But Adams also has a creepy side; in his old age he was depressed, cynical, and virulently anti-Semitic. He thought that members of his class should run the country. In his Education he dismisses the Populists (“nothing could surpass the nonsensity of trying to run so complex a machine [as American capitalism] by Southern and Western farmers in grotesque alliance with city day-laborers … ” [The Education of Henry Adams 1973 (1918), p. 344]) and finds Reconstruction and the suffragists beneath contempt. In certain moods, you can despise Adams as an upperclass WASP, whining that the United States has deteriorated to the point that, unlike his grandfather and great-grandfather, he is not the president, while immigrant Jews have gained power, and women are becoming masculine.

Adams is fascinating and perhaps profound on a number of topics, including the experience of failure in a country that worships success. Adams did not believe that history was progressive, and he thought that those who interpreted Darwin as offering proof for CJ801-BR[157–246] 3/3/03 5:03 PM Page 177 progress were wrong. In his writings, he described the transformation of the United States from a collection of colonies devoted to God and/or money, divided by the evil of slavery, to a great industrial, technological, and capitalist power. Adams saw the need to master technology and capitalism with intelligence, morality, and representative government; he believed that the Constitution no longer provided a viable structure for that mastery. Partly in order to understand and control the emerging forces, Adams was interested in education in the broadest sense (Adams claimed that his first lesson came as an infant when he saw the color yellow; until then, he had only known the black and white of Puritan morality). Intriguingly, Adams also criticized the United States for being too manly and for giving an insufficient public (not political) place to women and sex. Adams offers theorists a lot to consider.

It is easier to summarize Adams's themes than his theses, in part because he was contradictory, but mostly because he so constantly used irony. Socrates was earnest and straightforward by comparison. It is difficult to discern what Adams believes and is therefore problematic to define his theoretical contribution.

James Young knows this and devotes his beautifully written book to articulating that contribution by explicating and commenting upon Adams's nine-volume history of the United States, many essays, two novels, and two final great books, Mont St. Michel and Chartres and The Education. Young gives prominence to The History which along with Mont St. Michel he considers “Adams's most perfectly realized works,” and does not take up The Education until the book's second half. Some readers may not agree with this ranking and will find Young's discussion of The Education more compelling than that of The History.

Young wants to understand Adams correctly, and he has a special interest in cautioning those on the democratic Left who would dismiss Adams as reactionary, elitist, sexist, and anti-Semitic. If not claiming Adams as a leftist or even a friend of leftists, Young wants the Left to know that Adams is not as antithetical to their beliefs in community, widespread political participation, and equality as he often seems to be.

Young struggles to characterize Adams properly. Adams is alternately portrayed, with numerous qualifications, as not precisely a liberal, a civic republican, a conservative, an anarchist, an advocate of laissez-faire who was influenced by Marx and Hegel, a believer in markets but opponent of big business, a supporter of the strong state, a Puritan drawn to Aquinas and the Virgin Mary, a sexist, and a feminist. He was a radical who did not subscribe to the radical movements of his own time. He was intrigued by the Populists, but also dismissed them. He opposed Theodore Roosevelt, yet endorsed the Spanish-American War, but not the annexation of the Philippines. He criticized the highly masculine America that honored competition as the “survival of the fittest” and denigrated the gentle and feminine, but he did not support women's suffrage. Adams was a complicated fellow.

It is not Young's fault that Adams is complex and contradictory. Indeed, Young frequently reminds the reader that Adams's thought is ambivalent, elusive, nuanced, and contradictory. After struggling to label him correctly and coherently, Young says that like Walt Whitman, Adams “contains multitudes” (p. 229). Adams “engaged in constant dialogue with himself ” and never developed a consistent political theory (pp. 238, 243). I would call particular attention to Adams's complicated positions on democracy, truth, anti-Semitism, and feminism.

