Though civic education among the public has sunk to embarrassing levels, there has of late been an explosion in scholarship on the Founding Fathers. The intellectual giants of the revolutionary era are again all the rage among literary types, academic and otherwise.
Thomas Jefferson—the American sphinx, as Joseph Ellis calls him—is hardly en vogue these days, but his role in the founding is so extraordinary that antipathetic scholars cannot help but reckon with him. James Madison, Jefferson’s political lieutenant but hardly his intellectual subordinate, has enjoyed a renaissance in our times, as his description of relentless factional conflict seems to capture the essence of contemporary interest-group politics. Alexander Hamilton, long castigated as the defender of economic privilege, is enjoying a current bipartisan respectability. Conservatives have long admired his visionary understanding of how “trickle-down economics” can generate prosperity for all; liberals—increasingly animated by identity politics—have a newfound appreciation for this possibly mixed-race immigrant from the Caribbean.
Even George Washington, the laconic and inscrutable Father, has been the subject of a probing biography by Ron Chernow, as well as a smaller but insightful text on his political philosophy by Jeffry Morrison. Yet John Adams, true to form, has resisted this popular revival. Granted, he was the subject of a biography by David McCullough, as well as an HBO miniseries. Even so, Adams remains mostly a curiosity—a man out of step with his times and apart from the burgeoning conversation in the present day. Gordon S. Wood’s characterization remains the dominant conclusion: While nobody was more integral to the American Revolution, Adams “missed the intellectual significance” of the Constitution altogether.
But maybe it is we who have missed the intellectual significance of Adams. That is one of the underlying premises of this engaging new work by Luke Mayville. Writing in a conversational and eminently readable style, Mayville teases from the writings of this obstreperous Founder a bracing challenge to republican government, one that is particularly relevant in the age of Donald Trump.
Really, John Adams has nobody to blame but himself for his centuries-long castigation. He was not a man to swim with the currents but, rather, to paddle defiantly against them. His two main political tracts—Defence of the Constitutions of the Government of the United States of America and Discourses on Davila—amount to a defense of the British system of mixed government, with distinct roles for an executive, the aristocracy, and the people. Hamilton had endorsed such a system as well, but he had the political sense to pronounce his support behind closed doors, at the Constitutional Convention. Adams published his works anonymously, but most learned readers in America quickly divined their authorship. So his reputation as an elitist was set, as Gordon Wood attests.
Luke Mayville, however, begs to differ, and offers a compelling case for reconsideration. Why did Adams go against contemporaries who called for all power to be organized along democratic lines? Mayville answers that Adams feared the overweening power of the elite. Our second president rejected the contemporary view that it was possible to distinguish between a natural aristocracy (based on merit) and an artificial one (based on social distinctions). Instead, he believed, power will eventually flow to the wealthy and wellborn, regardless of whether they hold titles of nobility. They will form a “natural” oligarchy that will perpetually threaten the principles of republican government.
Accordingly, Adams sought to create a system that countered the aristocrats by way of a democratically elected branch and a strong executive, which he thought would align against the grasping oligarchs. Adams’s goal, according to Mayville, was to ostracize the oligarchs, concentrating them in one branch so that their influence could not pervade the entire structure of the government.
Writing to George Washington in the spring of 1787, James Madison argued that “the great desideratum which has not yet been found for Republican Governments, seems to be some disinterested & dispassionate umpire in disputes between different passions & interests in the State.” This is the monumental task that absorbed all the great philosopher-statesmen of the age. Madison proffered a unique answer to this puzzle, as did Hamilton. And the two of them, working together in the Federalist essays, ably defended the compromise put forward by the Constitutional Convention. Jefferson, in his peripatetic way, developed an answer over the course of his lengthy career. But what Mayville demonstrates here is that writing contemporaneously on the other side of the Atlantic while serving as minister to Great Britain, John Adams was trying to solve this “great desideratum” as well.
His solution was strongly influenced by the social psychology of the Scottish Enlightenment. Oligarchs are able to corral political authority without formal titles of nobility, Adams reckoned, because people are drawn naturally to power and wealth. As Mayville puts it: “It was not just the ability of the rich to buy influence, but also the sentiments of sympathy and admiration for the rich among the people that tended to concentrate influence in the hands of the wealthy.” One need look no further than the magazines in the grocery checkout aisle for confirmation that people are drawn to the rich and wellborn, like moths to a flame.
So Gordon Wood, in Luke Mayville’s estimation, has it backwards: Adams did not misunderstand the intellectual significance of the Constitution, which did away with the sort of balance that was the cornerstone of the British system; he understood this innovation precisely. He simply disagreed with it, and had compelling reasons for doing so.
The reader is left wondering if republican government is actually possible, at least under the premises Adams lays out. If the people are eager to be bewitched by the opulence of a Trump, or the good birth of a Kennedy, what possible artifice can keep them from ceding their God-given authority to their so-called betters? Adams’s solution could be just as dangerous as the disease: By concentrating the oligarchs in a single branch, he may be giving them an opportunity to coordinate their endeavors against the people. Similarly, Mayville notes that Adams wanted to attach honorific titles to government offices as a bulwark against oligarchy. But what happens if the oligarchs acquire them for themselves and their heirs?
While Mayville is sympathetic to Adams’s argument about the counter-oligarchic utility of titles, he does not offer a full evaluation of Adams’s plan of government. But then again, that is not his intended purpose: He seeks, rather, to reintroduce Americans to a long-neglected Founder who has been unfairly cast out of the republican tradition. In this regard he succeeds: Adams was a republican—and a thoughtful, forceful, and formidable one at that. And while Adams’s solution to the “great desideratum” of republican governance never gained traction, his diagnosis of the problem is clear-eyed and probing. Just a few weeks away from Donald Trump’s inauguration, it may be time to reflect on John Adams’s warnings about the danger of oligarchy to republican governance.
Jay Cost is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
