Book Review

As one of the most complex and intricate thinkers of the Revolutionary generation, it is not surprising that John Adams inspired awe and bewilderment in equal measure in his contemporaries. Neither Adams's thought nor his behavior were ever open to simple analysis. How could the voice of radical independence defend the British soldiers responsible for the Boston Massacre? How could the author of Novanglus defend titles in the new republic? Questions such as these plagued Adams throughout his political career. In all of his many phases—schoolteacher, budding lawyer, political thinker, president, public hero, and anti-hero—Adams's response was the same: he did not wish to fit any label, he prided himself on the independent nature of his thought, and he accepted reason from whatever source it came. If this emphatic refusal to toe a simple party line gave Adams the impression of a brilliant sphinx to his contemporaries, it has equally shrouded him in a veil of mystery to our own generation. In spite of Adams's unquestioned historical importance, he is the least studied of the major thinkers of early America, and in the few works that seriously tackle the subject, scholars have found little common ground, presenting him as inconsistent, too consistent, or simply "anomalous."	1
In John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty, C. Bradley Thompson's answer to the mystery of Adams's thought is clear: Adams's primary political good from the beginning of his career to the end was individual liberty. At one level, this analysis is yet another chapter in the seemingly endless republican-liberal debate over the nature of political discourse in the Revolutionary period. Thompson dismisses the notion that Adams was a believer in selfless service to a nascent Roman-style republic. Instead, he focuses on the Enlightenment facets of Adams's thinking and his debt to Locke, Newton, and Bacon. Believing that the methods of natural science could be applied to human beings, Adams sought to ground politics in men as they acted rather than as they should act. Though Thompson acknowledges the influence of Machiavelli, this is less tied to any acceptance of a pure classical republicanism than to a shared belief in the possibility of a "science of politics." Methodology rather than analysis unites Adams to the classical republicans. More important for Thomson, however, is disavowing the historiographical line that emphasizes the continued influence of Adams's private religious views on his public life. Ironically, First argued by the father of the republican thesis, Bernard Bailyn, and subsequently taken up by Edmund Morgan, and more recently Peter Shaw, this interpretation emphasizes Adams's continuing reliance on a Puritan tradition of introspection as evidenced in Adams's diary. For Thompson, traditional Calvinist Christianity has no hold on Adams's personal or public life, and he takes pains to highlight the passages in the diary that reveal Adams in a more skeptical light.	2
Unfortunately, Thompson's liberal Adams is neither convincing, nor well documented. Adams's continuing reliance on a Christian conception of man's fallen nature, his diary's acute introspection and self-evaluation, and his demand for the need of a "place of eternal rewards and a place of eternal punishments" are far from Thompson's picture of Adams as the Enlightenment liberal-modern. Thompson simply fails to mention portions of the diary that blatantly contradict his picture of an irreligious Adams or he glosses over evidence contradictory to his picture. For instance, Thompson argues that though Adams "accepted the necessity of miracles and the Bible as revealed truth. Much beyond that, he would not go" (9). This is stated as though it makes Adams some sort of religious skeptic. In reality, by accepting miracles and the Bible as revealed truth in a milieu where a Jefferson or Franklin could concede much less, Adams was marked as fairly conservative. The same fate Adams met in his own day greets him again in the pages of this work—the complexities and even contradictions are bypassed on route to a caricature of his thought. Though Adams had moved some distance from a strict Calvinist interpretation of Man and God, this does not mean that he had somehow dismissed it altogether. Further, this continuing reliance on a Calvinist view of man's nature, albeit in a new, less gloomy form, need not be seen in direct confrontation to either republican or liberal thought. The historical flowering of all three of these mentalities—Puritan, Liberal, and Whig Republican—occurred in a mid-seventeenth century England in which all three were frequently found in the same thinker. To refuse Adams's ability to do the same is simply to imprison him within a world of our own making.	3
Though Thompson's overall interpretation is seriously flawed, the routes that the author traverses to get there are well worth traveling. His analysis of A Defence of the Constitutions and his argument that Adams's reputation grew rather than diminished as a result of its publication revise the common interpretation that Adams grew reactionary and bitter through the 1790s and lost the support of the populace. Equally adept is Thompson's ability to draw from both the private and public writings of Adams and unite these in a single analysis. Too much of the meager writing on Adams has been divided into personal and public spheres, failing to take into account the unity Adams saw when examining his own life. Most important, however, is Thompson's willingness to tackle Adams as a subject of study at all. Perhaps because of the continuing notion of Adams as reactionary, stodgy, and conservative, scholars have overlooked him in favor of more glamorous subjects such as Jefferson. Hopefully, Thompson's endeavor will reignite scholarly interest in Adams; the subject remains as open to research as ever, for the mystery of Adams's thought is far from solved.	4
Brian S. Brown University of Oxford

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