If we accept the cycle of civilization as one of the facts or sequences presented to us by history, we may continue to pass submissively through the successive stages of decline until western civilization is liquidated by the same forces that wiped out preceding civilizations.

This would be the normal course of a cycle of civilization as it appears in recorded history.

Those who take this position argue that humanity has reached a point at which it may break out of the present cycle of civilization and begin a new cycle which will correspond with the possibilities brought to mankind during the great revolution of 1750-1970.

Religiously oriented intentional communities may be found today in many of the countries composing western civilization.

What concerns us here is the split of western civilization into two broadly divergent groups: capitalism and socialism-communism.

As western civilization has developed, nations and empires have tended to form more or less permanent alliances.

The stresses and strains of the current great revolution have introduced into western civilization new disintegrative forces of which the capitalist-Marxist confrontation is the most extensive, divisive and decisive.

The Marxist world, in its spectacular rise during less than a century, offers the only workable alternative to declining and disintegrating western civilization.

All but the first volume of the History deal with the epoch during which civilization has played a fateful role in world affairs.

The same thing may be said of other histories of civilization.

There are few books which approach the study of civilization as a stage or level of human culture.

Barnes, Harry E., A Social History of the Western World, N.Y.: Appleton, 1921. , A Survey of Western Civilization, N.Y.: Crowall, 1947.

Bell, Clive, Civilization, an Essay, London: Chatto and Windus, 1928.

Clough, Shepard B., Basic Values of Western Civilization, N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 1960.

Crozier, John B., Civilization and Progress, London: Longmans, 1892.

Douglas, Sholto O.G., A Theory of Civilization, N.Y.: MacMillan, 1914.

Forrest, J.D., Development of Western Civilization, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1907.

Hankins, Frank H., The Racial Basis of Civilization, N.Y.: Knopf, 1926.

Heard, Gerald, The Source of Civilization, London: Cape, 1935.

Morris, Charles, Civilization: An Historical Review of Its Elements, Chicago: Griggs, 1890.

Mumford, Lewis, Technics and Civilization, N.Y.: Harcourt Brace, 1934.

Pendell, Elmer, The Next Civilization, Dallas: Royal, 1970.

Seignobos, Charles, The Rise of European Civilization, N.Y.: Knopf, 1938.

Walker, C.C., The Biology of Civilization, N.Y.: MacMillan, 1930.

Wells, H.G., The Salvaging of Civilization, N.Y.: MacMillan, 1922.