Adams never referred to the book as an autobiography, it provides an account of Adams’s life from youth to the time of writing. By analyzing modernity through self-inquiry, Adams addresses a question that perhaps only Emerson and Nietzsche had come close to investigating: with the former authorities of God, history, great statesmen, and even individual agency gone, how do you construct the self? Adams frames this question as his search for “education,” presaging Hannah Arendt’s asking “What is Authority?” when “even this prepolitical authority which ruled the relations between adults and children, teachers and pupils, is no longer secure.” Carlyle, Tocqueville, and Mill had been concerned with the loss of great men: Adams is concerned with the loss of those who looked up to them. This is the first of two arguments I plan to make of The Education of Henry Adams. The second focuses specifically on Adams’s form of self-inquiry. It is significant that it was Adams’s editor to add the book’s first subtitle, “An Autobiography,” and not its author. Developing toward the end of the Enlightenment, autobiography builds individual authority through the mastery of one’s experience and its public declaration. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin doesn’t simply narrate Franklin’s rejection of paternal authority and entrepreneurial development: it also exemplifies Franklin’s turning to the self as the grounds of analysis through which to know the world. Authors before Adams like Franklin or Frederick Douglass had looked to autobiography to replace paternal authority with one invested in the individual and reading populace. But with those authorities slipping away, Adams writes the Education as a return to the confession, a genre of literature reliant upon a pre-Enlightenment conception of authority and epistemology: to write on the self, as Augustine did, is to know oneself through an external authority, rather than to confirm one’s self as authority alone. The goal of the Education recalls that of the Confessions, whose author told God “in you my ‘scattered selves are reunited’”
the great image of silent authority, a “protégé of George Washington,” was “a statesman designated by destiny, with nothing to do but look directly ahead, follow orders, and march” (40). When Senator Timothy Howe likens Adams to a begonia later in the book, Adams considers it his “ideal of the successful statesman”: “standing always in the most prominent positions” despite having “no useful purpose” (228). Adams’s heroes, educative as they are, don’t really do much in the Education. They’re transcendent, but they stand for Adams far more as living monuments to provide ideals to emulate, rather than as active, instrumental forces. According to Adams and others, these great men were disappearing. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Tocqueville and Mill had mourned the passing of great men in democratic times. Carlyle wrote Heroes in reaction to what he saw as the leveling of human life in a “machine universe.” In Sartor Resartus, Carlyle’s fictional Teufelsdröckh claimed “the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb.” According to these authors, the democracies of America and Europe brought with equality a humbling mediocrity from which few great men could emerge. In the 1835 introduction to the first volume of Democracy in America, Tocqueville lamented what he saw as the loss of “the majesty of laws”: “the people despise authority while fearing it.” Worse yet, “we have destroyed those independent beings who were capable of fighting single-handed against tyranny.” In 1859, as Adams left college, Mill echoed similar regrets in On Liberty. The order of the day in democratic times was “mediocrity.” The people no longer learn from “dignitaries in Church or State”: “No government by a democracy or a numerous aristocracy… ever did or could rise above mediocrity, except in so far as the sovereign Many have let themselves be guided (which in their best times they always have done).” Both Tocqueville and Mill, whom Adams at one
think my ‘Education’ is fit for any public. It is only proofsheets, full of errors, and I’ve not given it to any library here. The more I watch the coming public the more likely I think it that the public of fifty years hence will be something quite different from the past.” What Adams liked in Augustine, he told William James, was “the notion of writing a story with an end and object, not for the sake of the object, but for the form.” The Education’s parity with Augustine’s Confessions is clearest in the final chapters that elaborate Adams’s dynamic theory of history. Adams admitted that these were influenced by Augustine, intended to replicate the “Father,” “Son,” and “Spirit” books that conclude the Confessions. Augustine’s through God resulted in these philosophical treatises; Adams’s search results in his scientific theories of history, which he would continue in his final writings. Like with Augustine, then, Adams’s objective was that the text educate only insofar as it motivate other readers to or at the very least to draw some philosophical value from these final theories. But Adams’s most significant inheritance from Augustine is his appeal to authority to define the self. Augustine’s first goal was self-examination through a conversation with God: “do not go outward; return within yourself. In the inward man dwells truth.” According to Charles Taylor, Augustine was the first to experiment with “radical reflexivity,” to evaluate experience itself rather than simply live it. From this first-person experience, Taylor writes, Augustine proved God’s existence: “I am aware of my own sensing and thinking; and in reflecting on this, I am made aware of its dependence on something beyond it, something common.” In the Confessions, Augustine says to God that “you gather me from my own scatterings, after I have torn myself from your unity and fallen apart into multiplicity.” Adams takes from Augustine his use of “unity and multiplicity” to describe education through authority. In the preface, he wrote “that St. Augustine, like a great artist, had worked from multiplicity to unity, while he, like a