Giambattista Vico's Cyclical Theory of History

		(1668  -  1744)

Human societies pass through determinate stages of growth  and decay:

1. There is first a purely "bestial" condition, from which emerges
   what Vico termed "the age of the gods," when the basic social
   unit is the patriarchal family.  In the age of the gods, order
   of a kind prevails, the brutal instincts of men being curbed
   by fear of supernatural powers -- the beginnings of religion.

2. The next stage, "the age of the heroes," appears as a consequence
   of the alliances formed between the fathers of families to meet
   the challenge provided both by internal dissidence among their own
   dependents (or famuli) and by external attack from "lawless vagrants."
   Oligarchies are established through these alliances, and society is
   rigidly divided between patrician rulers and plebeian serfs or slaves.
   Laws are necessarily cruel and inequitable, and the life and poetry
   of the heroic age is imbued with ferocious and predatory ideals.

3. This stage is followed by "the age of men," which is engendered
   not by an abstract reverence for reason and "natural law" but by
   class conflict; the plebeian class demands and gradually achieves
   equal rights and a legal system that respects its interests.  But
   the weakening of traditional ties and the questioning of accepted
   customs and values that results from the establishment of free
   democratic republics leads inevitably to eventual corruption and
   dissolution.

4. The end of the cycle comes either through conquest from without
   or through inner disintegration and a reversion to primitive
   barbarism, and a new cycle begins.

(from Gardiner, Patrick. "Giambattista Vico." THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY.
 London: Collier,MacMillan, 1967. Formatting is for emphasis; not in original.)