Brooks Adams

(1848–1927), son of the first Charles Francis Adams, was a historian and a critic of society. Adams questioned prevailing attitudes and theories and developed his own theory of the movement of history. He believed that all history is a struggle between concentration and dissipation of energy. His ideas influenced his older brother, Henry Adams, and laid the groundwork for later historians and economists, including Thorstein Veblen, Oswald Spengler, and Charles A. Beard.

Adams' first book, The Emancipation of Massachusetts (1887), describes the development of religious freedom in that commonwealth. In his most important work, Law of Civilization and Decay (1895), he developed his cyclical interpretation of history. Civilization, he wrote, rose and fell according to the growth and decay of commerce. Adams applied this principle to the course of modern history and foresaw eventual chaos.

Brooks Adams was born in Quincy, Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard in 1870 and studied at Harvard Law School. Adams was secretary to his father at the Alabama Claims negotiations in Geneva, 1871–72. After practicing law in Boston, 1873–81, Adams, like his brothers Henry and Charles Francis, turned to writing and research.

His other writings include: America's Economic Supremacy (1900); The New Empire (1902); The Theory of Social Revolutions (1913).