Asimov is definitely a favourite and the use of fiction to explore otherwise polical/philosophical ideas is something I wish we had more of. That said, seeing

Asimov is definitely a favourite and the use of fiction to explore otherwise polical/philosophical ideas is something I wish we had more of. That said, seeing the world as predictable cycles is... a strong theme in modern history/political philosophy & not unique to him. That's (imo) what makes the psychohistory great. It's a fictionalised form of an idea that appears everywhere humans try to think of a big picture. Destiny.. fate. Marx was explicitly deterministic in his historical materialism theory, his core idea, and possibly the thing Asimov was parodying in psychohistory. Economics as a whole could be thing Asimov was parodying. The like of to set Malthus, Ricardo and even Keynes played this game. Modern economists (notably thomas picketty) predict cycles, their inevitable consequences and 2nd order effects. New/neo liberalism in the 80s & 90s had a strong, economics-oriented idea that the world would inevitably move towards liberal democracy and it's economic institutions. Gibbon's "Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire" has strong deterministic themes: success, decadence, collapse, renewal. Yuval Noah Harare's "Sapiens" has its driving theme of human history (a march towards more & better cooperation). The history leads directly into futurism & prediction in the sequel... also deterministic themes. Destiny has been a favourite theme in our stories since our first stories.