The Laws of History

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The quest for the laws underlying the history of human societies has occupied some of the greatest thinkers in history, from Heraclitus and Plato to Marx and J.S. Mill. But it is a quest that failed, not because of the diffuculty of the task but because the discovery of these laws requires us to see ourselves in a way that offends our intellectual sensibilities. By taking an uncompromising approach to the nature of mankind in this challenging book, Graeme Snooks lays bare the forces driving human society from its earliest beginnings through to the future. The Laws of History is divided into two parts that combine philosophical, sociological and historical reflection. * Part I considers the nature of laws, the reasons we might expect to find them at work in history, and why their formulation escaped the great historicists of the past. * Part II employs a novel inductive framework to draw out the general propositions underlying the different forms of human society. These general propositions concerning societal dynamics, historical change and institutional, are the laws of history. The Laws of History is both a highly original and controversial reflection on the course of human history and a remarkable attempt to develop a scientific model for the social sciences. It concludes and generalizes from the in-depth historical reflections of the companion volumes to this work, The Dynamic Society and The Ephemeral Civilization.

The Laws of History

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