- anakyklosis Greek
- The cycle of constitutions. Kingship decays into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, democracy into mob rule, and then a strongman restores kingship and the wheel turns again. Polybius thought the engine was generational: heirs raised inside inherited power lose whatever won it.
Polybius, Histories VI - asabiyya Arabic
- Group feeling. The solidarity produced by kinship and shared hardship, strongest among tribal peoples and weakest in comfortable cities. Ibn Khaldun made it the thing political power actually rests on, and gave dynasties roughly four generations before it dissolves in luxury.
Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah, 1377 - stasis Greek
- Faction, or civil strife. Aristotle's diagnosis is that every party to it appeals to equality and each grasps only half: democrats reason from equal birth to equality in everything, oligarchs from unequal wealth to inequality in everything.
Aristotle, Politics V - politeia symmikte Greek
- The mixed constitution. Combining monarchic, aristocratic and democratic elements so each checks the others, which Polybius thought was how Rome escaped the cycle for as long as it did. The ancestor of separation of powers.
Polybius; later Cicero and Machiavelli - ochlocracy Greek
- Mob rule. The degenerate form of democracy in the Polybian scheme, arriving when the people have been corrupted by bribery and the appetite for office.
Polybius - virtu Italian
- The capacity of a people or a founder to act effectively in politics, closer to force of character than to moral virtue. Its opposite is corruzione, the state in which citizens can no longer be trusted with free institutions.
Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, c. 1517 - metus hostilis Latin
- Fear of the enemy. Sallust's claim is that while Carthage stood, dread of a rival held Romans to discipline and concord, and that the ruin began in 146 BC when the rival was destroyed. An external threat as a source of internal cohesion.
Sallust, Bellum Catilinae, c. 42 BC - corsi e ricorsi Italian
- Courses and recourses. Vico's cycle of three ages, of gods, of heroes and of men, ending in the barbarie della riflessione, the barbarism of reflection, which he thought worse than the original barbarism because it is cold rather than savage.
Vico, The New Science, 1725 - anomie French
- Not moral decay but deregulation. Human desire has no natural limit, so it needs external norms to bound it. When rapid change outruns those norms, including sudden prosperity, the result is the restlessness Durkheim measured against suicide rates.
Durkheim, Suicide, 1897 - Entzauberung German
- Disenchantment of the world. Weber's point is not that we now know more, but that we believe in principle that everything can be mastered by calculation, so no mysterious incalculable forces are left in play.
Weber, lecture 'Science as a Vocation', 1917 - stahlhartes Gehause German
- A shell as hard as steel. Rendered by Talcott Parsons in 1930 as the 'iron cage', which is the phrase everyone now quotes. Weber's own image is a housing we are born into rather than a prison we are locked in, which changes the argument.
Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 1905 - decadence French
- A physiological and spiritual exhaustion in which the instincts turn against life, and weakness gets revalued as virtue. Nietzsche's version of decline is a diagnosis of values, not of institutions.
Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 1889 - Kultur / Zivilisation German
- Spengler's distinction between the creative, growing phase of a high culture and its rigid, urban, imperial late phase. Treat it as a description of a mood rather than a finding: specialists identified serious factual errors early, and the work was later taken up by the radical right.
Spengler, The Decline of the West, 1918 - challenge and response English
- Toynbee's alternative to Spengler's biological determinism. A challenge of the right severity, neither trivial nor crushing, draws a solution out of a creative minority, which the majority copies. Growth stops when that minority stops creating and starts merely dominating.
Toynbee, A Study of History, 1934 - hombre-masa Spanish
- Mass-man. Not a class but a psychological type found in every stratum, including the professions: the person who finds himself like everybody else and is pleased about it, who demands the benefits of a civilisation without asking what maintains it.
Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, 1930 - declining marginal returns English
- Societies solve problems by adding complexity, and each added layer costs more and returns less. When the return on further complexity goes negative, collapse becomes the economic option rather than the catastrophe. Tainter defines collapse narrowly, as a rapid loss of complexity.
Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies, 1988 - elite overproduction English
- Too many credentialed people chasing too few elite positions. In Turchin's structural-demographic model it combines with popular immiseration and state fiscal stress to produce the disintegrative phase of a cycle.
Turchin, Secular Cycles, 2009 - liquid modernity English
- Bauman's claim that modernity melted the old solids and then stopped casting new ones. Power becomes light and mobile while politics stays local, so institutions can no longer hold the shape of a life.
Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 2000
Where these come from
Each term is unpacked properly in the long argument about why civilizations fall, or in the essay on the thinker who coined it. If you want to use one of them in anger, the Discord is the place.