cyclic ideas of history.
St. Augustine's historical philosophy is largely based on Eastern notions of the kind found, for instance, in the Book of Daniel, where we are told that four kingdoms will arise, only to be destroyed through man's deceitfulness and error, until finally God sets up His Kingdom which shall never be destroyed.
Similarly, St. Augustine looked on all history, from Cain and Abel's fratricidal strife right up to the sack of Rome by the Goths (which he witnessed himself), as the struggle between good and evil. Thus Cain's murder of Abel corresponded to the killing of Remus by his brother Romulus, ^ and pre-Christian history could be divided into five periods, each of which ended in disaster. The sixth period which began with the birth of Christ would last until the Second Coming, the Day of Judgement, and the inception of God's eternal Kingdom, when good would finally triumph over evil.
The same historical outlook was reflected 200 years later by Bishop Isidore of Seville, and, with small changes, by subsequent Church leaders, for instance by the Jesuit Antonio Vieira, who in his curious Historia de Futoro predicted that the kingdom of his time, though not yet near its inevitable cataclysm, was bound to make way to God's perfect and eternal reign which, of course, would not be subject to periodic disaster.
During the Renaissance — and the word "Renaissance" means rebirth — Christianity, too, began to search for the Great World Year. Thus the Italian classicist Julius Caesar Scaliger, com- bining astronomical cycles with the 15-year Roman tax period {indictio romana — the unit of time of Papal Bulls to this day), arrived at a cycle of 7980 years. This cycle — ^which, after its discoverer, was called the Julian period, was said to have begun in the year 4713 b.c, so that in Scaliger's day another 1700 years were needed to complete it.
A later descendant of these earlier periodic historians was Friedrich Nietzsche, who in his Will to Power sang the praises of historical rebirth in beautiful dithyrambs. According to Nietzsche, "this world of stirring strength, endless and ne'er ^ St. Augustine: De civitate Dei, XV, 5.
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begun . . . this flood of fearless force, changing yet quite un- changed" turns simplicity into complexity, only to return to its original simplicity in time — to "joyful harmony, affirming itself in the uniformity of its orbits and years and blessing itself as never merely being, but always becoming — without satiety or tedium". Nietzsche's faith in the ever-revolving cycle of life, his delight in the "luck of the circle", was, however, purely aesthetic and he never tried to apply it in any way. Some of his lesser disciples, on the other hand, have tried time and again to prove that history in fact follows a rigid cyclical pattern. In the case of such long cycles as, say, Scaliger's Julian period, their attempts are, of course, mere parlour games without any prac- tical value for predicting the future. But bolder men have tried to show that even within shorter periods, history has often repeated itself, and is therefore likely to repeat itself in the future, as well.
Cabbalistic numbers
The classic example of this kind of historical analysis is a book which was submitted to the French Academy of Moral and Poli- tical Sciences by one of its members: Gaston Georgel's Rhythms in History.^ Georgel based his work on purely cabbalistic con- siderations: having come across the expression "7 x 77" in the Bible, he at once knew that historical events repeated them- selves every 539 years, or in multiples of that figure.
Georgel then put his revelation to the test, and — behold! — he was proved right, although there were slight deviations from the rhythm. Unfortunately, historical events can also be shown to "repeat" themselves at intervals different from Georgel's, depending on how we define this term, and the moment we apply any such schemes to real cases, we discover that their prognostic value is nil.
Take the case of the First World War, which was past history by the time Georgel's book appeared. 5S9 years earlier, i.e. in 1375-1379 we find ourselves in the middle of the Hundred Years War. At almost the same time, the period of Papal exile ended with the return of Gregory XI to Rome, and the death of ^ Gaston Georgel: Les rhythmes dans I'Histoire (Paris 1937).
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the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV led to the division of the Habsburg Empire, to civil war, and to anarchy over large parts of the Western World. While these events might be com- pared with the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy in 1918, it would be difficult to find any other parallel with the First World War. If we go back roughly 2 x 539 years from 1914, we may find something slightly more reminiscent of the great territorial changes of our time: the partition of Franconia by the treaty of Verdun ( 843 ) . Four times 539 years before World War I there took place the first of the Punic wars which can by no stretch of the imagination be likened to the First World War.
We should obtain much more convincing results if we used the ancient Egyptian Sirius-cycle of 1461 years instead, for if we count back 1461 years from the end of the First World War, we come to the middle of the fifth century, to Attila's great wars of conquest and to the Battle of the Catalaunian Plain (451 ) — the scene of the Battle of the Marne in World War I — which was of great historical importance. If we prefer to count back from World War II we are brought almost exactly to the year 476, which is considered the end of the Western Roman Empire.
