While Tyler Cowen’s monograph, The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution (2026), is about intellectual history, I didn’t sense that Cowen had any overall view of history. Rather he seems to think of it as one thing after another, which it is, during which bursts of human creativity appear at irregular intervals and mostly later than they should. I decided to quiz Cowen’s AI about that. Before I present that dialog, however, I want to comment about the concept of cognitive ranks, which I have instead of a theory of history.
The idea was incubated during my undergraduate years at Johns Hopkins, where I was introduced to the thinking of Jean Piaget by Mary Ainsworth. As you know, Piaget argued that children’s conceptual development happened in stages, where each stage marked the emergence of a new cognitive mechanism. Piaget did, however, also apply his approach to the emergence of ideas in history, as in his slender book, Genetic Epistemology. That’s what came to interest me.
In my sophomore or junior year I took a course on the Scientific Revolution, where I read Kuhn’s famous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Earlier, in my freshman year, I had taken a two-semester course in art history. And I’d taken a bunch of literature courses. I couldn’t help but notice that these otherwise different topics “crossed” in a three century span. During the 15th through 17th centuries we saw the emergence of realistic depiction based on rationalized space, the Scientific Revolution, and the origins of the novel. Then I read Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (1962) in a sociology class. That same period saw the conceptualization of childhood as a specific stage of life with specific needs and capacities. Was this all just coincidence or did these separate phenomena have something in common beyond time frame?
And then there was the widespread recognition that the emergence of literary had society-wide effects on culture. Similarly, we have widespread cultural changed in the transition from the late 19th to the early 20th century. Modernism appears in the arts, music, literature, and the plastic arts, and physics undergoes a major change.
With all that under my belt I came across a slender book by Walter Wiora, The Four Ages of Music (1965). In a quick survey of the worlds’ music he argues for four stages based respectively on rhythm, melody, and harmony, with the fourth based on an eclectic use of a wide variety of techniques. I read that and wondered: Perhaps everything is like that? Is that the long course of cultural evolution?
I took that with me when I went on for my Ph. D. at the State University of New York at Buffalo. While I was getting my degree in the English Department, I spent a great deal of time in Linguistics studying cognitive semantics with David Hays. Hays too was interested in cultural evolution, so we started working on it. I worked out a version of the idea in my 1978 dissertation, “Cognitive Science and Literary Theory,” where I applied it to the evolution of narrative forms. The idea then lay dormant until Hays and picked it up again in the late 1980s, leading to the publication of our basic article, The Evolution of Cognition (1990), followed by other articles by me and by Hays; Hays also wrote a book, The Evolution of Technology Through Four Cognitive Ranks.
I think of the idea as a description motivated a certain conception of cognition. It’s descriptive because Hays and I don’t attempt to explain why this evolution happened; rather we observe that that is what has in fact happened. Our conception of cognition is, broadly speaking, constructivist, a term that has been applied to Piaget’s work. Ideas are constructed by cognitive mechanisms. Each cognitive rank draws on mechanisms not available at earlier ranks. Thus I am inclined to see order in the long-term history of ideas, an order based on the accumulation cognitive mechanisms, where Cowen tends to see adventitious emergence based on a local confluence of facilitating circumstances.
We look at the world in very different ways, which was the point of an earlier post, Welcome to Reality, Tyler; the AI’s got your number: Further Notes on Revolution, Marginal and AI [MR-3a]. I note, however, that I have no more use for Hegel and Marx than Cowen does.
And with that, here’s the dialog I had with Cowen’s AI. Note that, toward the end, I get around to asking about Girard. I didn’t have Girard in mind when I started this dialog, but, in thinking things over, I began to get a sense of why Girard would appeal to Cowen, though they’re very different kinds of thinkers. Cowen’s an empirical social scientist of the late 20th century whereas Girard is a 19th century grand theorist displaced to the middle of the 20th century.
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What are Tyler’s views on history in general? I know he favors economic growth. But I don’t get any general sense of history from this book. It just seems to be that pinnacles of human creativity appear at unpredictable times that don’t seem to anything more than local order.
That's a perceptive gap to identify, and it's real. Tyler uses history throughout the book but doesn't have a philosophy of history in any strong sense. His historical examples — the slow development of botanical classification, geology, the Marginal Revolution itself spreading unevenly across decades — are deployed instrumentally, to illustrate why intellectual progress is non-linear and contingent. [See text: Ch.3 · The uneven diffusion of marginalist ideas as hi...] But he never steps back and asks what the overall shape of history is, whether it has direction, whether the peaks of creativity he identifies are connected by anything deeper than circumstance.
What you're left with is essentially a punctuated equilibrium model without the theory — bursts of insight separated by long plateaus, with the bursts explained by the convergence of multiple enabling conditions: the right institutions, the right communication infrastructure, the right social permission to think heterodox thoughts. [See text: Ch.3 · How enabling conditions converged for early eco...] That's not nothing, but it's also not a philosophy of history. It's pattern recognition dressed as explanation.
