Audiobook · read by volunteers
Theory of Social Revolutions
Brooks Adams (1848–1927)
Read by Nathalie J. · 6 chapters · 5 h 01
About the book
When do societies break down, and why do revolutions follow? Brooks Adams, an American historian and critic of capitalism, offers a bold answer. He believed that commercial civilisations rise and fall in predictable cycles: people gather in large centres, trade expands, wealth gathers in a few hands, and then the very institutions that made the system work begin to strain. In these essays he turns his attention to government, to the courts and to the position of the judiciary in the United States, arguing that American courts had taken on a legislative role. Six parts, read by a single LibriVox volunteer, cover about five hours. The ideas are provocative, sometimes startling and still debated, and the book is a useful window on early twentieth-century anxieties about power, law and change.
Introduction
Brooks Adams, who lived from 1848 to 1927, was an American historian and a critic of capitalism. He belonged to the famous Adams family of Massachusetts, which produced two presidents, and was the grandson of John Quincy Adams. His best-known earlier book was The Law of Civilization and Decay (1895), and he followed a different path as a writer on the course of civilisations. He believed that commercial civilisations rise and fall in predictable cycles: people draw together in large centres of population and engage in trade, wealth accumulates, and a crisis follows.
The Theory of Social Revolutions, published in 1913, belongs to non-fiction, history and political science. It takes up topics such as the collapse of capitalistic government, the limitations of the judicial function and the role of American courts as legislative chambers. These are the titles of its opening sections, and they show how closely the book connects abstract theory with questions of American law and politics.
Adams writes in a vigorous and argumentative manner, and his views were controversial then and remain so. Readers should treat the book as an expression of one thinker’s position at a moment of intense debate about industrial power, rather than as a neutral survey.
The recording has six parts, read by a single LibriVox volunteer, and lasts about five hours. It will interest listeners curious about the history of American political thought, about the Progressive era and about long-cycle theories of history. Today it is worth hearing for the challenge it poses and for the picture it gives of how an earlier generation tried to understand revolution and social change.
Public domain
Brooks Adams died in 1927: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text