...
Show More
Commitment to principle somehow necessitated unpopularity for John Adams, and the fullest expression of his best energies occurred in singular acts of passionate defiance. For Adams, virtue demanded a level of disinterestedness and a purity of public spiritedness that derived its compulsion from psychological imperative which seemed to require isolation and unpopularity as evidence of its authenticity.
Adams believed that there is no one principle which predominates in human nature so much in every stage of life as the passion for superiority. Every human being compares itself with every other around it and will find some superiority over every other.
Adams was obsessed with interior integrity, not with the external rewards that mastery of appearance could bring. Humility, piety, self-denial, and other habits were not just means to an end for him, but the ends themselves.
Adams suggested that most enduring political, social, and economic transformations were evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Successful revolutions such as the one he helped lead in America, were merely the final and most visible stages of what was a long process of preparation. The only kind of progress Adams truly trusted came gradually, moving at an evolutionary pace that allowed institutions to adjust and expectations to remain under some modicum of control.
In his political thinking, Adams did embrace two of the central tenets of the liberal tradition: the doctrine of popular sovereignty, that is, the notion that political power ultimately derives from the people; and the principle of equality before the law, the view that justice is blind to the class, race, or gender of the accused. In these two areas, Adams was a liberal.
Adams warned Jefferson that individual freedom and social equality were incompatible ideas, that ignoring their conflict only assured the triumph of the privileged. Adams insisted that government needed to play an active role in managing national priorities; that it was not, as Jefferson seemed to believe, only and always, a source of oppression.
An excellent book which explores the principles of government which two hundred years later we are still debating.
Adams believed that there is no one principle which predominates in human nature so much in every stage of life as the passion for superiority. Every human being compares itself with every other around it and will find some superiority over every other.
Adams was obsessed with interior integrity, not with the external rewards that mastery of appearance could bring. Humility, piety, self-denial, and other habits were not just means to an end for him, but the ends themselves.
Adams suggested that most enduring political, social, and economic transformations were evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Successful revolutions such as the one he helped lead in America, were merely the final and most visible stages of what was a long process of preparation. The only kind of progress Adams truly trusted came gradually, moving at an evolutionary pace that allowed institutions to adjust and expectations to remain under some modicum of control.
In his political thinking, Adams did embrace two of the central tenets of the liberal tradition: the doctrine of popular sovereignty, that is, the notion that political power ultimately derives from the people; and the principle of equality before the law, the view that justice is blind to the class, race, or gender of the accused. In these two areas, Adams was a liberal.
Adams warned Jefferson that individual freedom and social equality were incompatible ideas, that ignoring their conflict only assured the triumph of the privileged. Adams insisted that government needed to play an active role in managing national priorities; that it was not, as Jefferson seemed to believe, only and always, a source of oppression.
An excellent book which explores the principles of government which two hundred years later we are still debating.