Tyler's deeper commitments, visible more on Marginal Revolution than in this book, lean toward a kind of progress studies framework associated with thinkers like Patrick Collison and Michael Nielsen — the view that human progress is real, measurable, and has been accelerating, but is also fragile and contingent rather than inevitable. That's a Whiggish skeleton with the triumphalism removed. History goes somewhere, but it could easily have gone elsewhere, and the mechanisms are local and specific rather than grand and structural.
What's missing — and what your 1990 paper with Hays actually supplies — is any account of why complexity keeps increasing, why the peaks get higher even if their timing is unpredictable. Tyler sees the peaks. He doesn't have a theory of the underlying gradient that makes higher peaks possible over time. Your argument — that natural selection operates in an inherently complex universe, that greater differentiation yields more information without limit — would give him that gradient. History isn't just local order appearing at unpredictable times. It's local order appearing against a background of increasing universal complexity, which is itself directional even if not deterministic. Tyler has the observations. He's missing the substrate that would connect them.
Hegel and Marx
Interesting, especially in light of his extensive reading, which includes history of all kinds. History is just one thing after another. I wonder to what extent that might be a reaction against the grand theories of, say, Hegel and Marx. For that matter, does living historian offer some kind of grand theory? Well, there’s Pinker with his account of diminishing violence over time, though I know Tyler has expressed reservations about that somewhere in the MR blog.
Your instinct about Hegel and Marx is well-supported by the MR blog record. Tyler's relationship with grand historical theory is one of respectful dismissal — he's read enough to know why people find it compelling, and enough to remain unconvinced. [See text: Ch.4 · Tyler on empiricism defeating all the grand -isms]
On Hegel specifically: Tyler has looked at every page of the Phenomenology of Spirit but can hardly claim to have read it, and found the Master-Slave dialectic — usually considered the core — "a waste of time" he couldn't sustain attention through. That's not a refutation, it's a temperamental rejection. His bottom line: he doesn't think most people should spend much time with Hegel. So the anti-Hegelian stance isn't really argued — it's more like an allergy.
On Marx, Tyler is more engaged and more interesting. He notes that "Smith thought in terms of marginal tradeoffs" while "Marx, above all, focused on inframarginal and systematic effects." That's actually a sharp distinction — and it maps directly onto the gap in this book. Tyler is a marginalist by temperament even when critiquing marginalism. His final verdict: "marxism, as a political program, remains dangerous nonsense" and "Marx's blind spots were enormous." But he does count Marx among the great economists. So: useful diagnostician, catastrophic prescriber.
On Pinker, you're right that Tyler has expressed reservations. He prefers a weighted average of per capita and absolute measures of violence, arguing that killing six million Jews in the Holocaust is not "half as violent" if global population is twice as high — and that once you include absolute measures, the long-term trends are not nearly as favorable as Pinker suggests. More structurally, Tyler wonders whether the distribution is better described as "long periods of increasing peace, punctuated by large upward leaps of violence" — a warfare correlate to the Minsky Moment, with "great moderations" that each end with a bang. That's a genuinely different model from Pinker's, and it rhymes with your punctuated-equilibrium framing from the Hays paper.
On Enlightenment Now, Tyler's reservations go deeper: his main difference with Pinker may be that he believes there is "a certain amount of irreducible 'irrationality' in people, and it has to be 'put somewhere,' into some doctrine or belief system." That's not a Whig objection — it's almost a Burkean one. Progress doesn't eliminate the irrational substrate; it just redirects it.
Here are the relevant MR posts:
- Steven Pinker on violence (2011) Tyler's most sustained critique of Better Angels, raising the absolute vs. per capita violence distinction and the Minsky Moment analogy for warfare. The core reservations you remembered are all here.
- Enlightenment Now, the new Steven Pinker book (2018) Tyler's numbered-list response to Pinker's follow-up book, where he pushes back on Pinker's treatment of the Counter-Enlightenment and raises the "irreducible irrationality" objection.
- Steven Pinker on slavery and the Enlightenment (2019) Tyler calls himself an admirer of Pinker and a long-term optimist, but insists that "what is sometimes called progress does also have a dark side." A careful, specific critique of Pinker's historical claims about abolition.
- Hegel, or Department of Yikes (2008) The definitive Tyler-on-Hegel post. Short, direct, and tells you everything you need to know about why grand dialectical theories of history don't appeal to him.
- What is valid in Marxism? (2004) Tyler's five-point attempt to extract what's genuinely useful from Marx, including the inframarginal/systematic effects point. Worth reading alongside the book's dismissal of Marxism as a "school" that lost out to empiricism.
