SOURCE: "Brooks Adams: Human Nature in the Decay of Civilization," in The Image of Man in America, Southern Methodist University Press, 1957, pp. 239-48.

[In the following excerpt, Wolfe critiques Adams's approach to historical theory.]

"Perhaps Caesar's army was the best an ancient general ever put in the field, and yet it was filled with barbarians. All his legions were raised north of the Po, and most of them, including the tenth, north of the Alps."

—Adams

The historian, like the novelist and the economist, scatters through his pages colors and forms of his portrait of the nature of man, a portrait often painted in the image of himself. The more complex and many-sided the historian, the more contradictory his image of human nature. In his History, Henry Adams pictured man more as an energyusing and energy-producing organism than as one fixed and limited by heredity. When Charles Beard defined history as "the interplay of ideas and interests in the time-stream," he suggested the power of the human mind to absorb and act upon ideas even when they are in conflict with economic self-interest. At the end of Beard's life, his image of man was more complex than in his earliest books, when economic self-interest was to him always dominant over the dreams and visions of youth. In a search for the realities of human nature, none of us is without his myths; for myths and poetry must precede any science, and as yet we have only glimmerings of a science of man.

Like his brother Henry, Brooks Adams grew up with many high hopes for the race of man in a democratic society. But in 1880, at the age of thirty-two, Brooks suffered a nervous breakdown "which only good fortune prevented from turning out tragically for me." From this time forth, Brooks Adams believed man to be

a pure automaton, who is moved along the paths of least resistance by forces over which he has no control . . . I reverted to the pure Calvinistic philosophy. As I perceived that the strongest of human passions are fear and greed, I inferred that so much and no more might be expected . . . from any automaton so actuated.¹

By the word "forces" in the statement above, Adams means environmental forces in the main. But when he speaks of fear and greed, he considers them to be the products of heredity. Hence, though Adams is deterministic, his image of man is confused and contradictory. To him the social principle of competition arises from the inborn passions of "greed, avarice, and cruelty"; these passions do not emerge from the necessities of competition. Indeed, from the time of his nervous breakdown onward, Adams thought of every civilization as embodying two principles in conflict: "the law, or the moral principle, and the flesh, or the evil principle," the latter exemplified in the practices of competition. As he grew older, Adams leaned more and more heavily upon Rom. 7:14-24 as the central explanation of human nature. Like St. Paul he would say, "I delight in the law of God after the inward man: But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind." The union of mind and flesh is necessary to life, yet perpetually a chaos. As no equilibrium can ever emerge between mind and flesh in the nature of man, so no harmony can fix itself permanently in a social organism. In a democracy, moreover, the greed and avarice of human nature are released at an accelerated pace in the ceaselessly grinding mills of heightened competition.²

This view of man is pervasive and persistent in Adams' works, though not always dominant. However diligently Adams aspired to view the world through the eyes of science, he succeeded least when he was formulating his image of the nature of man. Had he kept his image of man in focus, Brooks Adams could not have written his classics of social analysis. In the midst of his evidence his theory of human nature collapses and disappears. But when he writes his prefaces, his theory of man magically comes whole again. In one of his earliest works, The Emancipation of Massachusetts (1886), he makes no mention of St. Paul; but many years later (1919), in a revised edition, he makes St. Paul the center of his theory, with no changes in the work itself. In Degradation, which also appeared in 1919, he again quotes St. Paul to the Romans on man's inner chaos. In The New Empire (1903) and The Theory of Social Revolutions (1913), Adams view of human nature appears only obliquely. But the essentials of his portrait had already appeared with startling fulness in his preface to The Law of Civilization and Decay (1895), which Adams wrote "to show how strong hereditary personal characteristics are." This work we must examine closely for the strokes and shadings it added to his portrait of the nature of man.

