ABSTRACT
Henry Adams never held public office; the Education may thus be read as documenting his "failure" to uphold a well-established family tradition. Adams's treatment of the decay of public life at the center of power in America may be read as a virtual case study of the issues treated by Jurgen Habermas in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Habermas's account of the transformation of the bourgeois public sphere focused on Germany, France, and England; Adams's Education may be read as a first-hand narrative account of how similar patterns emerged from the American experience. Habermas's discussion of the formation of the bourgeois public sphere and its initially democratizing political thrust is remarkably illuminating in view of Adams's much earlier autobiographical treatment of American society and politics. Adams closed the circle of public knowledge by beating a personal retreat into medieval history.
