Editing Philosophy of history (section)

=== Philosophy of chronology ===

Many ancient cultures held [[mythical]] and [[theological]] concepts of history and of [[time]] that were not [[linear]]. Such societies saw history as cyclical, with alternating Dark and Golden Ages. [[Plato]] taught the concept of the [[Great Year]], and other Greeks spoke of [[aeon]]s. Similar examples include the ancient doctrine of [[eternal return]], which existed in [[Ancient Egypt]], in the [[Indian religions]], among the [[Ancient Greece|Greek]] [[Pythagoreans]]' and in the [[Stoics]]' conceptions. In his ''[[Works and Days]]'', [[Hesiod]] described five [[Ages of Man]]: the [[Golden Age]], the [[Silver Age]], the [[Bronze Age]], the [[Greek Heroic Age|Heroic Age]], and the [[Iron Age]], which began with the [[Dorian invasion]]. Some scholars{{which|date=July 2018}} identify just four ages, corresponding to the four metals, with the Heroic age as a description of the Bronze Age. A four-age count would match the [[Vedic time keeping|Vedic]] or Hindu ages known as [[Satya Yuga]], [[Treta Yuga]], [[Dvapara Yuga]] and [[Kali Yuga]], which together make one [[Yuga Cycle]] that repeats. According to [[Jainism]], this world has no beginning or end but goes through cycles of upturns (utsarpini) and downturns (avasarpini) constantly. Many Greeks believed that just as mankind went through four stages of character during each rise and fall of history so did [[government]]. They considered [[democracy]] and [[monarchy]] as the healthy régimes of the higher ages; and [[oligarchy]] and [[tyranny]] as corrupted régimes common to the lower ages.{{citation needed|date= February 2016}}

In the East, [[Social cycle theory|cyclical theories of history]] developed in China (as a theory of [[dynastic cycle]]) and in the Islamic world in the Muqaddimah of [[Ibn Khaldun]] (1332–1406).

During the [[Renaissance]], cyclical conceptions of history would become common, with proponents illustrating decay and rebirth by pointing to the [[decline of the Roman Empire]]. [[Machiavelli]]'s ''[[Discourses on Livy]]'' (1513–1517) provide an example. The notion of [[Empire]] contained in itself ascendance and [[decadence]],{{citation needed|date=July 2018}} as in [[Edward Gibbon]]'s ''[[The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire]]'' (1776), which the Roman Catholic Church placed on the ''[[Index Librorum Prohibitorum]]'' (List of Prohibited Books).

During the [[Age of Enlightenment]], history began to be seen as both linear and irreversible. [[Condorcet]]'s interpretations of the various "stages of humanity" and [[Auguste Comte]]'s [[positivism]] were among the most important formulations of such conceptions of history, which trusted [[social progress]]. As in [[Jean-Jacques Rousseau]]'s ''[[Emile: Or, On Education|Emile]]'' (1762) treatise on education (or the "art of training men"), the Enlightenment conceived the human species as perfectible: [[human nature]] could be infinitely developed through a well-thought [[pedagogy]].

[[Social cycle theory|Cyclical conceptions]] continued in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the works of authors such as [[Oswald Spengler]] (1880–1936), [[Correa Moylan Walsh]] (1862–1936), [[Nikolay Danilevsky]] (1822–1885), [[Claude Lévi-Strauss]] (1908–2009),<ref>{{Cite book |last1=Lévi-Strauss |first1=Claude |title=Wild thought: a new translation of "La pensée sauvage" |last2=Leavitt |first2=John Harold |date=2021 |publisher=The University of Chicago Press |isbn=978-0-226-20801-5 |location=Chicago London |pages=264 |translator-last=Mehlman |translator-first=Jeffrey}}</ref> and [[Paul Kennedy]] (1945– ), who conceived the human past as a series of repetitive rises and falls. Spengler, like [[Herbert Butterfield|Butterfield]], when writing in reaction to the carnage of the [[First World War]] of 1914–1918, believed that a civilization enters upon an era of [[Caesarism]]<ref>
Compare [https://books.google.com/books?id=XDWcLHxfthMC Oswald Spengler and History as Destiny], page 93: "[...] the closing years of the First World War, when Spengler was completing his work, had witnessed the passing of the feudal rule of landed aristocracy in Germany and its merging into budding forms of parliamentary plutocracy - soon to be followed by the rise of 'mobocracy' and then Caesarism."
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after its soul dies.{{citation needed|date= February 2016}} Spengler thought that the soul of the West was dead and that Caesarism was about to begin.