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...