ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on sociocultural fluctuations in the Graeco-Roman and the Western cultures, concentrating on the period from about 600 B.C. to the present time. The problem arises from the fairly wide prevalence of the opinion that "history never repeats itself" that it is ever new, that there are no two sociocultural objects, values, groups, events, similar to each other either in time or in space. This is an abbreviated statement of the unicist conception of sociocultural and historical processes. In one sense sociocultural life and history never repeat themselves; and yet, in another, they always recur to some extent. One may as readily justify scientifically the study of the recurrent aspect of sociocultural processes as of their unique aspect. The uniqueness or recurrence of processes may, however, have different forms and degrees. If the unit and all the directions of a process remain the same throughout its existence, it cannot have any "punctuation," "turn," "measure," "phase," "link," "beat," "rhythm."
