Henry Adams, great-grandson of John Adams, grandson of John Quincy Adams, and author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Education of Henry Adams, is often overlooked as a serious political thinker. Many scholars have dismissed his writings as cynical and bitter while others regard him as a mere observer of American politics, accepting Adams’s description of himself as a stable-companion to statesmen.
A Political Companion to Henry Adams suggests that he was far more. In this provocative collection, editor Natalie Fuehrer Taylor presents works by some of the leading political thinkers in America today – scholars who challenge conventional judgments about the life and work of Henry Adams and credit him with revealing key insights into the nation’s evolving democracy. A Political Companion to Henry Adams fills a long-standing gap in scholarship that has devoted little attention to Adams’s political thought, offering a nuanced appreciation of his musings on the human condition and political life at the eve of the twentieth century.