Albert Lepawsky on Brooks Adams

“Twenty years later, Professor Wallace B. Donham, Dean of the Graduate School of Business at Harvard University, repeated that "if our civilization breaks down, it will be mainly a breakdown of administration";" and authorities in the field of public administration like Professor John M. Gaus of the Graduate School of Public Administration at Harvard and Dean Paul H. Appleby of the Maxwell Graduate School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University have quoted Brooks Adams's view.”

“Brooks Adams advocated that the chief function of administration should be to facilitate social change, or paradoxical as it may seem, to assure social stability by facilitating social change. Great-grandson of President John Adams, grandson of President Quincy Adams, brother of the "educated" Henry Adams, Brooks Adams produced, during the early 1900'S, a series of unorthodox historical essays. Their titles were more radical than their contents: The Law of Civilization and Decay, "The Collapse of Capitalistic Government," and The Theory of Social Revolutions. The last of these is quoted below; the first was regarded by Theodore Roosevelt as a "melancholy" but "powerful" book with "a very ugly element of truth."”