These examples show that the difficulties of applying world- historical formulae lie not so much in solving as in posing problems. What exactly is it that we wish to compare.'' So-called world history, at least during long periods, is nothing but a sequence of political and cultural events and, however shrewdly we try to read a common thread into it, that thread must remain a philosophical or literary exercise. We simply change the scenery, as in a play, considering first Egypt and Babylon, and perhaps China as well, then Greece and Rome, then Northern Europe and, much later still, the New World. Archaeo- logical finds may give us hints for setting up a pre-historical picture which, as its name implies, must be sketchy in the extreme. With little evidence and much fantasy we may seem to discover a few common links, but the actual facts, or at least our knowledge of them, is so small that we cannot legitimately con- sider the totality of historical processes as a unity with a dis- cernible rhythm.
The search for a pattern in history has therefore assumed new forms in modern philosophy of history. Since past cultures were obviously not co-existent, some flourishing while others
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had hardly begun to exist, and some dead or dying while others were still at the peak of their powers, individual civilisations are now being compared as such, rather than in the context of civilisations as a whole.
Historical philosophers for the past 200, and descriptive historians for the past 100 years, have been tackling this task with growing enthusiasm. Historical events of two civilisations having been tabulated independently, they are compared with each other as if they were two organic beings placed side by side on a dissection table.
In fact, these investigations are not always strictly inductive, i.e. based on generalisations from the known facts; rather are the facts often made to fit certain a priori generalisations. In other words, the investigators "prod" their facts for the required evidence. Still, historians are not alone in using this approach, and some of the most important scientific discoveries were made in the same way.
The basic difference between modern analyses of history and the old search for a Great World Year, is the new approach to time. In the ancient cycle-notions, time was considered to be continuous and infinite, even though the individual cycles were thought to return to their starting points. A new cycle could never begin before the last one had finished, and while individual cycles ran an equal course, they were never simultaneous. Modern periodic theories, on the other hand, treat the history of individual people, or groups of people and cultures, as if they existed independently and simultaneously. They are not con- cerned with geographical space and are interested only in parallel phenomena taken out of their time context. Every historical cycle begins with the year A and ends with the year Z, where the actual duration of the interval A-Z is irrelevant.
Three stages of history
The first historian to use this method consciously and to turn it into a philosophic principle was the Neapolitan Giambattista Vico. In his Principe di una scienza nuova d'intorno alia commune natura delle nazione ( Principles of a new science of the common
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nature of nations) which appeared in 1725, Vico saw the human spirit as the decisive driving force of all history. Now, this spirit develops equally in all peoples and in all countries. All people travel through three stages which Vico, basing himself on an Egyptian formula, called the divine, the heroic and the human. Thus in Greek history, the Homeric age was the heroic, and can hence be compared with our Middle Ages. In both epochs an aristocratic warrior caste ruled supreme over a predominantly rural economy, in both the ballad was thought the ultimate form of poetic expression, and in both human relationships were based on personal trust. Vico's point is that, if we recognise this prin- ciple, we can learn more about the Homeric age from a study of our own Middle Ages than from Homer himself.
Far-reaching though his conclusions were, Vico avoided speculations about future events, adding the rider that every independent cycle introduced novel and unpredictable factors. Less circumspect disciples preferred to ignore this reservation and insisted on using Vico's discovery for historical prediction. But the difficulties proved insurmountable, mainly because it is very difficult to determine what particular age — divine, heroic, or human — the present represents, and therefore by what stage it will be followed. This is true not only of history as such, but a fortiori of cultural trends.
Let us take an example from modem music. When Richard Strauss wrote the score for Salome at the beginning of our century, conservatives were not alone in considering him a revolutionary who was trying to upset all previous musical values. Using Vico's scheme, we would have to place him at the beginning of the third — the human — stage, if only because his realism was utterly opposed to, say, Wagner's romanticism. But only a year later Schonberg and Stravinsky produced works which, today, are considered the turning points in musical history, whereas Richard Strauss is called a late romantic.
Admittedly, some artistic phenomena recur so frequently that one can easily tell when one period is coming to an end and when a new period is about to begin. Thus the history of art demon- strates quite clearly that all great schools have simple beginnings which strike posterity as almost primitive. Once the new forms are perfected, mere technique gains the upper hand, first in a tendency towards exaggeration and pomposity and finally by
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emphasising mere decorative detail. As early as the 1750's, Winckelmann was able to trace this course of development in Greek art. Soon afterwards similar trends were shown to have existed in Gothic art, and even more emphatically in the phase which began with the early Italian Renaissance and ended with Rococo decadence. Even the apparently different architectural styles of the 19th century, which were little more than imitations of earlier styles, clearly reflect this trend.
