John Adams and the Fear of American Oligarchy by Luke Mayville, and: John Adams's Republic: The One, the Few, and the Many by Richard Alan Ryerson (review)

Political thought and argument define a key genre of American literature during the life of John Adams (1735–1826). The two fine books under review assist readers in transcending the time separating Adams from us, and in making his political thought accessible and worthy of study.

Students of political thought adopt one of two approaches, as different as matter and antimatter. The first, associated with Leo Strauss, sees political thought as an unchanging argument going back to Plato and Aristotle and extending to our time. The second, associated with Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock and dubbed "the Cambridge school," emphasizes historical context—framing a political theorist's work in the contexts of its time and place, identifying the problems that then seemed pressing and understanding the solutions offered for those problems.

We can draw on both approaches, recognizing enduring issues and problems while also recognizing historical peculiarities molding how political philosophers grappled with those issues and problems. These two excellent books show the value of such a nuanced and synthetic approach that recognizes enduring issues and problems while also heeding contexts shaping a political thinker's work. In the process, they give new weight, significance, and relevance to one of the Revolutionary era's most important political thinkers, John Adams.

Too many scholars foreground Adams's character and personality at the expense of his thought; they also condemn him for his alleged lack of originality that entrapped him in his era's conventional political wisdom. By contrast, in a splendid article in the William and Mary Quarterly in 1968, Stephen G. Kurtz argued that Adams was intent on recovering, synthesizing, and passing on the past's amassed wisdom, enterprises ruling out originality or creativity. Though too many scholars have missed Kurtz's sound point, Luke Mayville and Richard Alan Ryerson do not. They call us to reconsider Adams then and now, the significance of his political thought in his time, and its continuing or rediscovered relevance in ours.

Mayville, a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University, focuses on recovering a central element of Adams's thought—his preoccupation with aristocracy and its evil twin, oligarchy. For Adams, classical political thought defined the most perceptive approach to understanding political thought and behavior and to devising political institutions; for Mayville, classical political thought is the jumping-off point for understanding Adams. Classical political thought posited three pure forms of government—monarchy, rule by one leader; aristocracy, rule by an elite few; and democracy, rule by the many. At their best, commitment to the public interest undergirded these pure forms—but each form risked decaying into a corrupt form of government whose leaders would seek to secure their own interest at the polity's expense. Monarchy would decay into tyranny; aristocracy into oligarchy; and democracy into anarchy or ochlocracy (mob rule), either of which would be fertile ground for tyranny. Adams therefore sought to create a compound form of government blending elements of the pure forms—a republic comprising monarchic, aristocratic, and democratic elements.

Classical political thought thus defines the context for Mayville's thoughtful and sensitive analysis of Adams's writings and of the scholarship devoted to him. Mayville shows us an Adams who makes sense in Straussian and Skinnerian terms as a political thinker seeking to solve enduring political problems within his historical context. To Adams, the American Revolution presented an exceptional opportunity for American constitution makers to apply the past's lessons. Adams taught that aristocracy and oligarchy are rooted in human nature, in what he called "the passion for distinction" actuating ambitious people. Therefore, Adams concluded, in constructing a constitutional system you must devise an institution for would-be aristocrats—a legislature's upper house—and then hedge it...