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The Limits of Social Science: Henry Adams' Quest for Order*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Henry S. Kariel
Henry S. Kariel
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

Contemporary social scientists generally regard Henry Adams as a brilliant but erratic figure in the history of American thought. Their image of him is that of a gifted but unreliable and unscientific writer. Yet it is striking how, upon a re-examination of his approach to his world, there emerges a cluster of attitudes and preoccupations which clearly anticipate much of what is significant in the work of these social scientists themselves. The reason why Adams is not, however, regarded as a forerunner of present-day students of society is that he never kept himself from pushing his theories to conclusions. If those who share his scientific ideals must ultimately reach his conclusions, the limits of their science might be exposed by a reconsideration of his personal battle, of his peculiar pains, trials, and failures.

Anticipating familiar tendencies, Adams made a case for irrationalism insofar as he pleaded for the conversion of theory into action; for conservatism insofar as he supported the reduction of discords by a manipulative science of means; and for elitism insofar as he permitted the practitioners of empirical science to settle the social conflicts left open to debate by the traditional methods of politics and philosophy.

Type
Studies in American Political Thought
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 50 , Issue 4 , December 1956 , pp. 1074 - 1092
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1956

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Footnotes

*

The writer wishes to thank his own students as well as the Foundation for American Studies for having given him ample opportunity to have this study debated and criticized.

References

1 Adams, Henry, The Education of Henry Adams (Boston, 1918, hereafter cited as Education), pp. 156, 279 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 104; see also Ford, Worthington Chauncey, ed., Letters of Henry Adams: 1858–1891 (Boston, 1930, hereafter cited as Letters I), p. 83 Google Scholar; Education, p. 281; Cater, Harold Dean, Henry Adams and His Friends: A Collection of His Unpublished Letters (Boston, 1947, hereafter cited as Cater), pp. 53, 67 Google Scholar; Education, pp. 338, 346, 403, 317, 94–5, 92–3, 287–9; Ford, Worthington Chauncey, ed., Letters of Henry Adams: 1892–1918 (Boston, 1930, hereafter cited as Letters II), p. 476 Google Scholar; Letters I, p. 148 Google Scholar and II, pp. 580, 622; respectively. These expressions are but a sampling of Adams' bewilderment; nor do they fully suggest the resulting ennui.

2 Education, p. 243.

3 Adams had it both ways: he observed that society had “barred” the political courses he wanted to sail (ibid., p. 263); yet he wrote as early as 1864, “I have now studies immediately on hand, that will certainly require a hundred years of incessant activity to complete, so that it is high time to begin. I look forward not without pleasure to a return to my college life at an advanced age.” (Cater, p. 26; see also Cater, p. 312, and Letters I, pp. 154, 160, 162, 258 Google Scholar).

3a Education, p. 330.

4 Ibid., pp. 224 (see also 472), 300–1, 457, 314. The leading figure of Adams' novel Democracy “wanted to see with her own eyes the action of primary forces; to touch with her own hand the massive machinery of society; to measure with her own mind the capacity of the motive power.” “What she wished to see, she thought, was the clash of interests … the tremendous forces of government, and the machinery of society, at work. What she wanted was POWER.” Democracy (New York, 1880), pp. 10, 11–12 Google Scholar.

5 As Leo Strauss has shown in Natural Right and History (Chicago, 1953), p. 172 Google Scholar et seq., this was precisely the requirement Hobbes had to labor under in order to gain knowledge.

6 Letters I, p. 206 Google Scholar.

7 Education, p. 382.

8 See Jordy, William H., Henry Adams: Scientific Historian (New Haven, 1952), pp. 13, 56 Google Scholar; for Adams' relation to Comte, see pp. 92–3, 113–20, 254–5. While Jordy's is easily the best intellectual biography of Adams, a full-scale study illuminating both his personality and bis complex relation to Western social thought remains to be written.

9 Education, pp. 382, 431.

10 Jordy, op. cit., pp. 150–1, 163–219; Nichols, Roy F., “The Dynamic Interpretation of History,” New England Quarterly, Vol. 8, pp. 163–78 (June 1935)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Hume, Robert A., “Henry Adams's Quest for Certainty,” in Craig, Hardin, ed., Stanford Studies in Language and Literature (Stanford, 1941), pp. 361–73Google Scholar.