Whenever we reach a "Rococo stage", we may be certain that the end is near, and that a new age is about to dawn. Though it is difficult to tell what this new age will bring, we can say with certainty that it will be a much simpler one, greatly shorn of pomposity. This is precisely what happened at the beginning of the 20th century when Cubism and functional architecture came into vogue, and the same thing is likely to happen when current stylistic trends have run their full course.
To a lesser extent, such trends can also be detected in political history, although with much greater difficulty. Nevertheless, Aristotle thought that he could devise a scale of political regimes: democracy is followed by tyranny, tyranny by oli- garchy, oligarchy by democracy, and so on. Even though the Aristotelian scale based on the Greek city state is not universally valid, it does, nevertheless, apply to a number of modern instances.
But cycle-theoreticians are not satisfied with merely pre- dicting artistic or political developments; their ambition is to predict the totality of events. One hundred years after the publication of Vico's Scienza nuova, a young French mathemati- cian, Auguste Comte, published a theory of his own which, though very similar to Vico's, was apparently evolved indepen- dently. Comte, too, saw three stages in the development of Western civilisation: a theological age in which faith ruled supreme, a metaphysical age in which' reason first rears its head and overthrows old institutions, and a third, positivist age in which scientific knowledge alone governs all actions.
Unlike Vico's human stage, however, Comte's positive stage had not yet arrived or was only just about to start, and 24-year- old Comte saw to it that its approach was hastened by con- structing one of the most rounded and most influential Intel-
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lectual systems^ that has ever been devised. The second half of the 19th century was labelled the positivist era, and in some South American countries positivism became almost a state religion in which a "catechism" written by Comte himself took the place of the Bible. Alas, at the turn of the last century it appeared that far from having reached the promised stage of pure science, mankind was still bogged down in the first stage, and that much of what was considered positive knowledge was no more than naive faith and rank superstition.
Marx and Darwin
Auguste Comte's philosophy was much more messianic in character than that of his junior — Karl Marx, whose knowledge was aquired in more mundane ways. While every one of the four "progressive epochs", into which Marx divided past history with acknowledgements to Hegel, had laws peculiar to itself, it arose logically from the preceding epoch, and so would the fifth, the socialist epoch. That epoch seemed much closer to Marx than it did to most other people. Marx never looked upon him- self as a messianic prophet promising pie in the far-distant future.
Nor is Marxism messianic in form, and it was only Marx's disciples and popularisers who gave it that character. For Marx, socialism was not an external act of salvation, but the inner consequence of an inevitable social catastrophe. Hence Marx never maintained that socialism would be the last possible stage of human development, or that the classless society would last forever. He was much too much an historian, and much too steeped in the historical philosophy of his time, to think that world history could proceed dynamically until the collapse of capitalism, and become quite static thereafter. This was a delusion which he left to his lesser followers and to his opponents who never tired of asserting that socialism was trying to replace true religion with the promise of paradise on earth.
Marx was not a believer in Platonic cycles, rather was he a ^ Auguste Comte: Covrs de pbilosophie positive (18S9-1842).
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linear historian. For him, history moved up a steep gradient. Still, he was not fool enough to ignore the fact that mankind's longing was often directed at the past and not at the future, and his own love for Greek civilisation often drove him in the same romantic direction: "Man cannot become a child again, unless he become childish. But does he not love the simplicity of children and must he not, albeit on a higher stage, strive to reproduce his childhood.? Does not childhood reflect the character of every epoch? Why then should the historical childhood of mankind at its loveliest not exert a lasting charm, as a never-returning age? There are spoilt children and precocious children, and many ancient people were like these. The Greeks, on the other hand, were normal children."^
The later Marx, and particularly Engels, tried to adapt Darwin's theory of evolution to their own purposes. Thus, immediately after the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species (1859), Engels wrote: "Although crudely English, this book provides the scientific basis for our opinions." And 24 years later at Karl Marx's graveside, he added: "Just as Darwin discovered the laws of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the laws of development of human history." ^ Even so, Marxism' marriage to Darwinism, like all hybrids, turned out to be rather barren, not only because Darwin was a liberal, but mainly because he regarded the struggle for existence as perpetual, while Marx and Engels considered the class struggle as a capitalist excrescence that would inevitably cease when the proletariat seized power. Thereafter anything might happen.
