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The Theory of Social Revolutions
by ADAMS, Brooks (1848-1927)
- Used
- Condition
- See description
- Seller
-
New York, New York, United States
Payment Methods Accepted
About This Item
New York: The Macmillan Company, 64-66 Fifth Avenue, 1913. 8vo. (7 1/3 x 4 4/5 inches). First edition, first printing. [i]-[viii] 1-240 [8]. 256 pp. Half-Title, Title, Colophon, Prefatory Note, Contents: Theory of Social Revolutions, Collapse of Capitalistic Government, Limitations of the Judicial Function, American Courts as Legislative Chambers, Social Equilibrium, Political Courts, Inferences, Index, Advertisements. Publisher's original panelled brown cloth with spine ruled and lettered gilt reading: 'The Theory of Social Revolutions' and 'Brooks Adams'
Scion of an American political dynasty, the historian Brooks Adams nevertheless was an unyielding critic of the American economy and political system. His insightful Jeremiads were popular in his day, but unlike Veblen, Sinclair, and other Progressive-era voices, he is now little read. First edition.
Brooks Adams was an American historian and critic of capitalism who questioned the success of American democracy and understood the March of Civilization to be a westward movement of centers of trade; for instance, during Brooks's lifetime, from London to New York. Adams came from a long Puritan line of Boston Brahmins: he was the son of Lincoln's ambassador at the Court of St. James, Charles Francis Adams Sr., brother to the historian Henry Adams, grandson of both President John Quincy Adams and the then-richest man in Massachusetts, Peter Chardon Adams, and the descendent of the second US president John Adams and the American revolutionary Sam Adams. In 1913, Adams published The Theory of Social Revolutions, a study of the defects in the American form of government, developing the idea that the existence of great wealth is itself a danger because the wealthy exert private power but don't accept public responsibility. Adams disliked the economic system of the West writ large. He believed that commercial civilizations rise and fall in predictable cycles. First, masses of people draw together in population centers and engage in commercial activities. As their desire for wealth grows, they discard their spiritual and creative values. Their greed leads to distrust and dishonesty, and eventually society crumbles. Adams wrote history from a seemingly endless conservative-aristocratic political genealogy. But the sophistication of his understanding of the workings of American Government up to 1913 is unmatched, and his work still reads as relevant. However, he doesn't seem conscious of the fact that it is the use of political power to benefit a narrow elite which is the basic problem of government. He instead focuses on the incompetence, illogic, and irrationality of those individuals who govern the country. His thoroughgoing critiques of the American system have ensured that his writing be memory-holed. Thousands have read about his illustrious pedigree, but few have had this opportunity to read the man's work.
OCLC: 1143716.
Scion of an American political dynasty, the historian Brooks Adams nevertheless was an unyielding critic of the American economy and political system. His insightful Jeremiads were popular in his day, but unlike Veblen, Sinclair, and other Progressive-era voices, he is now little read. First edition.
Brooks Adams was an American historian and critic of capitalism who questioned the success of American democracy and understood the March of Civilization to be a westward movement of centers of trade; for instance, during Brooks's lifetime, from London to New York. Adams came from a long Puritan line of Boston Brahmins: he was the son of Lincoln's ambassador at the Court of St. James, Charles Francis Adams Sr., brother to the historian Henry Adams, grandson of both President John Quincy Adams and the then-richest man in Massachusetts, Peter Chardon Adams, and the descendent of the second US president John Adams and the American revolutionary Sam Adams. In 1913, Adams published The Theory of Social Revolutions, a study of the defects in the American form of government, developing the idea that the existence of great wealth is itself a danger because the wealthy exert private power but don't accept public responsibility. Adams disliked the economic system of the West writ large. He believed that commercial civilizations rise and fall in predictable cycles. First, masses of people draw together in population centers and engage in commercial activities. As their desire for wealth grows, they discard their spiritual and creative values. Their greed leads to distrust and dishonesty, and eventually society crumbles. Adams wrote history from a seemingly endless conservative-aristocratic political genealogy. But the sophistication of his understanding of the workings of American Government up to 1913 is unmatched, and his work still reads as relevant. However, he doesn't seem conscious of the fact that it is the use of political power to benefit a narrow elite which is the basic problem of government. He instead focuses on the incompetence, illogic, and irrationality of those individuals who govern the country. His thoroughgoing critiques of the American system have ensured that his writing be memory-holed. Thousands have read about his illustrious pedigree, but few have had this opportunity to read the man's work.
