America's finest eighteenth-century student of political science,
John Adams is also the least studied of the Revolution's key
figures. By the time he became our second president, no American
had written more about our government and not even Jefferson or
Madison had read as widely about questions of human nature, natural
right, political organization, and constitutional construction. Yet
this staunch constitutionalist is perceived by many as having
become reactionary in his later years and his ideas have been
largely disregarded.
In the first major work on Adams's political thought in over
thirty years, C. Bradley Thompson takes issue with the notion that
Adams's thought is irrelevant to the development of American ideas.
Focusing on Adams's major writings, Thompson elucidates and
reevaluates his political and constitutional thought by
interpreting it within the tradition of political philosophy
stretching from Plato to Montesquieu.
This major revisionist study shows that the distinction Adams
drew between "principles of liberty" and "principles of political
architecture" is central to his entire political philosophy.
Thompson first chronicles Adams's conceptualization of moral and
political liberty during his confrontation with American Loyalists
and British imperial officers over the true nature of justice and
the British Constitution, illuminating Adams's two most important
pre-Revolutionary essays, "A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal
Law" and "The Letters of Novanglus." He then presents Adams's
debate with French philosophers over the best form of government
and provides an extended analysis of his Defence of the
Constitutions of Government and Discourses on Davila to demonstrate
his theory of political architecture.
From these pages emerges a new John Adams. In reexamining his
political thought, Thompson reconstructs the contours and
influences of Adams's mental universe, the ideas he challenged, the
problems he considered central to constitution-making, and the
methods of his reasoning. Skillfully blending history and political
science, Thompson's work shows how the spirit of liberty animated
Adams's life and reestablishes this forgotten Revolutionary as an
independent and important thinker.
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