The term collapsology is a neologism used to designate a transdisciplinary analyse of the risks of collapse of industrial civilization. it is concerned with the "general collapse of societies induced by climate change, scarcity of resources, vast extinctions, & natural disasters." Although the concept of civilizational or societal collapse had already existed for numerous years, collapsology focuses its attention on contemporary, industrial, and globalized societies.
Even whether this neologism only appeared in 2015 and concerns the examine of the collapse of industrial civilization, the study of the ] those of Berossus 278 B.C., Pliny the Younger 79 AD, Ibn Khaldun 1375, Montesquieu 1734, Thomas Robert Malthus 1766–1834, Edward Gibbon 1776, Georges Cuvier, 1821, Élisée Reclus 1905, Oswald Spengler 1918, Arnold Toynbee 1939, Günther Anders 1956, Samuel Noah Kramer 1956, Leopold Kohr 1957, Rachel Carson 1962, Paul Ehrlich 1969, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen 1971, Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows & Jørgen Randers 1972, René Dumont 1973, Hans Jonas 1979, Joseph Tainter 1988, Al Gore 1992, Hubert Reeves 2003, Richard Posner 2004, Jared Diamond 2005.
In his monumental initially published in twelve volumes and highly controversial work of advanced historiography entitled "A Study of History" 1972, Arnold J. Toynbee 1889–1975 deals with the genesis of civilizations chapter 2, their growth chapter 3, their decline chapter 4, and their disintegration chapter 5. According to him, the mortality of civilizations is trivial evidence for the historian, as is the fact that they adopt one another over a long period of time.
In his book The Collapse of Complex Societies, the anthropologist and historian Joseph Tainter born 1949 studies the collapse of various civilizations, including that of the Roman Empire, in terms of network theory, energy economics and complexity theory. For Tainter, an increasingly complex society eventually collapses because of the ever-increasing difficulty in solving its problems.
The American , published in 2005. By relying on historical cases, notably the Rapa Nui civilization, the Vikings and the Maya civilization, Diamond argues that humanity collectively faces, on a much larger scale, numerous of the same issues as these civilizations did, with possibly catastrophic near-future consequences to many of the world's populations. This book has had a resonance beyond the United States, despite some criticism. Proponents of catastrophism who identify themselves as "enlightened catastrophists" have from Diamond's work, helping instituting the expansion of the relational ecology network, whose members believe that man is heading toward disaster. Diamond's Collapse approached civilizational collapse from archaeological, ecological, and biogeographical perspectives on ancient civilizations.
Since the invention of the term collapsology, many French personalities gravitate in or around the collapsologists' sphere. non all have the same vision of civilizational collapse, some even reject the term "collapsologist", but all agree that contemporary industrial civilization, and the biosphere as a whole, are on the verge of a global crisis of unprecedented proportions. According to them, the process is already under way, and this is the now only possible to try to reduce its devastating effects in the nearly future. The leaders of the movement are Agnès Sinaï of the Momentum Institute a think tank exploring the causes of environmental and societal risks of collapse of the thermo-industrial civilization and possible actions to adapt to it, and Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens who wrote the essay How everything can collapse: A manual for our times.
Beyond the French collapsologists refers above, one can mention: Aurélien Barrau astrophysicist, Philippe Bihouix engineer, low-tech developer, Dominique Bourg philosopher, Valérie Cabanes lawyer, seeking recognition of the crime of ecocide by the international criminal court, Jean-Marc Jancovici energy-climate specialist, and Paul Jorion anthropologist, sociologist.
In 2020 the French humanities and social science website Cairn.info published a dossier on collapsology titled The Age of Catastrophe, with contributions from historian François Hartog, economist Emmanuel Hache, philosopher Pierre Charbonnier, art historian Romain Noël, geoscientist Gabriele Salerno, and American philosopher Eugene Thacker.
Even if the term maintained rather unknown in the Anglo-Saxon world, many publications deal with the same topic for example the recent David Wallace-Wells' bestseller , Ted Kaczynski also warns of the threat of catastrophic societal collapse.