From Hammerfest to Cherbourg on one shore of the ocean—from Halifax to Norfolk on the other—one great empire was ruled by one great emperor—Coal. Political and human jealousies might tear it apart or divide it, but the power and the empire were one.
At its most insightful, Adams’ education is one that sees with much greater clarity a future still fuzzy to others. For instance, Adams is one of the few writers of his time to peer into a future world as yet unknown: the world of capitalism. And here he asserts that a truth come true: it is not politicians that will rule nations, but access to and control of natural resources.
Henry Adams was Darwinist because it was easier than not, for his ignorance exceeded belief, and one must know something in order to contradict even such triflers as Tyndall and Huxley.
Another aspect of great interest is to see how those who came of age during the period when tidal waves of new thoughts and theories were just coming to fore. Adams lived in the world before Charles Darwin as well as the world after Darwin and what is taken for granted by the overwhelming majority of the world (if not necessarily Americans) as the most likely theory was truly radical at the time. Of course, believing in radical theories doesn’t require understanding them.
By rights, he should have been also a Marxist but some narrow trait of the New England nature seemed to blight socialism, and he tried in vain to make himself a convert. He did the next best thing; he became a Comteist.
Adams also was around to witness the rise of socialism and the thunderous arrival of Karl Marx into the world of world of economics. Unlike with Darwin, Adams could not so fully embrace Marx’s theories, but it is notable that he does not reject it on the same basis with which he embraces Darwinism. He may not fully accept Marx, but neither does he kick it to the curb because capitalism is so obviously preferable.
…the story will show his reasons for thinking that, in essentials like religion, ethics, philosophy; in history, literature, art; in the concepts of all science, except perhaps mathematics, the American boy of 1854 stood nearer the year 1 than to the year 1900. The education he had received bore little relation to the education he needed. Speaking as an American of 1900, he had as yet no education at all. He knew not even where or how to begin.
Looking back from the perspective of the new century, Adams concludes that on the brink of his entering Harvard, he may as well as have lived at any point in the history of Christendom. Such was the extent to which the world changed over the course of the next half-century. And that is really the subject of The Education of Henry Adams; the memoir of an old man who as a young man would see the rise of the railroad, the telegraph, the Industrial Revolution, Darwinian evolution, Marxist socialism, gas lighting and electricity.
When looked back upon from the perspective of the 21st century the 19th century seems as hopelessly archaic and outdated as any century which preceded it, but through the eyes of Henry Adams the reader is enlightened. That half-century changed the world in ways that will force the second quarter-century of the 21st century to get its act together if it really hopes to compete. Most of the changes taking place today are just variations upon existing themes, but the world Adams is describing by the end looks like nothing at all like the one at the beginning.
