Abstract
In John Adams and the Fear of American Oligarchy, Luke Mayville makes the case that the political thought of John Adams is worth revisiting. It is worth revisiting because, among the Founders, Adams was most concerned with the problem of aristocracy. That is, even though Adams was on the losing end of the Revolution of 1800, a revolution that signaled a democratic turn in American politics against the conservatism of Adams’s own Federalist Party, it was Adams and not his more democratic opponents who worried most about aristocracy. It is this concern that made him an outlier, and it is this distinctiveness, Mayville argues, that makes him worthy of our consideration today.
First, a word should be said about terms. Why not title the book John Adams and the Fear of American Aristocracy? Mayville’s explanation in the introductory chapter is that even though Adams wrote about aristocracy, his real subject was actually oligarchy. This is because Adams’s concern was motivated by fear of rule by the rich and wellborn and not rule by the best (8). So even though Adams used the word aristocracy, the problem he examined was oligarchy. Or, more accurately, Adams collapsed the two terms into one. In what follows, I will use the word used by Adams, aristocracy.
In Adams’s view, aristocracy was a central and enduring fact of political life. Because there would always be aristocrats, the question for Adams was not how to remove them but rather how to make them less dangerous in a republic. His solution was a Senate. The idea was that it is better to give aristocrats an institutional home and then balance that home against other institutions. Thus, Adams was the country’s most devoted advocate of mixed constitution and its most forceful critic of a simple constitution. This eventually put him at odds with his countrymen. As Mayville puts it, “by the late 1780’s the intellectual current of the Atlantic world had turned decisively against notions of balanced government.” The absolute sovereignty of Hobbes “took a democratic turn as arguments for a united, popular sovereignty gained widespread appeal” (31).
As Mayville explains in chapter one, this was not a defense of elites. Rather, Adams’s specific fear was that aristocrats would threaten executive power, so he preferred an alliance between democracy and monarchy against aristocracy (53–54). The executive would act as a focal point, drawing the admiration of common citizens and providing a countervailing force against aristocrats. Thus, in the American context, the executive and the lower house would combine to protect against aristocracy.
Although Mayville does not point this out, this feature in Adams’s thought suggests a difference with James Madison’s presentation in The Federalist. In No. 37, Madison suggests an alliance between the two necessary ingredients of all governments, energy and stability, at least insofar as these two ingredients had to be balanced against a third, republican liberty, which was demanded by Americans. Madison goes on to identify these characteristics by explaining that stability requires rule by the few (the Senate), energy the rule of one (the president), and republican liberty the rule of the many (the House). Later, in No. 51, Madison speaks of a special relationship between the president and the Senate as an auxiliary precaution against the primary threat to separation powers, namely, legislative tyranny.
So where Madison feared legislatures because of their proximity to the sovereign people, Adams believed that aristocrats were the greater threat. In Adams’s view, the rule of the few was so inevitable that separation of powers had to be designed around defeating that threat.
This was an assertion about the way the world is, and it was a prediction about what the world would be like in the future. The former can perhaps be tested by modern social science, and the latter can be evaluated with the benefit of historical knowledge. With respect to the claim about historical progress, according to Mayville, Adams did not think that the “democratic-republican revolution would defeat aristocratic power” because the “wealthy and wellborn would constitute a powerful elite class, even in the absence of formal privileges.” In chapter two, Mayville writes that this prediction separated Adams from his “hopeful contemporaries” like Jefferson, who saw power moving in the other direction (63).
It seems to me that Jefferson’s position—which Mayville denigrates as hopeful—was clearly the more accurate one. Jefferson’s party won the Election of 1800, but, more than that, it signaled a political coalition that would dominate American politics at least until 1860, when the Republican Party achieved a kind of parity in terms of electoral power with the party of Jefferson and Jackson. This is a story told convincingly, in my view, by Gordon Wood, who has documented the rise of the “ordinary sorts” and downfall of rule by the “disinterested” elites whose wealth and birth once set them apart from others. 1 Tocqueville famously wrote that Jefferson’s victory over the Federalists was inevitable, at least in the United States, where democracy was the powerful force and Jefferson its apostle.
Mayville’s position seems to be that Tocqueville was wrong and that Adams was at least half correct. He concedes that Adams was going against the current of history, and yet he argues that Adams had the better grasp of future political development. That is, Mayville wants his reader to ask: What if both Tocqueville and Adams are right? What if the United States is land of democracy and oligarchy? To ask these questions is to reorient America toward Adams. Or as Mayville frames it, because “we are living not just with Tocqueville’s democracy, but also with Adams’s oligarchy,” we must face the fact that America is not immune from oligarchy. In this, Adams and Mayville argue, America is not and can never be exceptional (153).