From Darwin's theory no predictions about the near future can be made. This is undoubtedly why it lacks popular appeal, for men expect a universal law to enable them to do just that. Darwin's disciple, Herbert Spencer, tried to correct this short- coming by propounding a general law of evolution that applied to natural as well as to political history. Spencer was a strict evolutionist and therefore an anti-revolutionary. All natural phenomena develop spontaneously and rigorously out of the preceding stages, and all attempts to accelerate this process are senseless. Evolution is completely continuous without beginning
1 Karl Marx: Grundriss der politischen Okonomie (1857-1858), p. 31.
2 Karl Kautsky: Materialistische Geschicbtsauffassung (Berlin 1927), Vol. I, p. 199 f.
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or end. Hence Spencer's system included neither periods nor other rhythmical divisions.
Spencer's attempt to look on all historical developments as an uninterrupted chain of phenomena aroused immediate hostility. The most outspoken critic was the French philosopher Charles Renouvier who, in his spirited Uchronie, described a civilisation in which everything happens as logically and as rigorously as Spencer assumes, but in which the results are quite unlike those in the real world. Renouvier showed the absurdity of believing that history is an infinite continuum, and insisted that it was full of natural breaks. One such break was the emergence of great men. Renouvier's ideas, if true, would make political prognoses quite impossible, for who can predict the emergence of the next great man.? Moreover, the "greatness" of men depends not least on the unpredictable durability of their success.
The Decline of the JVest
Since the beginning of the 20th century, the idea of discon- tinuity made its incursion even into science. Planck's quantum theory, and the biological theory of mutations showed clearly that nature herself could proceed by sudden leaps. This new approach had immediate repercussions on historical research, and the two most important historical works of that time Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West and Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History both reverted to Vico's approach: history, far trom being continuous, is a series of independent recurring cycles. Once these cycles are distinguished, there emerge general laws by means of which the future may be predicted scientifically.
Both systems were strongly influenced by biological notions, and this was held against them particularly by English his- torians.^ Thus Spengler's "cultures" and Toynbee's 21 civilisa- tions clearly assume that history is modelled on organic life: cultures and civilisations grow up from a primitive stage, reach
1 R. G. Collingwood: The Idea of History (Oxford 1946), pp. 161-165 and 181-183. — W. H. Walsh: An Introduction to Philosophy of History (London 1951 ), p. 164 ff.
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a mature stage, fall ill and die a natural or sometimes an un- natural, premature, death. Once we know what stage a given culture or civilisation has reached, we can predict with a fair amount of certainty how long it will continue.
Spengler, a mathematician by training but a man of wide interests, came to very sad conclusions about the West: Western culture was about to die of exhaustion. What was left in store for it was no more than the typical decay phenomena of all late cultures, followed by the inevitable stage of barbarism and then by a new culture. It has been said that Spengler's scepticism was merely a typically German reaction to defeat in war, but this explanation cannot be seriously accepted, since the idea for his great work had occurred to him before 1914. Seen in historical perspective. The Decline of the West is really no more than one of those interminable discussions about the problem of decadence that were so fashionable at the turn of the century. While many of Spengler's prophecies have already been proved wrong in detail, it is too early to say that events have disproved his general contentions.
Arnold Toynbee, a professional historian of astonishing learning and scholarship, published the first of his ten volumes during the depression ( 1934), and completed his work after the Second World War, from which England emerged a greatly weakened victor. Though his work reflects the critical mood of the times, Toynbee's conclusions are far more optimistic than Spengler's. Western civilisation may be endangered, but extinc- tion is by no means round the comer.
Most modern propounders of cycle theories, like their predecessors, carefully avoid setting up precise historical time- tables, or else divide history into such long periods that no use- ful predictions can be made from them. Spengler was least guilty in that respect, for in order to synchronise his cultures, he had to determine the exact duration of the individual phases: prehistory, early history, late history, and civilisation (decay). Basing himself on the examination of older cultures and assuming that, since the historical clock had always ticked at the same rate and would therefore continue to do so in the future, he ventured to make predictions beyond the year 2200.^ Spengler was con-
1 Oswald Spengler: Der Untergang des Ahendlandes (76th-81st ed., Munich 1950), Vol. I, p. 68 fF.
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vinced that the common belief that oriental countries, and parti- cularly Far Eastern countries, were culturally inert, was an illusion, since, on closer examination. Oriental history proves to have been at least as stormy as Western history, and to have had comparable "cultures".
As a rule, modem nations take 200-SOO years to reach their political peak, remain static for a somewhat shorter period, and then decline for another 200-300 years. On this basis, long- term predictions can easily be made. Thus, since England took 300 years to become the world's foremost power — ^from the reign of Elizabeth I to the Victorian era — the rise of the United States which began with Independence may be expected to con- tinue for another hundred years.