II

Whereas Henry Adams sought to make history conform to a mathematical formula, Brooks searched for the constants of social change from the appearance of a strong agricultural economy to its disintegration. In his classic, The Law of Civilization and Decay, he describes a cycle of events which he believes to be inevitable. The original strength of every country, according to Adams, lies with its farming population. It was only by means of the farming population that Rome could recruit soldiers to expand its empire. As long as the population of free farmers was prosperous and sufficient, Rome could fill its legions with first-rate soldiers. Then, as the wealth of Rome increased, her rich men bought huge tracts of land on which they planted slaves taken in the wars. The free farmers, unable to compete with slave labor, were forced to mortgage their farms at exorbitant interest and finally lost their property to the usurers and bankers of the city. Then, as the free farmers forsook the land, Rome's strength declined, and the legions which were victorious, like those of Julius Caesar, were recruited from the barbarians of the empire's frontiers.

With the destruction of the free farmer, Rome's military power declined and her art decayed. Riches, not victory, usury, not oratory, became the central quest of Rome's young men. With the decline of the farming population, the family also disintegrated. As the free farmer was the bulwark of the army, so was he also the main support of the family as a stabilizing institution. To Brooks Adams a free farming population, a martial spirit, a religious fervor, an instinct for art, and family solidarity are the main props of a strong society. When these elements disappear, the civilization inevitably decays. This cycle of strength and decay Brooks Adams traces in Rome, England, and India, drawing conclusions also from the France of the nineteenth century and the America of the twentieth.

In praising The Law of Civilization and Decay, Henry Adams wrote, "It is the first time that serious history has ever been written. He has done for it what only the greatest men do; he has created a startling generalisation which reduces all history to a scientific formula." A cycle of events, however often repeated, cannot, however, be called a scientific formula. One may ask, for example, in Brooks Adams' law, why was it that Rome allowed its free farmers to be destroyed by its rich men? Was it inevitable that Rome should make no laws for the protection of its free farmers? In fact, Adams himself describes a period of revolt against the moneyed oligarchy in which the dictator Camillus was forced to agree to the passage of the Licinian Laws, which provided for a redistribution of the public land to the debtor class—land which had been seized in war and appropriated by the patricians. In Adams' words,

Licinius obtained a statute by which back payments of interest should be applied to extinguishing the principal of debts, and balances then remaining due should be liquidated in three annual installments. He also limited the quantity of the public domain which could be held by any individual, and directed that the residue which remained after the reduction of all estates to that standard should be distributed in five-acre lots.³

The impact of the Licinian Laws was, according to Brooks Adams, so revolutionary as to justify describing it as "the conquest of Italy." It was only after the passage of the Licinian Laws that Rome gained sufficient strength to conquer Carthage and Macedon.

Just how this revolutionary era in which the free farmer and the debtor class were favored by new laws is a part of the predictable law of civilization and decay Brooks Adams fails to explain. A cycle of history may be repeated a number of times without justifying an appraisal of its events as a law. One might as well say that wherever land is denuded of trees or washed by water, erosion takes place. It is true that an effect follows from a given cause, but it is not true that the cause is inevitably repeated. Indeed Brooks Adams' own illustration of the Licinian Laws shows that the reversal of the so-called law of civilization and decay was precisely the action which permitted Rome's greatest expansion. Hence for Henry Adams to call the tracing of such a cycle of events a science of history is like calling war an inevitable extension of belligerent human nature. Henry, indeed, afterward recognized the fallacy of his own high praise when he wrote to Brooks: "You with your lawyer's method, only state sequence of fact, and explain no causes?"

III

In The Law of Civilization and Decay, one of Brooks Adams' crucial generalizations about the nature of man runs as follows:

Like other personal characteristics, the peculiarities of the mind are apparently strongly hereditary, and, if these instincts be transmitted from generation to generation, it is plain that, as the external world changes, those who receive this heritage must rise or fall in the social scale, according as their nervous system is well or ill adapted to the conditions to which they are born.⁴

What Adams means by the term "peculiarities of mind" he does not elaborate, but throughout his masterpiece one may find such terms as "the imaginative type," "essentially martial race," "imaginative blood," and "Latin mind." If these are the peculiarities of mind to which Adams refers, most psychologists and all anthropologists today would call his assumption an utter myth, though it is true that we do not yet possess either quantitative or qualitative proof that such a thing as "the Latin mind" does not exist.

