David C. Krakauer

There we go again: are there ‘universal laws' to derive from history? It is a debate that has been raging for roughly 150 years now (especially since Tolstoy's supplementary essay on his 'War and Peace'), and on which no conclusive answers have yet been reached. This collection of essays doesn’t deliver that either, as the introduction admits.

This book has been published by the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico (USA), the cradle of complexity studies. And as is to be expected, most authors are convinced that large, global patterns, perhaps even laws about history, are indeed possible to discern. It is remarkable (but not surprising) that especially non-historians defend this line: physicists Murray Gell-Mann and Geoffrey B. West, evolutionary biologist David C. Krakauer, and paleontologist Geerart J. Vermeij for instance believe that history is to be approached in a daring way; they provide models from the natural sciences that are connected with the study of complexity, feedback mechanisms, quantitative approaches, etc. The historians David Christian (father of Big History), Fred Spier (predecessor of Big History), Kenneth Pomeranz (supporter of Global History) and Peter Turchin (adept of Cliodynamics) more or less join in and try to prove the value of grand theory from their own perspective. I find the result of their efforts rather meager: they come up with highly predictable coarse grain patterns such as the increasing complexity of living systems, the increasingly high energy consumption or the cyclical pattern of demographic movements until the 19th century.

Personally, I was most charmed by the more down-to-earth approach of John R. McNeill who, with concrete historical data, illustrates the complex processes of differentiation and homogenization and the increasing adaptability of human societies, taking a middle position between pattern recognition and eye for the contingent in history.

Finally, it is laudable that the Santa Fe institute also gave a forum to the literary specialist Geoffrey Galt Harpham, who speaks very lucidly against pattern recognition. But his reference to 19th-century Social Darwinian racial theories is a rather crude and rude argument. To me there’s nothing wrong with looking at the broader picture, with respect for the critical historical method, and recognizing the unavoidable place of contingency in history.… (plus d'informations)