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spectator.com.uk forward slash innovator. Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club

podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator, and this week I'm

joined by Peter Turchin, whose new book End Times, Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political

Disintegration does something very startling indeed. It proposes, if you like, a scientific theory of history,

which ever since the last person to do that, Karl Marx,

has been somewhat out of fashion. Peter, welcome.

Thank you, Sam.

Can you tell me a little bit about how you approach this, about what you call Cleodynamics,

this new way of looking at history?

Well, you know, we live in this very nice societies that are in principle

capable of delivering high quality of life to the populations. However, as we know from history,

all such complex societies eventually enter a period of social and political turbulence, which I have called end times.

Why? The quick answer is elite overproduction. Elite overproduction is something that we observe ubiquitously in all the periods

preceding crisis periods in the past societies that we have studied. At this point, we have

gathered nearly 200 cases of such past crisis, ranging all the way from the Roman Republic and over to today.

And too many elites looking for a fixed and not increasing number of elite positions seems to be the universal feature of this road to those crises.

Yes, can you explain what elito production means exactly? I mean, you've sketched it there.

You explained very well in the book what that means exactly in detail and what forms elit overproduction can take.

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