Read Anywhere and on Any Device!

Subscribe to Read | $0.00

Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!

Create Free Account

Quick and Easy Sign Up!

It takes less then 1 minute to sign up, then you can enjoy Unlimited eBooks.

Sign Up Browse

Popular Genres

Read Anywhere and on Any Device!

  • Download on iOS
  • Download on Android
  • Download on iOS

John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty

John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty

C. Bradley Thompson Lance Banning Wilson Carey McWilliams
4.4/5 (34 ratings)
Read Download
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 Defense 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.
Language
English
Pages
360
Format
Paperback
Publisher
University Press of Kansas
Release
November 16, 1998

John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty

C. Bradley Thompson Lance Banning Wilson Carey McWilliams
4.4/5 (34 ratings)
Read Download
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 Defense 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.
Language
English
Pages
360
Format
Paperback
Publisher
University Press of Kansas
Release
November 16, 1998

More books from C. Bradley Thompson

America's Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It

C. Bradley Thompson

4.5/5 (94 ratings)

Neoconservatism: An Obituary For An Idea

C. Bradley Thompson

4.3/5 (37 ratings)

John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty

C. Bradley Thompson

4.4/5 (34 ratings)

The Revolutionary Writings of John Adams

John Adams

4.5/5 (22 ratings)

Antislavery Political Writings, 1833-1860: A Reader

C. Bradley Thompson

4.6/5 (3 ratings)

Freedom and School Choice in American Education

Greg Forster

4.6/5 (3 ratings)

The Objective Standard: Summer 2012, Vol. 7, No. 2

Craig Biddle

5/5 (2 ratings)

The Rise and Fall of Neoconservatism

Damon Linker

3/5 (2 ratings)

The Objective Standard: Winter 2012-13, Vol. 7, No. 4

Karl Kowalski

0/5 ( ratings)

Rate this book!

Write a review?

loader