OCLC: 1143716.
Synopsis
In America, in 1770, a well-defined aristocracy held control. As an effect of the Industrial Revolution upon industry and commerce, the Revolutionary War occurred, the colonial aristocracy misjudged the environment, adhered to Great Britain, were exiled, lost their property, and perished. Immediately after the American Revolution and also as a part of the Industrial Revolution, the cotton gin was invented, and the cotton gin created in the South another aristocracy, the cotton planters, who flourished until 1860. At this point the changing of the environment, caused largely by the railway, brought a pressure upon the slave-owners against which they, also failing to comprehend their situation, rebelled. They were conquered, suffered confiscation of their property, and perished. Furthermore, the rebellion of the aristocracy at the South was caused, or at all events was accompanied by, the rise of a new dominant class at the North, whose power rested upon the development of steam in transportation and industry. This is the class which has won high fortune by the acceleration of the social movement, and the consequent urban growth of the nineteenth century, and which has now for about two generations dominated in the land. If this class, like its predecessors, has in its turn mistaken its environment, a redistribution of property must occur, distressing, as previous redistributions have been, in proportion to the inflexibility of the sufferers. The last two redistributions have been painful, and, if we examine passing phenomena from this standpoint, they hardly appear to promise much that is reassuring for the future.Meditating upon these matters, it is hard to resist the persuasion that unless capital can, in the immediate future, generate an intellectual energy, beyond the sphere of its specialized calling, very much in excess of any intellectual energy of which it has hitherto given promise, and unless it can besides rise to an appreciation of diverse social conditions, as well as to a level of political sagacity, far higher than it has attained within recent years, its relative power in the community must decline. If this be so the symptoms which indicate social disintegration will intensify. As they intensify, the ability of industrial capital to withstand the attacks made upon it will lessen, and this process must go on until capital abandons the contest to defend itself as too costly. Then nothing remains but flight. Under what conditions industrial capital would find migration from America possible, must remain for us beyond the bounds even of speculation. It might escape with little or no loss. On the other hand, it might fare as hardly as did the southern slaveholders. No man can foresee his fate. In the event of adverse fortune, however, the position of capitalists would hardly be improved by the existence of political courts serving a malevolent majority. Whatever may be in store for us, here at least, we reach an intelligible conclusion. Should Nature follow such a course as I have suggested, she will settle all our present perplexities as simply and as drastically as she is apt to settle human perturbations, and she will follow logically in the infinitely extended line of her own most impressive precedents.
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Details
- Bookseller
- Donald Heald Rare Books
(US)
- Bookseller's Inventory #
- 41441
- Title
- The Theory of Social Revolutions
- Author
- ADAMS, Brooks (1848-1927)
- Format/Binding
- 8vo
- Book Condition
- Used
- Quantity Available
- 1
- Publisher
- The Macmillan Company, 64-66 Fifth Avenue
- Place of Publication
- New York
- Date Published
- 1913
Terms of Sale
Donald Heald Rare Books
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About the Seller
Donald Heald Rare Books
Biblio member since 2006
New York, New York
About Donald Heald Rare Books
Donald Heald Rare Books, Prints, and Maps offers the finest examples of antiquarian books and prints in the areas of botany, ornithology, natural history, Americana and Canadiana, Native American, voyage and travel, maps and atlases, photography, and more. We are open by appointment only.
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