Can the history of culture be quantified? I believe many historians would answer this question in the negative. The prevailing view seems to be that historical events are unique and unrepeatable, and any attempt to discover laws or recurring patterns in these phenomena is usually met with extreme suspicion. Let us remember as an example the antagonistic reaction provoked by works such as The Decline of the West by the German philosopher and historian Oswald Spengler, or A Study of History by the British historian Arnold Joseph Toynbee, whose conclusions, however, were based on qualitative analysis. It is not surprising, therefore, that to find true quantifiers of history, one must turn to authors who were not professional historians.
The first important attempt at a quantitative
analysis of historical phenomena was undertaken by the Russian-born, American
sociologist Pitirim A. Sorokin. In his monumental work, Social and
Cultural Dynamics,
he conducted a quantitative study of the history of Greco-Roman and Western
thought, to analyze the evolution of thought patterns over the centuries and so
discovering if there are discernible uniformities, and answering the following
questions: Is there a systematic increase in historical development, as Marx,
Comte, and other authors assert? Or, on the contrary, are there cyclical
alternations? Can patterns of succession be detected between traditionally
opposing philosophical schools: idealism and materialism; realism and
nominalism; determinism and indeterminism? But Sorokin's study is incomplete,
since it analyzes only two activities, philosophy and science, and does not
distinguish between them (everyone is simply a thinker).
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| Alfred L. Kroeber |
The second attempt at quantifying culture is due to
A.L. Kroeber, an American anthropologist who tried to demonstrate in his book Configurations
of the Growth of Cultures
that geniuses are never born alone. Kroeber believed that cultural movements are not
arbitrarily distributed over time, because those who implement them influence
one another through imitation or emulation, creating a cultural environment and
forming configurations or groupings of individuals born around the same time and cultivating
the same cultural activity. In support of this thesis, Kroeber analyzed several
thousand historical names from Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Indian, Chinese,
Japanese, Mesoamerican, Islamic, Hebrew, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and Western
civilizations. The cultural fields considered were philosophy, science,
philology, literature and drama, painting, sculpture, and music. However,
Kroeber's analysis is not fully quantitative. He classifies the authors under
study into three categories: cultural pinnacles (marked with two asterisks);
important authors (one asterisk); and the rest (without asterisks).
I have just published a book where I address in
detail the quantification of history. Its title is The Quantification of History and the Future of the Western World. I wrote the first version a long time ago, in
1985. In 1996, I used my studies for the field of science in the introduction
to my dictionary, 1.000 grandes científicos (1,000
Great Scientists,
Editorial Espasa). In 2014, I expanded and updated the book, because a
publisher was willing to publish it, although at the last minute they canceled
the contract, claiming that my ideas were not the same as theirs (I suppose
because I am against abortion). I talked about this in another
post. Now, almost 12 years later, I have published it on Amazon, in Spanish
and in English translation.
The studies in the book cover almost three thousand
years of the history of Greco-Roman and Western civilization in five fields of
activity: science,
philosophy, literature, visual arts, and music. This is a biographical analysis, in which each
field is represented by its practitioners, whose birth, peak, and death dates
(if known) are noted, as well as their nationality.
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| Pitirim Sorokin |
Each historical figure has received a quantitative
rating represented by a number between zero and ten (eight for scientists),
calculated from the number of lines dedicated to each author in the texts or
encyclopedias that served as the basis for this study. The criteria varied
depending on the specific field of activity, as well as the sources of
information used. Given that encyclopedias mention a huge number of
individuals, which grows exponentially as the rating decreases (there are far
fewer excellent creators than good ones, and far fewer good ones than average
ones), I subjected the results to a screening process, eliminating those that
fall below a certain threshold, which depends on the field of activity. In the
case of the Western civilization, the same data have sometimes been subjected
to several different thresholds to normalize them and facilitate comparison
with Greco-Roman civilization.
The next step was to divide three thousand years of
history into intervals of reasonable length. Here I considered using the
century, the half-century, or the quarter-century. I have used little the
quarter-century as being too short, because a person's creative period often
exceeds this duration, making it difficult to assign to each individual a
single quarter-century. Therefore, in general I used the century and the half-century,
depending on the amount of data available.
Although I am not a historian, this is not the first time I have ventured into the field of history in my popular science books. In 1979, my book Human Cultures and Evolution (Vantage Press, New York) was published, and in 2017, Evolución biológica y evolución cultural en la historia de la vida y del hombre (Biological Evolution and Cultural Evolution in the History of Life and Man, CEU Ediciones, Madrid). Since my two great predecessors were not historians and have set a precedent, I consider myself justified to enter this field.
In the two next posts I’ll give a few samples of the
results of my analysis.
Thematic Thread on Science and History: Previous Next
Manuel Alfonseca
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