Consuming energies: Henry Adams and ‘the tyranny of thermodynamics'

In the closing decade of the nineteenth century, the American historian and descendent of two US presidents Henry Adams identified what he and his circle saw as the most dramatic historical change of the century and one laden with consequences for the next, namely the emergence of his nation as the most powerful on earth. We argue that Adams (along with his brother Brooks) drew specifically on Lord Kelvin's energy physics to analyse the foundations of that economic power in terms of the energy resources available for the production of useful work, and hence for the creation of wealth. In 1895 Brooks had publicly enunciated a ‘law of civilisation and decay’ that would explain the rise and fall of historical empires in terms of the concentration and dispersal of natural energies, including those of culture and race. Crucial to the US case was technological development which, through invention and innovation, was permitting those intense concentrations of wealth and power that characterised the USA in the modern world. But Adams deployed energy physics throughout from a highly critical and sceptical perspective. He was therefore sceptical that technological development equated with onward and ever upward progression, sceptical that the USA was guaranteed a long term future as the world's greatest power, sceptical that democracy in America meant government for the people, and, most significantly, increasingly vociferous in his opinion that the concentrations of energies in the twentieth century world must produce catastrophic conflict between warring nations. ‘Power works weird effects on our original sinful nature!’ Henry Adams to Mary Cadwalader Jones, 6 March 1909