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Chapter 2 John Adams: Defense of the Mixed Constitution It is true that I can say and have said nothing new on the Subject of Government. Yet I did say in my Defence and in my Discourses on Davila, though in an uncouth Style, what was new to Lock, to Harrington, to Milton, to Hume to Montesquieu to Reauseau, to Turgot, [to] Condorcet, to Rochefaucault, to Price to Franklin and to yourself; and at that time to almost all Europe and America. . . . Writings on Government had been not only neglected, but discountenanced and discouraged, through out all Europe, from the Restoration of Charles the Second in England, till the French Revolution commenced. . . . In this state of Things my poor, unprotected , unpatronised Books appeared. —John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson My plain writings have been misunderstood by many, misrepresented by more, and vilified and anathematized by multitudes who never read them. They have, indeed, nothing to recommend them but stubborn facts . . . —John Adams, letter to Charles Holt John Adams read more political theory and felt he learned more from it than any other prominent politician. His sense of worth was intimately wrapped up in his knowledge of political philosophy. As a young man he set out to gain a systematic understanding of politics. Well before he reached the presidency he felt that he had lived out his ideal by reconciling book learning and lived experience. Adams would not have become president were it not for his facility with political theory. This was not because voters preferred to have the most well-read scholar of politics in the job. Rather, his elite colleagues bestowed positions of high responsibility on him partly because of his hard 20 21 John Adams work and learned nature in the field and partly because they valued the substantive commitments he had found in theoretical works. His theory-based understanding of the relationship between the British government and that of the colonies led him to be an early and forceful advocate for independence. His knowledge of institutional dynamics prompted the Massachusetts constitutional convention to let Adams write the state’s new constitution virtually single-handedly. Partly due to his facility in international legal theory the Continental Congress appointed him as an envoy to France and to Holland. Later he was selected to be one of the peace negotiators with Great Britain. His work in these roles placed him among the nation’s foremost leaders, and the renown he gained in them culminated in eight years as vice president and four years as president . In an age when political theory was valued—in large part for its role in justifying the Revolution—Adams’s own obsession with this body of work helped him to become a national leader. As indicated in the first quote above, Adams did not claim to be original . He did not think he advocated an innovative political philosophy. He judged that the essential truths of politics had already been discovered by others. His reputation was to be staked on being the champion and implementer of the correct understanding of politics. Doing so required him to refute mistaken understandings, which he found abundant among political philosophers and politicians. According to Adams, neither Franklin nor Rousseau, neither Condorcet nor Jefferson really understood politics, because they rejected theories which were empirically demonstrated to be correct. While Adams was devoted to reading all political philosophy, he discarded much of it as nonsense. Winnowing its valuable ideas from the chaff was so important to him that he developed a method of discerning how to do so. For the benefit of the public, and to refute mistaken ideas, he compiled two books in rapid succession during the late 1780s: his massive Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America and his Discourses on Davila. Through them he hoped to end the neglect of “Writings on Government.” It does surprisingly little violence to these books and to John Adams’s political thought in general to say that they consist almost exclusively of pieces cobbled together from an array of political theorists. C. Bradley Thompson suggests that “the primary context within which Adams’ political thought must be viewed . . . is his confrontation with the Western political and philosophical tradition.”1 This is not to say that Adams was always incisive or careful about political theory. He seemed to place an almost exclusive faith in it—as if all useful political wisdom could be reduced to general rules and that wisdom...

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