Brooks Adams's books are no longer read as history (if indeed they ever were), but they remain in the judgment of divers authorities significant documents for the historical study of American thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Possibly no American historical writer is more difficult to characterize and evaluate than Brooks Adams. It is safe to say that he would have been amused and not at all surprised at the ambiguity of his reputation more than a half century after his death, for during his lifetime he took evident satisfaction in being considered complicated, eccentric, perverse, and misunderstood. He referred to himself more than once as "an unusable man" and "a crank" who very few people could bear to have about.

A partial account of favorable responses to his work indicates something about both its importance and the difficulty of evaluating it. Charles A. Beard...