The idea of cyclical recurrence is as old as mythology and the continuation it has found within philosophy. The discovery of cyclical time is not and cannot by any means be new, in view of the fact that cycles are components of natural, cosmological and biological sequences of events. Even the rediscovery of social rhythms could be dismissed as the compensatory longing which fills a society that has grown weary of the domination of the metronome, or could be interpreted as a harmlessly endearing form of conservatism, which seeks to rely on habit as a factor of social stability. But this is not all. Precursors of the idea can be found without much difficulty, and so also can empirical observations. The regularity with which particular forms of economic crisis recurred impressed itself on social science early on. Other phenomena of social life which seemed to recur regularly were also observed, recorded and subjected to statistical analysis: wars, crop failures, revolts, but also seasonal variations in the birth and death rate, in the crime or divorce rate, stimulated the imagination of social science to record more accurate data and to search for the laws concealed in them. Simply on the strength of their far-reaching significance for economic events alone, it was the recurrent economic upturns and downturns which were vigorously examined. A Russian economist, Kondratiev, and after him Schumpeter and many others, thought they had found the pulsating rhythm of recurrence. In the form of so-called long waves, at intervals of about fifty-five years, there are, so runs the hypothesis, phases of technological innovation which have a lasting influence on economic events. Kondratiev himself wrote in 1928 that he was not of the opinion that the periodicity of the natural sciences was commensurate with the social world; by 'regularity' he understood the repetition of particular events or phenomena in time. Since then, with the aid of refined statistical methods and an enlarged data basis, long waves have turned into a small sea of research literature.25 As it was with Kondratiev himself, it is a question of being able to draw conclusions about the form and length of cycles from the observation of cyclical events, which either recur in strictly periodical fashion or at least show recurring sequences of alternating phases, and of examining their connections with one another.
From the Future to the Extended Present
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