SOURCE: "Brooks Adams, Caustic Cassandra," in The American Scholar, Vol. 9, No. 2, Spring, 1940, pp. 214-27,

In the following excerpt, Madison offers a survey of Adams's major works and political concerns.

Brooks Adams is, a dozen years after his death, a truly forgotten man. A test poll of twenty-five college graduates of various ages and interests elicited the fact that less than a third were able to identify him and that only one, a writer on legal history, was familiar with some of his writings. Nor is this surprising. His radical social and economic views had early antagonized the class to which he belonged, and throughout his mature years he was scorned (by those who knew what he stood for) as the last and least worthy of the captious Adams tribe. His books, readily appreciated in England and translated into French, German and Russian were ignored by most of the...