This book is a study of the relationship between the use of energy in society and the general pattern of development in Great Britain during the 1870 1914 era. Professor Adams argues that Britain's apparent 'decline' in this period was not in fact a decline but a levelling off in capacity to do work, a result of the country's collective decision to invest more heavily abroad than at home. This pattern accords with Lotka's general energetic principle of natural selection. Specifically, Britain found it necessary to invest abroad, thereby creating an industrial environment for its own products...

"Quite the contrary of old generals, nations do not fade away; they have to be killed."

Richard Adams' view of the nation as a basic social unit is central to this pioneering study in social anthropology. The result of many years of research in Guatemala, this volume utilizes the author's fieldwork as well as that of his colleagues and students to construct a set of concepts explaining how Guatemala reached the difficult circumstances in which it found itself in the 1960s--and still finds itself today.

With the breakup of the great colonial empires after the Second World War,...

Can human social evolution be described in terms common to other sciences, most specifically, as an energy process? The Eighth Day reflects a conviction that the human trajectory, for all its uniqueness and indeterminism, will never be satisfactorily understood until it is framed in dynamics that are common to all of nature. The problem in doing this, however, lies in ourselves. The major social theories have failed to treat human social evolution as a component of broader natural processes.

The Eighth Day argues that the energy process provides a basis for...