SOURCE: "The Unusable Man: An Essay on the Mind of Brooks Adams," in The New England Quarterly, Vol. XXI, No. 1, March, 1948, pp. 3-33.

In the following excerpt, Aaron surveys Adams's work and intellectual development.

I

Brooks Adams has been dead for more than twenty years now, but there are still many people in Boston and Cambridge who remember this eccentric and arrogant man, the last of the children of Charles Francis Adams to survive. His nephews and nieces recall his gruff manner and his penchant for saying shocking things at dinner parties, his love of argument, his endless jaunts to watering spas, his fondness for the Scottish lays he compelled his niece Abigail Adams to memorize. To some people, it seems, he was known as a crank, "that damned fool, Brooks," and Boston never quite accepted the man whom, during the fiery days of "96, it had ostracized as...