Another generalization upon which Adams bases his conclusions is this:

Thought is one of the manifestations of human energy, and among the earlier and simpler phases of thought, two stand conspicuous—Fear and Greed. Fear, which, by stimulating the imagination, creates a belief in an invisible world, and ultimately develops a priesthood; and Greed, which dissipates energy in war and trade.⁵

Though Adams does not claim in this passage that fear and greed are inherited traits, we know from later statements that he accepted them as such. From fear comes imagination, which in turn produces mental casts that are not only religious, but military and artistic. As long as fear dominates society, the family, the army, and the church are strong. But when greed dominates, and commerce thrives, a new type of man appears whose main interests are economic and scientific; then art and religion decay, and the family declines.

According to Adams, when a nation has disintegrated through the concentration of capital in a few hands, through the growth of the population unfitted for war or art, and through depletion of its farming manhood, the only possible remedy is an invasion which supplies "fresh energetic material by the infusion of barbarian blood." This crucial statement shows that Adams regarded involuntary eugenics, not a redistribution of wealth and opportunity, as the only hope for the strengthening of race. The cycle Adams describes he was certain is irreversible by the growth of social intelligence or an economic revolution such as that set in motion by the Licinian Laws. A population in which families grow smaller and smaller and manhood less martial cannot, in Adams' opinion, rejuvenate itself. If Adams had read Henry George's explanation of the decline of civilizations as proportionate to the progressive denial of equality, he gives no evidence in The Law. To Adams society was an organism, with a birth, growth, and decline; to George society had no fixed life cycle; it was a grouping of social forces in which the amenities and creativity of civilization would inevitably expand with the extension of economic opportunity to larger and larger numbers. Adams, however, always returns to his central thesis that barbarian blood rejuvenates a people.

Since Adams regarded England and America as far advanced economic societies, he expected a breakdown in Western civilization by 1985. The dark races, he asserted, were gaining on us. England was a bankers' civilization in which, to Adams, the London Jew was a symbol of the dominance of the economic mind. In 1896 he wrote, "England is as much governed by the Jews of Berlin, Paris, and New York as she is by her native growth. It is in the nature of a vast syndicate, and by control of London, they control the world." It was in vain that Theodore Roosevelt reminded Adams that America and England were still producing a vast number of first-rate fighting men despite the centralization of wealth and the concentration of American civilization in larger and larger cities.

IV

In his analysis of the dispersion of human energy, Brooks Adams, like Henry, begins with the assumption that all energy is derived from the sun and that human life is one form of animal life by which solar energy is released. From this statement one might assume that Brooks believed those societies most exposed to the sun or eating foods grown by its warmth would have the greatest energy. On the contrary, however, Adams' thesis is that societies have differing reservoirs of energy "in proportion as nature has endowed them, more or less abundantly, with energetic material." What energetic material consists of Adams does not explain; but it is apparent that to him human energies derive from genetic determinants rather than from proper foods or a hardy outdoor life.

In neither Adams' day nor our own do we have any scientific data on the transmission of energy by genetic means, except for sexual energy, the quantitative potential of which, on the basis of the Kinsey analysis, appears to be hereditary. But a great mass of evidence exists to show that human energies depend primarily upon work habits and the quality and quantity of food to which one is accustomed. In one brilliant study alone, Josué de Castro's The Geography of Hunger, we have ample proof that the energies of two-thirds of the world's people are depleted daily for lack of food. To what extent psychological forces deplete or replenish human energies no one yet knows, though William James has explored the topic with brilliant insight in "The Energies of Men." Brooks Adams does not touch this thorny problem; he is content with the inheritance of "energetic material" and the assumption that an exhausted and decaying society can be rejuvenated only through the "infusion of barbarian blood."

