Biography

Beringause, Arthur F. Brooks Adams: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955, 404 pp.

Defends Adams as a philosophical progenitor of Oswald Spengler, author of The Decline of Western Civilization, and credits Adams as the first historian to apply a scientific formula to the explanation of history.

Nagle, Paul C. Descent from Glory: Four Generations of the John Adams Family. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983, 400 p.

Examines the dynamics of the Adams's dynasty, and dedicates a chapter to Brooks Adams.

Criticism

Aaron, Daniel. "Theodore Roosevelt and Brooks Adams: Pseudo-Progressives." In Men of Good Hope: A Story of American Progressives, pp. 245-80. New York: Oxford University Press, 1951.

Positions Adams and Roosevelt at the forefront of the American Progressive Movement, and enumerates varying critical assessments of Adams's career. The essay also includes a useful, lengthy biographical discussion of Adams, and quotes liberally from his letters and essays.

Aiken, Conrad. A review of The Emancipation of Massachusetts, by Brooks Adams, and The Degradation of History, by Henry Adams. In his A Reviewer's ABC, pp. 115-20. New York: Meridian Books, 1958.

In his 1920 review of the revised The Emancipation of Massachusetts and Henry Adams's The Degradation of History, Aikens finds that both brothers attempted to bring order to what they believed to be the inherent chaos of the degradation of society.

Anderson, Thornton. Brooks Adams: Constructive Conservative. New York: Cornell University Press, 1951, 250 p.

Examines Adams's conservatism in light of his personality, which Anderson describes as shy among people but passionate among ideas.

Brooks, Van Wyck. "The Adamses." In New England: Indian Summer, pp. 485-502. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1950.

Discusses Adams's disgust for "an age in which pig-iron was more important than poetry," and presents a concise overview of Adams's theories in The Law of Civilization and Decay.

Childs, Marquis W. "Evaluation." In America's Economic Supremacy by Brooks Adams, pp. 1-60. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1947.

Observes that Adams presented a topical antidote to U.S. fin-de-siècle optimism, and that Adams's theories remained sound in 1947.

Clark, J. B. "America's Economic Supremacy." Political Science Quarterly, Vol. XVI, No. 1 (March 1901): 142-44.

Grapples with Adams's demand for imperialist expansion to acquire China and its vast resources.

Loos, Isaac, "The Theory of Social Revolution." The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. XIX, No. 6 (May 1914): 842-44.

Questions the validity of Adams's assertions that human society operates as a living organism, and challenges the facts employed by Adams to support his theories.

Madison, Charles A. "Brooks Adams: Jeremian Critic of Capitalism." In Critics & Crusaders: A Century of American Protest, pp. 285-307. New York: Henry Holt, 1947.

Declares The Law of Civilization and Decay a "work of seminal influence," and assesses Adams as "the most original and profound member" of the Adams family. Madison also associates Adams's theories with the socialist writings of Karl Marx.

"The New Empire." The Yale Review (Feb. 1903): 421-23.

Challenges Adams's scholarship and his use of uncredited sources, finally discounting The New Empire as "hurriedly written and ill-constructed; regarded even as fiction, it is dull."

Additional coverage of Brooks's life and career is contained in the following sources published by Gale Research: Contemporary Authors, Vol. 123, and Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 47