Axis of ills

His theory was that any given civilization was, literally, a bundle of energy that waxed and waned over time. How a society managed its energy level was a function, in part, of the two basic human emotions, identified by Adams as greed and fear. Phases of greed led to increasing urbanization, commercial activity, and skepticism. This increased the overall level of energy, but only at the risk of subjecting it to a rather one-dimensional development. Gaining the world and losing the soul -- that sort of thing.

By contrast, a society with a low or decreasing energy level would be characterized by fear, since it was less able to subject the world to its control. If an age of greed culminated in domination by financiers, the natural leaders in a period of fear were religious authorities. The rise and fall of empires, for Adams, was a protracted struggle between the forces of greed and fear -- with shifts of energy level being moments of crisis, when one or the other takes over.

While his ideas still hold a certain fascination for specialists in the history of American thought, it is safe to say that very few people nowadays could be described as followers of Adams. One important exception to that rule is Kevin Phillips, who first came to prominence as the architect of Richard Nixon's ''Southern strategy" for realigning support for the Republican Party.

Phillips's new book, ''American Theocracy," will naturally be taken as the latest in a series of criticisms of the course of the GOP over the past 20 years. But it is also as pure an application of Adams's theories as anything published in the past several decades.

It is not just a matter of some vague resemblance -- as there is between, say, Adams's ideas and Oswald Spengler's ''Decline of the West." Rather, you actually need to keep the old Brahmin's outlook in mind while reading ''American Theocracy," or else it will look like a set of miscellaneous reading notes and anti-Bush editorials cobbled together into a stimulating but chaotic book with a somewhat misleading title.