The Education of Henry Adams

Adams — great-grandson of John Adams, grandson of John Quincy — writes his own life in the third person as the record of an education that failed: an eighteenth-century training in classics, law and moral certainty issued to a man who had to live in the world of the dynamo, the railroad and industrial finance. The late chapters, “The Dynamo and the Virgin” and “A Dynamic Theory of History”, abandon memoir for an attempt to measure history by the acceleration of available force, with the Virgin and the dynamo as rival symbols of what a civilization organizes itself around. Privately printed in 1907 and published in 1918, the year after Adams’s death; it won the 1919 Pulitzer.

Why it’s on the list: It closes out the curriculum’s American Experiment section alongside Macaes’s History Has Begun — the founders’ republic seen from the far end, by a descendant of two presidents who could not find a place in it.

Where I saw it: Brendan McCord’s Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List, in the section on The American Experiment. The full 211-entry transcription is on The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List.

Connections

• Henry Adams — the author and subject.
• Innovation — the accelerating force the book tries to measure.
• The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List — the curriculum this came from.