However, all such predictions are highly speculative, not only because they are based on far too few comparative data but also because they seem to have no logical basis. Why should people tire after eight or ten generations rather than after twelve or fifteen? All attempts to derive such "ethnopolitical" natural laws from biological processes like youth, maturity, and senility, must strike the unprejudiced observer as highly questionable.
Father and Son
More plausible theories emerge from considerations of shorter periods, e.g. of one generation only. It is an incontestable fact that fathers and sons rarely have identical attitudes and tempera- ments, and since nations are made up of individuals, the succes- sion of generations with different convictions and opinions seems to be a logical basis for making historical predictions.
In the 19th century, for instance, it was generally true to say that the respective heir to the throne would oppose the politics of his father. Where the latter was conservative, the Crown Prince would be liberal, where the father worked for inter- national understanding, the son would usually be a rabid nationalist. Top-level changes usually led to changes of admini- strators, and thus the impression arose that all new generations make clean sweeps of the past.
We must, however, be quite clear that such changes are no
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more than pseudo-biological processes. There is, in fact, no such thing as a clean break between generations. By and large, the same number of fathers die and the same number of children are bom every year, and it is only after particularly bloody wars that a disproportionately large young generation may arise. In general, we may therefore say that changes of attitude from one generation to the next are purely sociological processes caused by periodic changes in fashion.
It was in this sense that Sainte-Beuve first used the term "romantic generation" to characterise the poets and writers who were in vogue in France after 1830, and it was from litera- ture that the idea of self-contained generations later spread to other fields. Thus positivists tried to replace the customary division of history into centuries by a "natural" division into generations, and even quite recently, modem disciples of Auguste Comte have attempted to show that the three generations which succeed one another within every century always have dis- tinct attitudes and ideas. ^
If these positivist ideas were true, it would be the easiest thing on earth to make correct historical predictions. Unfor- tunately there is no evidence that the great bell of rejuvenation strikes every 30 years, and that those born between two strokes always fit into one of two categories. This rhythmical concept derived from literature was impossible to apply even to art, and art historians were forced to introduce a new notion of "genera- tion": new artistic styles were said to arise regularly every 13-22 years by artists born at roughly the same time, so much so that the history of art could be divided into distinct periods based on the birth-dates of great artists. ^
This "discovery", which caused something of a sensation in the twenties, did not remain a sensation for long. To consider the dates of birth of famous men as historical criteria for setting up an historical calendar seems questionable if only because a considerable number of poets, artists, philosophers, discoverers, inventors and statesmen only produce their most important works in later life, or change their style, approach, and form at
1 Frangois Mentr6: Rhythmes sociaux et bistoriques in Les Rhythmes et la Vie (Paris 1947), p. 202 f.
2 Wilhelm Finder; Das Generattonenproblem in der evropdiscben Kunst (1926),
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frequent intervals. Picasso and Stravinsky, for instance, had quite a number of "periods". For this reason alone, great his- torical events, rather than great personalities, must be taken as the milestones of history, no matter how important these personalities are. Birth dates are best left in the hands of astro- logers.
War and Peace
But what are great historical events.? No one can doubt that the invention of the printing press and the discovery of America were more important historical achievements than even the most decisive wars. Unfortunately peaceful achievements of such scope are very rare and, indeed, occur far too irregularly for us to deduce any kind of rhythm from them. Moreover in troubled times like ours, it is wars rather than great inventions which seem to have the most striking effects on our lives.
Thus there is no historical problem that interests people more than that of the recurrence of wars. Unfortunately, history cannot provide the answer, not only because of the inherent difficulties of the problem, but also because war is a generic term, covering local skirmishes, large-scale battles, and inter- national conflicts. Moreover, it is not always easy to tell when a given war began and when it ended. Even the Hundred Years' and Thirty Years' wars were not quite as long as their names imply, since they were interrupted by lengthy periods of relative peace. Large-scale wars are generally preceded and succeeded by small ones, politically inseparable from them — e.g. the Balkan Wars and the Allied War of Intervention in Russia before and after the First World War.
Because of these complications it seems much more logical to compare total periods of military intervention, rather than specific wars, and this is precisely what investigators of periodic war phenomena have usually done. From such investigations it would appear that during the 18th, 19th, and early 20th cen- turies, world-shaking military disputes occurred at approximate intervals of 50 years. Within roughly two hundred years, there were five long periods of armed conflict consisting of the War of the Spanish Succession ( 1701-14), the period of the War of the
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