From Peter Turchin: "It is time for history to become an analytical, and even a predictive, science." He proposes to found cliodynamics "from Clio, the muse of history, and dynamics, the study of temporally varying processes and the search for causal mechanisms. Let history continue to focus on the particular. Cliodynamics, meanwhile, will develop unifying theories and test them with data generated by history, archaeology and specialized disciplines such as numismatics (the study of ancient coins)."
This sounds a lot like Hari Seldon and psychohistory to me! Very ambitious, but most interesting. I have always liked books about patterns in history, dating back to Paul Kennedy's "The rise and fall of the great powers". And bringing analytical tools to it makes a lot of sense of course, and fits my interests.
Anyway, go check Peter Turchin's blog, it is full of interesting posts. In the meantime, I am going to look at his book on Secular Cycles.
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