SOURCE; A review of The Law of Civilization and Decay: An Essay on History, in American Historical Review, Vol. 49, No. 1, October, 1943, pp. 77-78.

[In the following excerpt, Coulborn favorably reviews The Law of Civilization and Decay, but finds much of its research and conclusions dated.]

The republication of Brooks Adams' theory of history [The Law of Civilization and Decay: An Essay on History] is an event of importance to historians. Mr. Alfred Knopf judged such an event timely. Dr. Charles A. Beard judged Brooks Adams' work the best lesson from the American classics for the present generation of historians. By this judgment and by his introduction Dr. Beard repeats the attempt made by Brooks Adams' more distinguished brother Henry, half a century ago, to persuade American historians to take their profession seriously and address themselves to the problem Brooks Adams faced.

Brooks Adams explained history as a cyclical process, each civilization—the term not defined—beginning in an age of dispersion and proceeding into an age of concentration. In the first age, the first phase of the cycle, institutions are loose and weak and the "imaginative man" leads society, expressing himself in religion and in war; fear is the dominant urge in this age. In the second age, the second phase of the cycle, there is a process of centralization and the "economic man" attains to leadership, expressing himself in science and in business, especially in currency manipulation; greed has now become the dominant urge. The "law" of civilization compels a society to move from the first into the second phase of the cycle and then, continuing to operate, becomes a law of decay, as economic man, in his climactic type, the "usurer," gradually starves his fellows until their vitality is destroyed. Thereupon new "races" appear and the cyclical process is repeated ad infinitum. This theory Brooks Adams applied to the Graeco-Roman and Western civilizations.

Some of his contemporaries received Brooks Adams' sally politely—for example, the reviewer in this journal (see Am. Hist. Rev., I, 568). But it did not convert the profession; the same reviewer gently recommended further "minute study" of the "fall of Rome" before "any very complete work . . . upon the general course of history" was undertaken. Since that time Brooks's problem, the meaning of history, has been treated by some foreign scholars, few of them professional historians.

There are important parts of Brooks's argument which have been put out of court by the increase of knowledge since his time, but there are other parts still well worthy of comparison with the products of more recent thinkers. As a determinist and a vitalist Brooks Adams anticipated Spengler, as Dr. Beard notices (pp. 3-4). Today there is a strong reaction against determinism which tends to result in vitalism becoming humanistic. But Brooks's treatment of economic matters, which Henry Adams thought akin to Marx's treatment, has recently been fairly closely paralleled by Ralph Turner in his anthropological-economic interpretation of history (see Am. Hist. Rev., XLVII, 810). Brooks's "usurer" is one type of what Ortega y Gasset calls the "mass-man," when the massman rises to power. The first phase of Brooks's cycle is equivalent to Toynbee's "universal church" and, though vaguer, is perhaps by the same token truer to the facts. Brooks's description of the two phases of his cycle is not impressive when compared with modern definitions of culture by categories, as made, for example, by MacIver or the Webers. Nevertheless, the two-phase cycle itself, which goes back to Vico, still seems to the reviewer preferable to Sorokin's three-phase cycle.

Whatever crudities and positive errors there may be in Brooks Adams' theory, he did face the supreme problem of the historian. And, if this last statement be regarded as one of opinion, the opinion is shared by Dr. Beard, by Toynbee, and presumably by most of the other scholars mentioned above. Dr. Beard says in his introduction (p. 4) that "all great human causes turn on theories of history, that all the modern revolutions which have shaken the world have been inspired by theories of history. Every piece of philosophic, economic or political writing either presents such a theory or rests upon assumptions, articulate or tacit, derived from it." In the present era of wars, revolutions, and other social struggles, then, Brooks Adams brings a pertinent message to historians.

Finally, The Law of Civilization and Decay presents an instructive example of the relation between the events and conditions of a period of history and the serious historiography of that period. Dr. Beard's introduction demonstrates that relation at length. He has used in part the evidence of unpublished material, namely Henry Adams' annotations upon the manuscripts made before publication of the New York and Paris editions and several letters of Brooks and Henry made available by Mr. Henry Adams of Boston, nephew of the brothers. From this portion of the introduction a thoughtful historian has an admirable opportunity to deduce the true meaning of the duty of objectivity. He may perhaps measure his own professional qualifications by his ability to make the deduction.

It is fair to add—since there is here much praise of Brooks Adams—that contemporary historians may take warning from what may be called the "romance" of Brooks's conclusion. There were, in fact, three rather different conclusions, respectively in the English, American, and French editions! (The conclusions are stated in the respective prefaces, not in the last chapter.) Now Newton (so far as is known to the reviewer) did not publish three editions of the Principia having three different conclusions: the apple did not shoot up to heaven, nor did it fly off tangentially to the east; it fell only and always to the ground. At least, the contrast shows that Dr. Beard is right when he says that The Law of Civilization and Decay is no law; at most, it shows that Benedetto Croce is right—but I cannot believe that he is altogether right—when he says that the historian should not seek to be a prophet.