The Law of Civilization and Decay

rdf:langString The Law of Civilization and Decay

rdf:langString The Law of Civilization and Decay: An Essay on History is a book written by Brooks Adams in 1895. His intention was to prove that the rise and fall of civilizations follows a definite cycle of centralization and decay. Adams outlined this theory by sketching the patterns of major periods in western history, concentrating on economic and social factors. Adams argues that social "movement," as in colonization and industrialization, leads to consolidation; consolidation, in turn, creates a comparative advantage for frugality versus artistic expression. Because Adams believed that these traits of the mind were heritable, he argues that consolidation led to the domination of one people over another, and the domination of one civilization over another. The successive rises and falls of empires were therefore dictated by their stage in this cycle relative to other empires, by which commercial centers moved from one city to another: "In proportion as movement accelerates societies consolidate, and as societies consolidate they pass through a profound intellectual change. Energy ceases to find vent through the imagination and takes the form of capital; hence as civilizations advance, the imaginative temperament tends to disappear, while the economic instinct is fostered and thus substantially new varieties of men come to possess the world. Nothing so portentous overhangs humanity as this mysterious and relentless acceleration of movement, which changes methods of competition and alters paths of trade; for by it countless millions of men and women are foredoomed to happiness or misery as certainly as the beasts and trees, which have flourished in the wilderness, are destined to vanish when the soil is subdued by man. The Romans amassed the treasure by which they administered their Empire, through the plunder and enslavement of the world. The Empire cemented by that treasure crumbled when adverse exchanges carried the bullion of Italy to the shore of the Bosphorus. An accelerated movement among the semi-barbarians of the West caused the agony of the Crusades, amidst which Constantinople fell as the Italian cities rose; while Venice and Genoa, and with them the whole Arabic civilization, shriveled when Portugal established direct communication with Hindoostan. The opening of the ocean as a highroad precipitated the Reformation and built up Antwerp, while in the end it ruined Spain; and finally the last great quickening of the age of steam, which centralized the world at London, bathed the earth in blood from the Mississippi to the Ganges. Thus religions are preached and are forgotten, empires rise and fall, philosophies are born and die, art and poetry bloom and fade, as societies pass from the disintegration wherein imagination kindles to the consolidation whose pressure ends in death." —The Law of Civilization and Decay (1896)