11 “The department of history needs to concert with the departments of biology, sociology, and psychology some common formula or figure to serve their students as a working model for their study of the vital energies; and this figure must be brought into accord with the figures or formulas used by the department of physics and mechanics to serve their students as models for the working of physico-chemical and mechanical energies.” Adams, Henry, “A Letter to American Teachers of History,” in The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (New York, 1920, hereafter cited as “Letter”), pp. 137–263 Google Scholar, at pp. 261–2. For a modern manifestion, see Miller, David L., “The Unity of Science Movement,” Southwestern Social Science Quarterly, Vol. 26, pp. 252–9 (December 1945)Google Scholar; and Neurath, Otto, Carnap, Rudolf, and Morris, Charles, eds., International Encylcopedia of Unified Science (Chicago, 1955)Google Scholar.

12 Cater, p. 328, n. 2.

13 Adams, Henry, “The Tendency of History,” in The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma, pp. 125–33Google Scholar (hereafter cited as “Tendency”), at pp. 126, 127, 128 (see also Letters II, p. 49 Google Scholar); Cater, pp. 558–9.

14 Adams, Henry, “The Rule of Phase Applied to History,” in The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma, pp. 267–311 Google Scholar (hereafter cited as “Rule”), at p. 310.

15 Force Adams defined as “anything that does, or helps to do work.” Scientific hypotheses as well as reason itself were seen as but dependent, contingent forces. Education, pp. 388, 474; “Letter,” p. 208.

16 “Between the dynamo in the gallery of machines and the engine-house outside, the break of continuity amounted to abysmal fracture for a historian's objects. No more relation could he discover between the steam and the electric current than between the Cross and cathedral.” Education, p. 381.

17 See “Rule,” p. 308, also see Cater, p. 529 where Adams looks roughly 100 years ahead, or Letters, II, p. 83 Google Scholar, where he speaks of 200 years. Later, a triangulation of the development of the ocean steamer brings him to 1927; he allusively maintains, however, that an expert study of the progression of explosives would provide the best data. Education, pp. 341–2; see also Cater, p. 533; Letters II, p. 616 Google Scholar.

18 Education, pp. 408, 421–2, 494; Cater, p. 529. See also his letters in Ford, Worthington Chauncey, ed., A Cycle of Adams Letters: 1861–1865, 2 vols. (Boston, 1920, hereafter cited as Cycle), Vol. I, p. 135 Google Scholar, and Cater, p. 504.

19 He seems to have known as much. In 1891 he wrote to Elizabeth Cameron, “Unfortunately I am cursed with the misfortune of thinking that I know beforehand what the result must be ….” ( Letters, I, p. 458 Google Scholar). And in 1910 he ironically wrote hie brother Charles that he had provided “the logical and mathematical demonstration that the human race is going to end when I do ….” ( Letters II, p. 551.Google Scholar)

20 Education, pp. 302, 382, 451, 472, Letters II, p. 119 Google Scholar (see also Education, pp. 303, 306, 353).

21 Education, p. 282; “Rule,” p. 310.

22 Ibid., pp. 227–8, 434.

23 Ibid., pp. 231–2. He concludes, not surprisingly, that “he was a Darwinian for fun.” See also Cater, p. 648.

24 Education, pp. 328, 433.

25 Cater, pp. xlvi, 36, 328, 519, 596, 647, 770; Letters II, pp. 8, 10–11, 70 Google Scholar. To the editor's preface of the Education, actually written by Adams, he obtained permission to attach Henry Cabot Lodge's name. (Cater, pp. xc, 523.)

26 Cater, p. 520; Letters II, p. 524 Google Scholar.

27 Education, pp. 12–13. For a possibly contrasting view of “men who sprang from the soil to power,” see p. 265.

28 Yale Review, Vol. 5, pp. 82–9 (October 1915)Google Scholar.

29 Cater, p. 434; Education, pp. viii, 306, 310, 367-9 and 501; Adams, Henry, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (New York, 1904)Google Scholar, ch. 15; Letters II, p. 119 Google Scholar; “Tendency,” p. 133. The counsel of silence pervades Adams' writings: see also Letters I, p. 301 Google Scholar; Letters II, pp. 70, 122–3, 317, 445, 468, 552 Google Scholar; Cater, pp. 235–358, 475, 496, 519, 521, 524; Education, p. 358.

30 Letters I, p. 526 Google Scholar. His relation to Catholicism may be similarly characterized; see Jordy, op. cit., p. 286, n. 90.

30a See Education, pp. 305, 462.

