Cruise Scientific               Visual Statistics Studio

The Long Waves of Time

When analyzing Quincy Wrights (1965) data on frequency and intensity of warfare among the Western countries, we noticed a cycle, superimposed on the cycle of wars, wars with periodicity of about 200 - 300 years. Comparing this cycle with the cycle typical of the Chinese wars, both cycles showed similar periodicity for the time intervals when, in China, the Confucius philosophy was predominant. Several researchers, independently analyzing Quincy Wrights (1965) data on frequency and intensity of warfare have also observed this long wave cycle, identified by Denton and Phillips in Some Patterns in the History of Violence (1968) as likely caused by an action-reaction process in political philosophy, taken in the broad sense to include the general attitude of the elites toward the correct society, a cycle of profound changes, heralding a new epoch.

 Search for the Long Waves of Time

To outline tentative contours of this cycle, we had first to choose the anchor points of our time scale, our best guess being the closing centuries of the Roman Empire, from about 275 to 476, and at the other pole the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989, marking the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. Hypothesizing a sine wave with amplitude of about 200 years, the long wave cycle of wars would have about eight inflection points. As the religion dominated most of the history of the West, the religious and secular epitomes are not meant in an absolute, but in a relative sense.