Henry Adams: The Political Wisdom of His Biography, History, and Freedom

Abstract

This review essay considers two recent publications: David S. Brown’s The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams, and Ormond Seavey’s Henry Adams in Washington: Linking the Personal and Public Lives of America’s Man of Letters. Henry Adams was the descendant of two American presidents (John Adams and John Quincy Adams) and raised in the revolutionary atmosphere that continued to linger in New England at the time of Adams’s birth in 1838. Yet, by the time of his death in 1918, the republic that his great-grandfather helped to found had been transformed into a large, industrial democracy poised to become one of the twentieth century’s superpowers. Brown, a historian, and Seavey, a literary critic, offer insight into the remarkable life and works of a very private man from one of America’s most public families.