notebooks, avoid their
blunders and direct our own feet along paths that fulfil our lives at
the same time that they meet the widespread demand for survival and
well-being?

Civilization has been extensively experimental. Several thousand years,
during which civilizations have appeared, disappeared and reappeared,
have been too brief to establish and stabilize a hard and fast social
pattern. As the complexity of civilizations has increased, variations
and deviations have grown in number and intensity. With the advent of
western civilization a culture pattern is being put together which
differs widely from its predecessors.

All civilized peoples seem to have developed from simple beginnings and
experimented with broader and more complicated life styles. In western
civilization the number of experiments has increased and the span of
their deviations seems to have broadened. Under the circumstances an
analysis of civilization must take for granted not only social change
but the development of, human society along lines which link up the
outstanding structural and functional ideas, institutions and practices
of successive civilizations.

I propose in this inquiry to state certain accepted facts from the
history of civilizations and of contemporary experience. I also propose
to analyze the facts and generalize them in such a way that the results
of the study may provide an understanding of the human social past,
together with some guide-lines that will prove useful in the formulation
and implementation of the present-day policy and procedure of civilized
peoples, nations, empires and of the western civilization.

This book is not a popular treatise, nor is it a textbook. Rather. it is
an attempt to summarize an area of critical human concern. Academia may
not use such material: nevertheless it should be available to students
and administrators who must plan and direct the social future of
humankind.

_Civilization and Beyond_ rounds out a series of studies that I began in
1928 with _Where Is Civilization Going_? The series has extended through
_The Twilight of Empire_ (1930), _War_ (1931) and _The Tragedy of
Empire_ (1946). Up to 1914 my field of study was confined largely to the
economics of distribution. The war of 1914-18 pushed me rudely and
decisively into the broader field. I have described the process in my
political autobiography: _Making of a Radical_ (1971).

I hope that this study will provide a useful li