Progress and Decline
That Civilization is playing out the last act of an inescapable Greek tragedy is a notion which Brooks Adams, the American historian, proclaimed fifty-five years ago in his book The Law of Civilization and Decay. The same dark prophecy was heard in Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, and more recently Arnold Toynbee has contemplated it in his Study of History. But how much truth is there in this fatalism? asks LOVELL THOMPSON, the Boston essayist and publisher long associated with Houghton, Mifflin.