If Henry Adams can be said to have expressed a coherent political idea, it was that all things decay. He was a connoisseur of decline, whether chronicling the ebb of Western culture, the erosion of political morality or the failure of democratic institutions.
The almost simultaneous publication of David McCullough’s John Adams, a wonderfully readable life of Henry’s great, great grandfather, the second President of the United States, and James P. Young’s Henry Adams: Historian as Political Theorist, a somewhat-less-readable attempt at an intellectual summary of Henry Adams’ career, provides us with irrefutable evidence that Henry Adams was right – all things do decay, especially in the Adams family.
