Decline and Fall

Asimov modeled the Foundation series on Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, transposing the fall of Rome to a galactic scale. The Galactic Empire declines the same way: overextension, bureaucratic decay, military dependence, and the slow loss of technological knowledge at the edges while the center stays oblivious. Asimov's key idea is that empires rarely fall from outside attack — they rot from internal decay, a process so gradual that people rarely notice until the libraries are already burning.