Polybius, a Greek historian of the 2nd century BC, was born in Megalopolis, in the heart of Arcadia, around 200 BC, in a world shaken by the rise of Rome. A prominent member of the Achaean League, he was first a statesman before becoming, by force of events, an observer of Roman power. Deported to Rome after the defeat of his homeland in 168, he was held as a hostage for seventeen years. This captivity, far from humiliating him, made him a privileged witness to the mechanics of Roman politics and a friend of the great figures of the nobilitas, notably Scipio Aemilianus, the victor of Carthage. His major work, the Histories, begun in 146 BC, J.-C., is not limited to a chronicle of conquests: it is intended as a meditation on the nature of power, the laws of history and the moral causes of the greatness and ruin of states. What distinguishes Polybius from his Greek predecessors is the ambition to tear history away from contingency to extract a regularity, an almost natural law of political development. Where Herodotus marveled at the diversity of destinies and Thucydides sought the logic of events, Polybius, for his part, elaborates a general theory of the birth and death of regimes. It is this theory that he calls anacyclosis, a term he borrows from the vocabulary of cyclical return to designate the recurring succession of constitutions: monarchy, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy and ochlocracy. Each political form, according to him, is corrupted into its opposite by excess of the very principle that gave birth to it. Political history is therefore a circular movement, where men, forgetful of virtue, pass from one excess to another. This moral and pessimistic realism, anchored in the observation of human nature, marks a break with the philosophical speculation of its elders.
Before Polybius, it was in Plato that the first "anacyclosis" of regimes was outlined, in Book VIII of The Republic. But Platonic thought retained a metaphysical and religious scope: the fall of constitutions was only the earthly translation of a cosmic disorder. Souls, by moving away from the divine measure, dragged the city into the degradation of aristocracy towards tyranny. This cycle was vertical, not circular: it described a fall from heaven to the cave, a descent of Good towards matter. In Polybius, on the contrary, the political order no longer reflected the order of the world; it was a matter of human behavior. The theology of destiny gave way to a moral anthropology. Anacyclosis was no longer the punishment for a cosmic disorder, but the predictable consequence of human weakness. This desacralization of politics gave Polybius's theory a universal and timeless scope. By linking the destiny of constitutions to the education of citizens and the virtue of elites, he inaugurates a form of philosophy of history in which politics becomes a collective morality. Every regime, he writes, is born from education and dies from forgetting. This is why, reread in light of the institutional and cultural crisis of the contemporary West, Polybian theory appears singularly acute.
We are living in a moment when democracy, saturated with its own excesses, threatens to tip into what the historian called ochlocracy, the reign of the crowd and passion. Observing the loss of moral bearings, the disintegration of intellectual mediations, and the failure of elite training, we find the signs that Polybius already identified as the beginnings of decadence. This is precisely what I propose to examine: how can the ancient theory of anacyclosis, based on the observation of Greek and Roman regimes, help us understand the crisis of modern democracies? And above all, to what extent do the "betrayal of the clergy" and the disintegration of university training today constitute symptoms of the transition from democracy to ochlocracy? Rereading Polybius allows us to understand the intellectual conditions of political salvation—for, as he wrote in Book VI of his Histories, “peoples who maintain the discipline of their fathers prolong their prosperity.” Thus conceived, the Polybian theory of anacyclosis is not an abstract speculation on the destiny of peoples, but an observation based on historical experience and the study of human characters. Polybius does not claim to discover a metaphysical principle of history, but a moral law inscribed in human conduct and the structure of institutions. Unlike Plato, who saw political degradation as a consequence of cosmic disorder, Polybius recognizes it as the product of an inner corruption: the erosion of civic virtue, the weakening of the sense of the common good, the substitution of enjoyment for discipline. This moral realism, free from any religious background, allows us to understand why his thought remains effective in interpreting the crises of the contemporary world. It assumes neither divine intervention nor historical fatality: only the permanence of human passions. His thinking revolves around the intuition that constitutions become corrupted because men forget. Anacyclosis, far from being a blind mechanism, is a pedagogy of power. It highlights the moral responsibility of rulers and the fragility of institutions when they cease to be inhabited by virtue. Understanding this cycle therefore means understanding the internal dynamics of political decadence: not the brutal fall of an order, but its slow dissolution under the effect of moral laxity. It is this mechanism of degeneration, both universal and timeless, that I would like to first expose before examining its resonance in the crisis of our contemporary democracies.
