I love all literature, especially American literature. There’s a crackpot quality about some American thinkers that I just haven’t found anywhere else.
Take, for example, Henry Adams’s address to the American Historical Association in 1894.
Adams, famous for The Education of Henry Adams, was a public intellectual. People who taught at universities wanted to know what he was thinking. In the 1890s, there was some handwringing about whether history could become a science.
Everyone was talking about Darwin and what the different academic disciplines could learn from his thought.
The possibilities for history seemed open and immediate. If science could discover the laws that rule nature, it must discover the laws that rule human beings.
The great thing about science is that it is predictive. What, Adams asked, would we do if we thought history was a science and could predict the behavior of humanity?
What would do if we thought, based on the laws of human behavior, that the scientific age would prevail and exterminate religion? What if we thought that the scientific impulse would decline and be submerged in another age of faith?
What if we thought that the power of labor, which was on the rise at the time, would ebb and workers would be treated like worker bees? What if we thought that the labor would prevail and that the notions of capital and property should be suppressed?
A science cannot be played with. If an hypothesis is advanced that obviously brings into a direct sequence of cause and effect all the phenomena of human history, we must accept it, and if we accept it, we must teach it. The mere fact that it overthrows social organizations cannot affect our attitude.
Genius, I think, with a streak of that crackpot quality.
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