# The Laws of History Author: [[Graeme Snooks]] ## Review This is book three of a trilogy that begins with The Dynamic Society. I didn't do a detailed reading of part 2, skimming it briefly, because I was simply too excited to see the end result. Except for his usual wordiness and hard concepts the author did not disappoint. His framework for history is thorough and well developed. There will be new and innovative concepts for everyone in this book. The book is divided into two sections. The first section discusses the past attempts to uncover the laws of history, the different methods used in conducting that research, and how he improved on those methods in his research. The second section reiterates his historical research conclusions and describes the laws of history developed in book 1 and 2 of the trilogy. There have been a few attempts through the millennia at deriving the laws of history. He puts these into two categories although JS Mill seems to fall between the two. There is the inductive/empirical camp, which decries deductive thinking and as a result resorts to purely factual retelling or, at best, finding patterns in outcomes of events. Then there is the deductive camp which creates metaphysical creations in their minds and projects those onto history. These are the most famous authors of laws of history such as: Spengler, Toynbee and Marx. He describes these as the two extremes of scientific analysis. He argues deduction and induction both need to be used to analyze patterns in the historical processes that generate events, using deductive models. This is also Bertrand Roehner's conclusion on scientific methodology in history in "Patterns and Repertoire in History" - no wonder they are friends. In order to generate his laws he looks at a civilizations across time, the patterns in quantitative and qualitative data, tries to understand the processes that generate the data, and then generalize on the processes. The laws are divided into three sets. The first describes the primary laws from which all others are derived. The most important of these is that the human desire to survive and prosper is the fundamental driver of civilization. The secondary laws describe mechanisms and some are more oriented to certain periods of history. The tertiary laws are about the institutions and organizations we build. There are 22 laws in total, which is too many to describe here. I think I am so enamored with this book because it touches on two of my own hobby research projects: how we form knowledge and beliefs; and the mechanics of historical change. His ideas fit well with my (still evolving) thoughts on these two issues, which encourages me. I think its fair to compare his research to bottom-up models of economics, such as ABMs. The outcomes are fundamentally driven by the desires of agents. Their self-organizing behaviour creates the conditions for them to meet those desires. Should those conditions no longer be useful to meet the desire to survive and prosper, the agents will change their behaviour and restructure their society, etc., etc. To be clear he doesn't put it in those terms and is openly against ABMs in other papers. This is purely my interpretation of his research through my lens. I hope that his research gains more traction some day, because he has really valuable things to say about the laws of history and dynamics of society. ## Related - [[The Dynamic Society]] - [[Ephemeral Civilization]] - [[Resources/Kindle Quotes/The Death of Zarathustra]] - [[Inductive Analysis]] - [[Framework for analysis and decision-making]] - [[Frameworks and Theories on the Mechanics of Historical Change]]