Henry Adams’s Democracy: Intelligence, Sentiment, and Politics in the American 1880s

TY - JOUR

T1 - Henry Adams’s Democracy: Intelligence, Sentiment, and Politics in the American 1880s

AU - Collins, Michael

PY - 2020/12/4

Y1 - 2020/12/4

N2 - This article considers Henry Adams’s 1880 novel Democracy in the context of his lobbying for civil-service reform, to show how the novel mobilizes proto-eugenic discourses of measurable “intelligence” and biological “merit” in its depiction of the characteristics Adams demanded of political actors in the new post-bellum era of American capitalist imperialism. Drawing on recent critical work on biopower and sentimental culture by Kyla Schuller and the history of the emotions by Sianne Ngai, I show how Adams’s novel predicts the system of Progressive Era biopolitics in its picture of idealized, modern, “meritocratic” forms of governance, and in so doing forecloses post-war processes of democratization in the service of efficient, “intelligently”-directed, and panoptic capitalist-state power.

AB - This article considers Henry Adams’s 1880 novel Democracy in the context of his lobbying for civil-service reform, to show how the novel mobilizes proto-eugenic discourses of measurable “intelligence” and biological “merit” in its depiction of the characteristics Adams demanded of political actors in the new post-bellum era of American capitalist imperialism. Drawing on recent critical work on biopower and sentimental culture by Kyla Schuller and the history of the emotions by Sianne Ngai, I show how Adams’s novel predicts the system of Progressive Era biopolitics in its picture of idealized, modern, “meritocratic” forms of governance, and in so doing forecloses post-war processes of democratization in the service of efficient, “intelligently”-directed, and panoptic capitalist-state power.

KW - Henry Adams

KW - Sentimentalism

KW - Eugenics

KW - Democracy

KW - Civil Service

M3 - Article

SN - 0178-1987

VL - 65

SP - 43

EP - 63

JO - Amerikastudien/ American Studies Quarterly

JF - Amerikastudien/ American Studies Quarterly

IS - 1

M1 - 3

ER -