Brooks Adams' picture of human nature is filled, then, with grotesque inaccuracies unchallenged in the main by his contemporaries and undiluted by decades of ruthless self-inspection. To correct his image of man in a less mythical direction, Brooks needed the medical training of Oliver Wendell Holmes or William James or the earthy realism of John Dewey. Even the crude Abraham Lincoln, with no access to the wealth of Boston's learning, produced a more consistent and realistic picture of man than did Brooks Adams. If Lincoln was a determinist, he recognized, as Brooks did not, causes and effects as distinguished from patterns; whereas Lincoln was rationalistic in his determinism, Brooks put his faith in the inner chaos of flesh and spirit. To Lincoln's mind, the energies of men expanded with the conviction that their hopes had a realistic basis in the conditions of society; that too was determinism. But to Brooks Adams the expansion of democracy could only mean the expansion of greed and fear and the victories of the flesh, whatever the small triumphs of benevolence along the way.

Even Henry Adams held a more dispassionate view of the nature of man than his brother Brooks. In the writing of history, Henry achieved a detachment from himself that was not possible for Brooks; as Ed Howe said, Henry could "sit on the fence and watch himself go by." Whereas, in his study of the Licinian Laws, Brooks shows no realization whatever that Rome's success thereafter was due to the expansion of opportunity for the small farmer, and the corresponding release of energies hitherto imprisoned by despair, Henry Adams shows an acute awareness of the torrents of American energy, "like the blast of a furnace," when men understood that economic and political betterment waited only upon their labor. In a sense his history of America represented to Henry Adams and his readers the plasticity and variability of the nature of man; whereas to Brooks The Law of Civilization and Decay embodied his belief that greed and fear are so fixed in human nature as to prevail ultimately over all hostile forces. But whereas Henry's picture of man in his masterpiece represents a kind of dispassionate agnosticism about man's nature, Brooks's Law is a doleful repetition of the failure of man to achieve emancipation from his innate greed and fear.

Fortunately, however, the most significant aspects of The Law do not derive from the crude anthropology of its author. Nothing that Henry Adams wrote is a more brilliant synthesis of social forces than The Law; indeed, Brooks's masterpiece abounds with facts, insights, and parallels unique in their coherence and force among American historians. Brooks's analysis of the concentration of wealth and power as concurrent with the decline of the farming population is always informed and pithy: "For many years farming land has fallen throughout the West, as it fell in Italy in the time of Pliny. Everywhere, as under Trajan, the peasantry are distressed; everywhere they migrate to the cities, as they did when Rome repudiated the denarius." No American historian has used statistics with more dramatic timeliness: "In 1789 the average French family consisted of 4.2 children. In 1891 it had fallen to 2.1, and since 1890, the deaths seem to have equalled the births." On some problems, it is true, Brooks has a blindness hardly comprehensible: art to him is an expression of the imaginative and martial age, not the commercial. Hence he is forced to omit the glories of Florence in the time of Michelangelo and the art of Amsterdam in the time of Rembrandt. But no historian can see the world whole, and Brooks was catholic and brilliant in his use of diverse original sources. To write his classic, Brooks was forced to detach himself from the limitations of his training as an Adams, a lawyer, a member of the privileged rich. From his image of man however, Brooks could not escape; indeed, he never doubted the accuracy of his portrait.

NOTES

¹ Henry Adams, The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (New York, 1919), pp. vii-viii. See Arthur F. Beringause, Brooks Adams, A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955), p. 373.

²The Emancipation of Massachusetts (New York, 1919), p. 5; Degradation (1919), pp. 85, 105.

³The Law of Civilization and Decay (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), pp. 16-17.

⁴Ibid., pp. 4-5.

⁵Ibid., p. 6.