L'Anacyclose: The Moral Law of Regimes and the Crisis of Western Democracy
Polybius, in Book VI of his Histories, offers one of the most penetrating analyses of the dynamics of political regimes. A Greek observer of Roman triumph, he does not simply recount conquests: he seeks to understand why some constitutions prosper and why others become corrupted. His answer, known as "anacyclosis," is based on a formidably simple idea: every regime carries within it the principle of its own destruction. Monarchy is succeeded by tyranny, tyranny by aristocracy.[1], to the aristocracy the oligarchy[2], to democracy, ochlocracy, before the cycle begins again.
“Men, when they have escaped violence, seek justice; but when justice has triumphed, they seek pleasure.” [3].
This sentence encapsulates a pessimistic, but profoundly realistic, political anthropology: peoples forget the virtues that founded their freedom. This law of cycles is not a cosmic fatality but a moral consequence. Polybius never attributes the destiny of cities to the gods; he imputes it to human nature, to the loosening of morals, to the progressive corruption of civic courage. The transition from democracy to ochlocracy occurs when freedom, the principle of cohesion, becomes license, that is to say, a demand without measure.
"When the crowd, seduced by flattering speeches, disdains the laws and arrogates all power to itself, then ochlocracy is born." [4].
History, for him, is the theater of this constant metamorphosis of regimes, where disorder always arises from an excess of freedom and tyranny from an excess of equality. If I apply this grid to the contemporary political situation, the resemblance is disturbing. Institutional instability, repeated reshuffles, governments without anchors, reflect a crisis of authority that Polybius would have recognized as a classic symptom of democratic degeneration. Street clashes, violence committed in the name of political causes, whether insurrectional demonstrations or exactions under the guise of indignation, signal the entry into a phase where passion supplants the law. In modern democracies, the legitimacy of power rests on deliberation and trust in institutions; but this trust is crumbling, replaced by the temptation to impose the will of the crowd. We are not yet in ochlocracy, but on its edge: the moment when democracy loses its rational language and speaks only in shouts.
Polybius would doubtless see this as an effect of the regime's very success. Prosperity, peace, and abundance, he says, breed softness, because people forget that freedom is paid for with discipline.
"The sons of those who have supported tyranny cannot support freedom." [5].
The lesson applies to our societies, sated with rights but tired of the duties they entail. Democracy, exhausted by its own success, seems to be surrendering to the logic of the crowd: everything must be immediate, emotional, shared, without mediation. This is how, according to Polybius, the decadence of regimes begins—not in economic crisis or war, but in the loss of moral sense and the erasure of memory.
The lack of training of elites and the betrayal of clerics: the matrix of disorder
If ochlocracy is, for Polybius, the final phase of the cycle, its primary cause is the corruption of the elites. Book VI of the Histories emphasizes the moral role of the ruling classes. In the Roman constitution, which Polybius considers exemplary, political stability rests on the virtue of the magistrates, the memory of the senators, and the piety of the people:
"The Roman constitution is great because the magistrates fear blame, the people respect customs, and the senators remember their ancestors." [6].
The ruin of regimes begins when those who govern forget the meaning of their office and use power rather than serve it. This observation cruelly illuminates our times. The political crisis is not only institutional, it is first and foremost intellectual and moral. We have produced elites without culture, administrators without vision, decision-makers without historical depth. Aristocracy, said Polybius, degenerates into oligarchy when the best cease to think in terms of the common good. We are there: competence is erased behind communication, responsibility behind career. The State, delivered to a technocracy without spiritual depth, is nothing more than a theater of individual ambitions. The "democracy of experts" has replaced the Republic of citizens.
