Introduction to Forum on Luke Mayville, John Adams and the Fear of American Oligarchy

Abstract

John Adams and the Fear of American Oligarchy.
By Luke Mayville. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016.
232p $29.95 hardcover.

It is always a pleasure to assemble an outstanding group of scholars to discuss a new book and to witness a happy result. The pleasure was especially great in this case. I have long shared James Read’s opinion that Adams is “one of the most important, and least read” of America’s founding-era theorists. Luke Mayville’s book decisively shows that Adams, often portrayed as an aristocratic and arcane thinker, was in fact a state-of-the-art political psychologist and a practitioner of a genre of political theory that Mayville rightly insists we need more of. That is, Adams contributed not to “democratic theory” but to “theories of oligarchy,” which pause from asking how the people ought to wield their just powers in order to observe why, and how, the few in fact wield far more than their just share.