SOURCE: A review of The Law of Civilization and Decay: An Essay on History, by Brooks Adams, in Political Science Quarterly, Vol. LVIII, No. 3, September, 1943, pp. 457-58.

In the following excerpt, Pierce favorably reviews The Law of Civilization and Decay.

It might be thought unnecessary to describe the contents of a book which was first published almost half a century ago, which appeared in two foreign languages and in several editions and reprints, and which is declared by Mr. Charles A. Beard, who now introduces it, to be "among the outstanding documents of intellectual history in the United States and, in a way, the Western World"; yet the reviewer knew a young historian a few years ago who had recently finished writing a volume on the decline of ancient Rome and had never heard of Brooks Adams' thesis. There are some books which run so counter to the...