ABSTRACT
The primary laws of history deal with societal dynamics at a very general level. Their purpose is to explain the general behaviour of human decision-makers, the strategies they employ to meet their objectives, and the societal consequences of these actions. But, to explain specific historical processes, we need to apply these primary laws to our dynamic timescapes and reconstruct the underlying dynamic mechanisms. In this way, it is possible to derive our secondary laws or laws of historical change. The secondary laws are arrived at inductively from the dynamic mechanisms, not from the historical patterns as the old historicists attempted. In effect, but not in practice, the secondary laws are derived from the primary laws. Some of the resulting secondary laws have unconditional applicability, and even those that are clearly more relevant to one of the three historical eras that encompass the past two million years of human history can be applied to other eras under specified conditions. And they all have relevance for the future.
