Hey it's the one that Turchin managed to have not named... psychohistory. Fair enough, that's not absolutely about a one-way life-cycle (From not overly much to sometimes less than zero, or its counterpart There and back again).

For VC, go back to the Medicis? Obsession with Roman over Athenian (ie, not even Macedonian or ahem Florentinian, whom, as you know, were blessed-- by themselves-- with nonTrumpian^W (-"anti"-)papist perturbations) can only push them closer to all of extant theory. They don't get to have Germanics explain their early policy failures, eg

Update: for the record, I hold the opinion that libertarianism and liberalism (social, political but not to forget the far less trendy "fiscal") should be right next to each other in parameter space. One may be allowed to define a metric that puts a firewall, or, if you are less amused, an event-horizon _around_ them. I'd suggest "make things people want"