Whether or not readers agree with the assertion that oligarchy is as dominant as Adams and Mayville say it is, the more important part of Mayville’s argument is his explanation for why Adams believed what he did. In chapter three, Mayville argues that Adams rejected the two common solutions for aristocracy. First, Adams doubted that elections would solve the problem of aristocracy by installing, as Mayville says Madison believed, the best men in office. Second, Adams also doubted that education could reform the judgment of people in a way that would lessen the threat of aristocracy. This doubt stems from his confidence that the educated—even philosophers—would prefer that their children marry the rich and the wellborn (90–91). This is, to be sure, another prediction that can be tested more or less empirically. Do smart people of middling backgrounds prefer that their children marry the children of the rich and wellborn? When successful philosophers send their kids to elite schools (and it is probably safe to assume that they do), do they urge them to seek out only the truly virtuous and wise for their social and sexual relationships? Or do the beautiful, the rich, and the wellborn seem more attractive to the virtuous and wise once they have the means to mix with them?
These questions are certainly worth asking, and Mayville is to be commended for connecting political theory to political questions that cry out for empirical investigation. But the key is Mayville’s focus on the rationale behind Adams’s prediction. Mayville shows that Adams believed that aristocracy was deeply rooted in human nature. Its source was a “longing for distinction” common to all human beings (107). Unlike Rousseau, who believed this longing came with society, Adams believed instead that it was present in all men, in all times, who are, as Mayville puts it, “driven by a raging passion for distinction and a frantic fear of obscurity” (111). This assumption explains a key step in Adams’s logic: we admire the rich, not because we want the marginal benefits made possible by their money, but rather because they are admired by others. It’s not their money, but their fame that makes them powerful.
This means that aristocracy is really not about wealth but rather about something else. As Mayville explains Adams’s position, it was about influence (86). This is why Adams included beauty as a trait of aristocracy. Because we long for distinction, and because we see that the beautiful are admired, we allow the beautiful to have more influence than they deserve. Aristocracy comes from the fact that some of us have “a tendency to stand out” (188). The problem, then, is “not strictly material but also aesthetic” (117). The roots of aristocracy can be traced to the souls of ordinary citizens.
Adams’s unique analysis emerges in his famous exchange with Jefferson. In that exchange, Jefferson offered what Mayville regards as the more common solution for aristocracy, drawing a distinction between “artificial” and “natural” aristocracy. This distinction rested on the premise that some sort of rule by the few was not only inevitable but also desirable. But the key for Jefferson was to elevate the few who deserved it because of their ability and their virtue. The problem was that these few were scattered by Nature across society, while the rich and well born were concentrated and easy to locate. So, for Jefferson, the key was to design ways to find the natural aristocracy, that is, to rake the genius from the rubbish, and give them the means and opportunity to compete with, and maybe even rule over, the artificial aristocracy. But Adams had a different notion. In his view, there were five “pillars” of aristocracy: beauty, wealth, birth, genius, and virtue. Whereas Jefferson sought to create a system that would recruit those with genius and virtue, Adams believed the problem was that the first three would always win out over the fourth and fifth. For Adams, Jefferson’s distinction between artificial and natural aristocracy did not address the deeper problem that the rich, the wellborn, and the beautiful will have influence.
With this reorientation of what the problem is, Mayville offers a solution in chapter four that is not strictly material. Because certain individuals will distinguish themselves even in the face of economic policies aimed at equality, the solution is to encourage other ways for the wise and virtuous to distinguish themselves. Here, Mayville notes, “modern democratic ideologies have not appreciated the counter-oligarchic role of honorifics.” So Adams’s infamous proposal for a grandiose title for the president should not be read as confirmation of Adams’s elitism or his tin political ear, but rather as his appreciation of the need for republics to find and honor the wise and good as bulwarks against the rich, the wellborn, and the beautiful. But in the United States, this “instinctive democratic impulse,” which Mayville writes is traceable to Andrew Jackson, assumes that such titles promote individuals above ordinary people and are thus to be discarded (146). It is this impulse that favors term limits and the election of judges. In my view, this attention to the virtue of titles is the biggest contribution of Mayville’s book.
More broadly, Mayville’s book is an opportunity to think not so much about Adams but rather about the enduring fact that in a land committed to equality it seems as if the rich and wellborn actually rule. In this, Mayville has reminded scholars of the early republic of another line of inquiry that might connect them to mainstream political science. He has also written a book, so rare as “a first book,” that could be assigned in a lower-level undergraduate seminar. Indeed, for those interested in Adams, I would go as far as to say that Mayville’s book is a better starting place than Adams’s own writing. But this is also to say that scholars of the early republic will not find any new insights here. There are no major interventions in the literature on Adams, and the comparisons to other Founders such as Jefferson or Madison are too breezy to advance the scholarship. Specialists would do better to read Richard Alan Ryerson’s John Adams’s Republic: The One, the Few, and the Many (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). Ryerson’s book is clearly the product of decades of editorial work on the Adams papers, and it is now easily the authoritative account of what Adams was thinking, when he was thinking it, and why. Ryerson’s book, in my view, is the new model for work on the history of political thought in the early republic.