ABSTRACT
The reissue of Brooks Adams’s The Law of Civilization and Decay, with a long and illuminating introduction by Charles A. Beard, is tardy recognition of a work of seminal significance. He had the temperament of a Jeremiah. In his criticism of the capitalistic society Brooks was of course on the side of the socialists. Brooks was the first American economic historian to occupy himself with the basic problem of our industrial civilization: how to adjust contemporary society to the ever-increasing velocity of economic concentration. The more he observed the effect of our economy upon the mass of mankind, the more he was persuaded that capitalism must either develop a greater social intelligence or be superseded by a ruling group able to cope with the strains and stresses of scientific centralization. To the end of his life Brooks continued his study of the flux of civilization.
