Author: Richard Alan Ryerson
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 142141922X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 571
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Book Description
VIII. Redefining the Republican Tradition, 1784-1787 -- IX. John Adams's Republic in Republican America, 1787-1800 -- X.A Retrospective Retirement, 1801-1826 -- Conclusion: Memory and Desire in America's Republican Revolution -- Notes -- An Essay on Sources -- A Chronology of John Adams's Political Study and Writings -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- X -- Z
Author: Richard Alan Ryerson
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421419238
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 571
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Book Description
This trailblazing study explores Adams’s political thought across his entire career in law and public service. Winner of the Sally and Morris Lasky Prize of The Center for Political History Lebanon Velley College Scholars have examined John Adams’s writings and beliefs for generations, but no one has brought such impressive credentials to the task as Richard Alan Ryerson in John Adams’s Republic. The editor-in-chief of the Massachusetts Historical Society’s Adams Papers project for nearly two decades, Ryerson offers readers of this magisterial book a fresh, firmly grounded account of Adams’s political thought and its development. Of all the founding fathers, Ryerson argues, John Adams may have worried the most about the problem of social jealousy and political conflict in the new republic. Ryerson explains how these concerns, coupled with Adams’s concept of executive authority and his fear of aristocracy, deeply influenced his political mindset. He weaves together a close analysis of Adams’s public writings, a comprehensive chronological narrative beginning in the 1760s, and an exploration of the second president’s private diary, manuscript autobiography, and personal and family letters, revealing Adams’s most intimate political thoughts across six decades. How, Adams asked, could a self-governing country counter the natural power and influence of wealthy elites and their friends in government? Ryerson argues that he came to believe a strong executive could hold at bay the aristocratic forces that posed the most serious dangers to a republican society. The first study ever published to closely examine all of Adams’s political writings, from his youth to his long retirement, John Adams’s Republic should appeal to everyone who seeks to know more about America’s first major political theorist.
Author: Charles N. Edel
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674368088
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 421
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Book Description
America’s rise from revolutionary colonies to a world power is often treated as inevitable. But Charles N. Edel’s provocative biography of John Q. Adams argues that he served as the central architect of a grand strategy whose ideas and policies made him a critical link between the founding generation and the Civil War–era nation of Lincoln.
Author: John Adams
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Constitutional history
Languages : en
Pages : 46
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Book Description
Author: Luke Mayville
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691183244
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 230
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Book Description
Why American founding father John Adams feared the political power of the rich—and how his ideas illuminate today's debates about inequality and its consequences Long before the "one percent" became a protest slogan, American founding father John Adams feared the power of a class he called simply "the few"—the wellborn, the beautiful, and especially the rich. In John Adams and the Fear of American Oligarchy, Luke Mayville explores Adams’s deep concern with the way in which inequality threatens to corrode democracy and empower a small elite. Adams believed that wealth is politically powerful not merely because money buys influence, but also because citizens admire and even identify with the rich. Mayville explores Adams’s theory of wealth and power in the context of his broader concern about social and economic disparities—reflections that promise to illuminate contemporary debates about inequality and its political consequences. He also examines Adams’s ideas about how oligarchy might be countered. A compelling work of intellectual history, John Adams and the Fear of American Oligarchy has important lessons for today’s world.
Author: John Adams
Publisher: Hackett Publishing
ISBN: 9780872206991
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
The fundamental article of my political creed, declared John Adams, is that despotism, or unlimited sovereignty, or absolute power is the same in a majority of a popular assembly, an aristocratical council, an oligarchical junto, and a single emperor. Equally arbitrary, cruel, bloody, and in every respect diabolical. The consequences of this article for Adams' thought are nowhere better articulated than in this anthology, which presents his remarkable attempts at constructing a complete political system based on constitutional, balanced, representative government.
Author: John Adams
Publisher: Regnery Publishing
ISBN: 9780895262929
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 766
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Book Description
Explores the writings of John Adams and his conservative political philosophy as it fits in the American tradition, providing the text of his major works, letters, and essays.
Author: John Adams
Publisher: Library of America
ISBN: 1598535307
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 905
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Book Description
Gordon S. Wood presents the final volume in his definitive three-volume edition of the writings of a great American Founder. A powerful polemicist, insightful political theorist, and tireless diplomat, John Adams (1735–1826) was a vital and controversial figure during the early years of the American republic. Once overshadowed by Washington and Jefferson, Adams has become the subject of renewed interest, with a best-selling biography and acclaimed television series reintroducing him to millions. Now, this final volume of a comprehensive three-volume edition makes his important writings from the early national period broadly available to general readers. Bringing together letters, diary excerpts, political essays, speeches, and presidential messages, Writings from the New Nation 1784–1826 illuminates Adams's service as a diplomat in the Netherlands and England; his eight years as vice president under Washington; and his tumultous single term as president. The first person to win a contested presidential election and then to be defeated for reelection, Adams faced bitter criticism from both Jeffersonian Republicans and Hamiltonian Federalists while striving to prevent an undeclared naval conflict with Revolutionary France from escalating into full-scale war. Selections from A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (1787–88) and Discourses on Davila (1790–91) demonstrate his insights into the strengths and weaknesses of ancient and modern political systems, while letters to his wife and children illuminate the passionate and mercurial personality of one of our most fascinating Founders. This volume is published simultaneously with Abigail Adams: Letters, the first comprehensive collection of the extraordinary correspondence of Adams's wife and key advisor. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
Author: C. Bradley Thompson
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700611819
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 360
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Book Description
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.
Author: John Adams
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781542761543
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 324
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Book Description
The Revolutionary Writings of John Adams presents the principal shorter writings in which Adams addresses the prospect of revolution and the form of government proper to the new United States. Though one of the principal framers of the American republic and the successor to Washington as president, John Adams receives remarkably little attention among many students of the early national period. This is especially true in the case of the periods before and after the Revolution, in which the intellectual rationale for independence and republican government was given the fullest expression.
