Joseph Tainter’s “How Scholars Explain Collapse” (2023) examines the stories societies have told about their own rise and ruin, and the explanations scholars have offered for the fall of civilizations.

He begins with the modern ancestor myth of progress. Humanity advances from fire and agriculture to writing, metallurgy, cities, states, and increasing complexity, until our own social order comes to appear as the natural issue of history. Collapse sits uneasily within this tale: if civilization is an ascent, how are we to understand societies that descend?

From there Tainter ranges over more than three thousand years of reflection on political ruin. Mesopotamian writers blame impious kings and divine punishment; Chinese texts interpret famine and disorder through the loss of the Mandate of Heaven. The ancient analogy between societies and living organisms appears in Plato’s Laws and receives a more developed form in Polybius. Ibn Khaldun traces dynastic decline through luxury, mounting expenditure, heavier taxation, falling productivity, and conquest. Montesquieu connects Roman greatness with virtue and decline with its loss; Vico and Volney emphasize faction and conflict; Gibbon dwells on failures of rule while remarking that the greater wonder may be not that Rome fell, but that it endured so long. Spengler, Rostovtzeff, and Toynbee find still other patterns in civilizational decline.

Economic and social explanations follow. Tenney Frank, Christopher Caudwell, Arthur Boak, William Sinnigen, and Samuel Dill variously emphasize landed elites, exploitation, the condition of labour, and the weakening of the middle orders. Louis West shifts the blame to the consuming masses. J. B. Bury gives a larger place to contingency. Ellsworth Huntington and Hubert Lamb make climate a major historical force, while later environmental writing turns to resource exhaustion, ecological degradation, and overshoot. Norman Yoffee carries the literature of collapse back to its Mesopotamian beginnings; Peter Turchin revives the Khaldunian tradition; C. S. Holling gives cyclical thinking an ecological form.

The favoured explanation changes with the age doing the explaining. Collapse theories, Tainter observes, often “express ideals and criticisms of the social world.” Eighteenth-century factionalism, revolution, the world wars, class conflict, environmentalism, climate change, mass consumption, and inequality all leave their impress upon interpretations of earlier societies.

Tainter then compares nineteen cases of collapse and sixty-four proposed explanations, which he gathers under ten broad heads: climate change, invasion, revolt, internal conflict, environmental deterioration, catastrophe, changes in trade, religious or ideological decline, the economics of complexity, and chance. Twenty-eight of the sixty-four fall under what he calls a deus ex machina: a drought, invasion, plague, earthquake, or other “bolt from the blue” arrives and seems to settle a difficult historical question.

The shock may be perfectly real. The harder question is why one society withstands drought, invasion, or epidemic while another comes apart. What had already made the latter vulnerable?

Only near the close does Tainter return to the question of myth in a fuller sense. Drawing on Misia Landau, he notes that accounts of human development often assume the structure of myths or folk tales: the hero begins humbly, passes through trials, acquires powers, and triumphs. Civilization may be narrated in much the same way, from fire and agriculture to cities and civil society. And in many myths triumph is followed by another possibility: the hero is destroyed by pride or hubris.

The essay’s larger subject is the historical imagination, and the tendency to make earlier ruins bear the moral and intellectual burdens of the present. Collapse has been explained as punishment, decadence, cycle, class conflict, ecological tragedy, climate catastrophe, or simple misfortune. Each generation finds in the past dangers that speak with peculiar force to its own concerns. After three thousand years of such attempts, Tainter ends with a dry and difficult-to-forget judgment: “Surely we can do better.”