But Polybius goes further: he makes education the very condition for the survival of cities. The Romans, he writes, instruct their children in respect for the illustrious dead, so that they learn glory and virtue (Histories, VI, 53-54). The continuity of the city depends on this symbolic transmission. Yet the current collapse of schools and universities signifies the breaking of this chain. We have ceased to train minds capable of judging and ordering; we are manufacturing individuals saturated with information but devoid of intellectual hierarchy. It is no coincidence that faculties are becoming the site of ideological struggles where moral passion replaces study. The "wokization" of teaching, the intimidation campaigns against researchers, the recent ouster of Fabrice Balanche for an offense of opinion, are worrying signs: the university renounces the truth as soon as it fears the crowd. Polybius had already understood this mechanism: institutions only hold if they are based on common beliefs and a religion of truth.
"Among the Romans, religion, far from being superstition, is the bond that keeps the people in obedience." [7].
When this bond is broken, the people disperse and power totters. The betrayal of the clergy, to use a modern expression, is then the crucial moment of the fall: the guardians of knowledge, instead of enlightening the city, begin to follow it. By abdicating their duty of reason, they deliver thought to the crowd, and the crowd to its passions. The role of the university in this shift is central: it is the university which, ceasing to educate, prepares for ochlocracy. Higher education no longer produces enlightened citizens but convinced activists, and each chair becomes a platform. In such a context, the very idea of intellectual authority becomes suspect: all hierarchical knowledge is denounced as oppression, all transmission as domination. This is precisely what Polybius announced: democracy is destroyed by excess of democracy, when the judgment of the wise has no more weight than the cry of the crowd.
At the Gates of Ochlocracy: Towards the Restoration of Order and Reason
Polybius describes ochlocracy as a brief but violent regime, where the multitude, tired of itself, seeks a master.
"When the multitude can no longer bear its own confusion, it gives itself over to one." [8].
Ochlocracy is not a stable state: it is a moment of dissolution, an interregnum between liberty and despotism. In this chaos, authority fades, the law loses its prestige, and the city survives only through the return of a strong power. This moment is tragic because it is both necessary and destructive: the need for order engenders the prince, but it is the crowd that creates him. The observation applies to us. The impotence of institutions, the proliferation of contradictory norms, the disconnect between political discourse and reality, are the symptoms of a regime in the process of disintegration. The populism rising in Europe and the United States is not the cause of the evil, but its effect. It arises from the void created by the resignation of elites and the blindness of clerics. Citizens, exhausted by complexity and cacophony, demand the simplicity of a single voice. On social media, the tyranny of the vocal minority imposes its agenda on the silent majority: it is the faceless, unaccountable digital mob that governs through pressure and shame. Polybius would have recognized in this "opinion" a new form of the demagogy he feared: the use of words to flatter passion. The final stage of the Polybian cycle, however, is not inevitable. If peoples can fall, they can also reform. Polybius never despairs of human virtue.
“Peoples who maintain the discipline of their fathers prolong their prosperity.” [9].
The only remedy for political decomposition is education, not that of slogans but that of reason. The reform of institutions must begin with the reform of minds. Restoring schools, giving back to universities a sense of truth, rehabilitating the intellectual aristocracy and the transmission of knowledge, these are the conditions for political salvation. A society that no longer educates cannot govern itself: it is condemned to be governed. Before recovering the political monarchy (in the ancient sense), it is therefore necessary to reestablish the aristocracy of the mind, that is to say, the reign of Logos on doxa.
Polybius warns us: constitutions do not die from without, but from within. France, like the entire West, will not perish from lack of wealth or invasion, but from moral exhaustion, from forgetting what founds liberty. We stand on the threshold of the last moment of the cycle, the one where democracy, left to its own devices, transforms into a crowd. We still have a choice: educate or perish. To restore the university is to restore the Republic; to fail to do so is to prepare for the monarchy.
