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PARTISAN REVIEW
Adams faced the challenge of finding a philosophy of authority
capable of coping with an industrial society intoxicated with the
prospect of unlimited power. He came to reject modern religion as a
source of authority for the same reason he had rejected modern
politics: it may satisfy our needs but it could never answer to our
demands for truth. The Virgin satisfied Adams's need to
contemplate authority as the beauty of moral power, but she did not
exist, and Adams knew it. When the mind knows the game the
imagination plays, the game is up. But there is a politically consoling
thought in
The Education of Henry Adams.
That great American
"conservative Christian anarchist," as he described himself, remains
an enemy of today's "neoconservatives" for much the same reason
Trotsky was an enemy of Stalin: he knew too much.