Young tentatively tries to claim Adams for democracy. He argues that Adams always believed in representative democracy, twice stating that he was not a “democratic misanthrope” (pp. 203, 242, 76, 114). Adams “offers us a kind of democratic idealism” (p. 30). Young argues that Adams offers some clues for a democratic revival, even if he would not believe in that revival (p. 8), but his evidence for these assertions is a bit thin. At some point in his voluminous writings, Adams complimented the conduct of the people during the War of 1812, and did not associate morality with social station (pp. 65, 114). “The Virgin's sympathy for ordinary people and the victims of injustice and her distrust of authority might well find a sympathetic hearing on the Left,” Young writes, “though I certainly do not claim that this is Adams's intended audience or that he himself should be placed on the left of the political spectrum” (p. 222). Young also calls Adams a “civic republican,” which means that he hoped for a populace devoted to the common good (pp. 45, 120). Adams would “embrace the idea of community, the stress on duty and virtue as the antithesis of corruption, but he would not be so enthusiastic about the republican theory of participatory democracy” (p. 232). His ideas in the end “were a none too consistent mixture of civic humanism, liberalism, and, in his case, a residual Puritanism” (p. 232). James Young is clearly a democrat; but I am not persuaded that Adams is even a fellow traveler. Adams's theoretical contributions lie elsewhere.

Given the difficulty in labeling Adams, perhaps it is not surprising that Young wonders if Adams can properly be considered a postmodernist. Adams continually searched for unity in the world, but found only chaos. Young concludes that Adams is an individualist who cultivates a unique self, not a postmodernist, “[b]ut there are ways in which Adams seems to at least flirt with postmodernism” (pp. 158–59). Coming before Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, Adams could not really flirt with postmodernism, but Young has opened an intriguing line of thought. Like William James, Adams does not believe in fixed truth, and he especially rejected the convictions of his Puritan ancestors. Perhaps Adams is a proto-postmodernist. Young forthrightly concedes Adams's anti-Semitism, yet repeatedly insists that it is not central to his theories (pp. 2, 114). Young explains his anti-Semitism as a form of madness (“serious derangement”; “psychic disorder”). Young suggests that Adams should not be dismissed because of his anti-Semitism, and that is true, but as Young himself points out, Adams's hatred of Jews is related to his association of them with the bankers that he despises (p. 185). Also, from the beginning of The Education Adams makes it clear that he sees Jews as outsiders in America; he cannot comprehend how an Adams has fallen as low in social status and power as “Israel Cohen” (p. 3). Thus, it is not entirely correct to say that the anti-Semitism is unrelated to other key ideas in Adams.

Young wonders whether Adams might be seen as a feminist, even if he ignored suffragists and dress reformers: “Perhaps in elevating women to an almost mystical level and in stressing motherhood, as he did, he could not see that the equality, if not the superiority, he sought for women could be furthered by granting them the suffrage” (p. 128). Young concedes that it was not quite feminist of Adams to identify women as irrational, even if Adams contrasts feminist irrationality favorably with the rationality of industrial capitalism (p. 156). Because Adams associated women with reproduction and thought that women belonged at home in the family, he cannot be seen as a great feminist (pp. 193, 230).

Despite the fact that I ultimately think Young's case for Adams as a friend, fellow traveler, and resource for democracy is weak, I think that every one should read Henry Adams, and any theorist who wants to explore commentary on Adams should start with Young. Young is fair: He tries to present Adams as an appealing figure, but straightforwardly addresses counterevidence and arguments. His book makes a substantial contribution to American political thought. I do not know of another assessment of Adams from the standpoint of political theory. Young offers a seemingly complete and up-to-date bibliography on Adams. Young is particularly helpful in figuring out the machinations of the English politicians Russell, Gladstone, and Palmer during the Civil War; Adams's discussion of them in The Education is passionate and soaked with Machiavellian insights, but quite confusing.

Ultimately, I agree with Young that democratic theorists should read Adams in order to better understand the United States and the nature of political action, to meditate on progress and failure, and to determine the type of education that is necessary to think and act in a world that seems to be spinning out of control.