31 Ibid., p. 369; emphasis supplied.

32 Lubbock, Percy, ed., The Letters of Henry James, Vol. II, pp. 360–1 (New York, 1920)Google Scholar.

33 Even where he might be tempted to rationalize his failure, he admits his desire for power (Education, pp. 263, 358–9). In 1862, he wrote to Charles Adams, “But what we want is a school. We want a national set of young men like ourselves or better, to start new influences not only in politics, but in literature, in law, in society, and throughout the whole social organism of the country—a national school of our own generation.” Cycle I, p. 196 Google Scholar. The Education and the “Letter,” too, were intended “to serve a social purpose,” Cater, p. 781; Letters II, p. 524 Google Scholar; see also Jordy, op. cit., pp. 250–5.

34 How hard Adams tried may be seen in his review of Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology where, as he confessed later, “he resorted to what he thought the bold experiment of inserting a sentence in the text, intended to provoke correction.” (Education, p. 227.)

35 Cater, p. 621; see also pp. 330, 644–5, and his letter to Henry Holt, p. 455. To Henry James, Adams wrote in 1903, “We knew nothing—no! but really nothing! of the world. One cannot exaggerate the profundity of ignorance of Story in becoming a sculptor, or Sumner in becoming a statesman, or Emerson in becoming a philospher. Story and Sumner, Emerson and Alcott, Lowell and Longfellow, Hillard, Winthrop, Motley, Prescott, and all the rest, were the same mind,—and so, poor worm!— was I! … Improvised Europeans, we were, and—Lord God!— how thin!” ( Letters, II, p. 414.Google Scholar)

36 This is not to deny his doctrinaire economic notions or his ingenuous anti-Semitism.

37 Letters II, p. 515 Google Scholar, n. 1; Education, p. 352 (see Cater, p. 682); Letters II, pp. 524, 531 Google Scholar; Education, pp. 410, 451.

38 Thus Adams thought Raymond Poincaré's “artistic measure” was precisely his “light touch.” Education, p. 455. “‘Discuss serious things lightly and light things seriously,’ was one of his rules of good conduct ….” Cater, p. lxvii. See also his letter to Lodge, George Cabot, Cater, pp. 540–3Google Scholar.

39 Education, pp. 369–70.

40 The Uses of the Past (New York, 1952), p. 24 Google Scholar. Muller is discussing not the task of the artist but the tragic view of history.

41 One of the characters in Democracy, cast as a successful Massachusetts historian but an ineffectual diplomat, is made to say, “Let us be true to our time … ! If our age is to be beaten, let us die in the ranks. If it is to be victorious let us be the first to lead the column. Anyway, let us not be skulkers or grumblers.” Since the speaker is a pessimist and cynic, this view is made all the more arresting. See also Cater, p. 449.

42 Education, p. 232. In 1862 he had already written tha t a mind to which “evil never seems unmixed with good” and to which “good is always streaked with evil … a mind which is not strongly positive and absolute, cannot be steadily successful in action ….” Cycle I, p. 195 Google Scholar.

43 Cater, p. 458; see also Letters II, p. 100 Google Scholar.

44 Adams was to recall that he had “sat down as though he were again a boy at school to shape after his own needs the values of a Dynamic Theory of History.” In order “to become effective” he had “to invent a formula of his own for his own universe ….” (Education, pp. 472–3; emphasis supplied.)

45 Barber, Bernard, Science and the Social Order (Glencoe, Ill., 1952), p. 244 Google Scholar. The following treatises might be mentioned: Dodd, Stuart C., Dimensions of Society: A Quantitative Systematics for the Social Sciences (1942)Google Scholar; Simon, Herbert A., Adminstrative Behavior (1948)Google Scholar; Homans, George C., The Human Group (1950)Google Scholar; Lasswell, Harold D. and Kaplan, Abraham, Power and Society: A Framework for Political Inquiry (1950)Google Scholar; Rashevsky, Nicolas, Mathematical Biology of Social Behavior (1951)Google Scholar; Parsons, Talcott, The Social System (1951)Google Scholar; Levy, Marion J. Jr., The Structure of Society (1952)Google Scholar; Grinker, Roy R., ed., Toward a Unified Theory of Human Behavior (1956)Google Scholar; see also Behavioral Science, a journal which began publication in 1956.

46 As Adams discerned, “Ignorance required that these political and social and scientific values of the twelfth and twentieth centuries should be correlated in some relations of movement that could be expressed in mathematics …” (Education, p. 376). He frequently regretted his ignorance of mathematics; see, for example, Letters II, p. 519 Google Scholar.

47 See Education, pp. 458, 488.

48 Ibid., p. 458.

49 See Adams' letter to Taylor, cited in n. 13, above.

50 “Tendency,” pp. 128–9.

51 Waldo G. Leland, quoted in Cater, p. xcv. See also Letters II, p. 537 Google Scholar.

52 Education, p. x.

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