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.
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.
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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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691184456 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2024 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 232 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
A Perennial Problem
It is that rapacious spirit described by the elder Adams; and no one understood the true character of a purse-proud, grasping oligarchy better than he did.
— Senator John Milton Niles, speech delivered in the US Senate, 18 February 1838
Should Americans fear oligarchy? In other words, should citizens of a republic founded upon ideals of civic equality fear the political power of the rich? Even if this question is being asked today with a special urgency, the question itself is hardly new. At the outset of the American republic, when the framers of the United States Constitution first submitted the document to the public for approval, the question of oligarchy was hotly debated. Critics of the Constitution — the so-called Anti-Federalists — argued that the new system would elevate to power a wealthy ruling class. Rather than empowering those "who have been used to walk in the plain and frugal paths of life," the new system of government would guarantee rule by America's "aristocracy." What the Constitution's defenders had fancifully called "representative democracy" would in fact be "a mere burlesque." There would be "no part of the people represented, but the rich," and no security provided against the undue influence of a social and economic elite.
Meanwhile, Federalist proponents of the Constitution argued that there was little reason to view the rich as a dangerous political force. After all, the aristocratic orders of the Old World were absent in post-Revolution America, and the Constitution mandated that this remain the case by expressly prohibiting titles of nobility. America would be a republic, and the real danger in republics was not oligarchic power but the power of untrammeled majorities. James Madison, whose influence at the Philadelphia Convention was second to none, warned against "the superior force of an interested and over-bearing majority." In his monumental tenth essay in the Federalist Papers, Madison paid only passing attention to the danger that an oligarchic elite could pose. Being small in numbers, such an elite would simply be voted down. Oligarchic power might exist as a nuisance, but it would not be a serious threat to the republic: "It may clog the administration, it may convulse the society; but it will be unable to execute and mask its violence under the forms of the Constitution." In a revolutionary republic that had thrown off aristocracy and monarchy and put "We the People" on the throne, there was no reason to fear oligarchy.
When Federalists and Anti-Federalists debated the likelihood of oligarchy in America, they were partaking in a larger, transatlantic discourse about how best to ameliorate the vast inequality of political power that had characterized the aristocratic societies of eighteenth-century Europe. The emerging democratic-republican consensus, espoused by an increasingly influential set of reformers in France and several other European nations, held that the key to eliminating aristocratic privilege was the dismantling of the various forms of legal privilege found in European societies. Orders of nobility, titles, social ranks or "estates," hereditary magistracies — these were the pillars that propped up aristocratic privilege. Pulling down such pillars would be the essential step in breaking aristocratic power and establishing true republics, formed upon the basis of equal citizenship.
From the perspective of the American Federalists, the Constitution of 1787 would establish just the type of republic envisioned by European reformers. The proposed American system prohibited titles of nobility and — remarkably in the context of the eighteenth century — made no distinction between the rich and the poor. In this context, what did Anti-Federalists mean when they spoke of a home-grown aristocracy? They agreed that America would be home to an aristocracy in the ancient-Greek sense of hoi aristoi (the best), a class of men distinguished by meritocratic qualities such as talent and virtue. But with the entrenched aristocratic orders of the Old World completely absent in America, the fear of a dangerous aristocracy or oligarchy of corrupt elites was without foundation.
Yet leading Federalists and European reformers alike tended to overlook a dissenting view of elite power. In the American context, many Anti-Federalists believed that the roots of political inequality ran deeper than was assumed and that aristocratic power would survive the dismantling of formal aristocratic institutions. When Anti-Federalists used the term "aristocracy," they meant something quite different from the conventional aristocracy of the Old World. Though formal aristocratic orders would not exist in the new republic, America would remain threatened by an oligarchic elite consisting of "birth, education, talents, and wealth," a class that would tend to monopolize political power. This class, which Anti-Federalists insisted on calling an aristocracy, would lack the trappings of European nobility but would nonetheless enjoy distinctions "as visible and of as much influence as titles, stars and garters."
The problem of aristocracy was among the chief points of contention during the ratification debates of 1788, as Federalists and Anti-Federalists argued the merits of the proposed Constitution. The tension reached a peak at the New York State Ratifying Convention, when Alexander Hamilton vigorously assaulted the notion that an aristocracy existed in America. The fiercely ambitious, self-made Hamilton, who by the age of thirty-three had bootstrapped himself from obscure origins to wealth and notoriety, dismissed his opponents' fears of aristocracy as mere paranoia. It was true that some men were distinguished by qualities such as wealth and wisdom and that others were not, but such distinctions alone did not set men apart from one another politically. Not only did the Constitution proscribe titles of nobility, it also drew no political distinction between social or economic classes. In this context it was delusional to describe the American elite as an ominous ruling class. "This description, I presume to say, is ridiculous. The image is a phantom. Does the new government render a rich man more eligible than a poor one? No."
Roughly eighteen months before Hamilton dismissed his opponents' fears of oligarchy, John Adams had begun work on his three-volume Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America. The Defence was motivated by a variety of events and provocations, but among Adams's chief goals from the very outset was that of articulating the threat that aristocracy had posed to political communities throughout history. In the midst of a democratic-republican revolution that was transforming the Atlantic world, Adams sought to impress upon reformers and revolutionaries his conviction that the power of social and economic elites would not vanish with the abolition of formal titles of nobility.
Adams was still in Europe when Hamilton stood up at the New York Ratifying Convention to deny the presence of an oligarchic threat. We can only imagine how the distinguished New Englander might have responded. We know that he was, by that time, a firm supporter of the proposed Constitution; however, he probably would have objected to the view of Hamilton and others that the Constitution would be invulnerable to domination by elites. In fact, the likelihood of Adams's dissent from the mainstream Federalist position was suggested by the immediate Anti-Federalist rejoinder to Hamilton's argument. The rejoinder fell to upstate lawyer and merchant Melancton Smith, the leading Anti-Federalist present at the convention. Plainspoken, disheveled in appearance, and from an undistinguished family, Smith was no match for Hamilton in flair or oratory, but he persisted in warning the delegates of an oligarchic American elite. Perhaps in recognition of the mismatch in stature between Hamilton and himself, Smith defended the Anti-Federalist description of aristocracy by invoking a distinguished authority: "My idea of aristocracy is not new: — It is embraced by many writers on government: — I would refer the gentleman for a definition of it to the honorable John Adams, one of our natural aristocrats."
Indeed, close examination of Anti-Federalist writings suggests that several of the most influential Anti-Federalists drew their critique of aristocracy from Adams's Defence. Adams shared not just Melancton Smith's belief in the existence of an oligarchic elite, but also his fear that such an elite would dominate American political life. As we will see, the Defence was in large part an effort to describe the threat posed by aristocratic power, a threat that had persisted through the ages and would remain even in an age of republican equality. Aristocrats would continue to wield enough power to subvert the institutions of government, even in the context of popular sovereignty and unicameral assemblies. Eliminating the vestiges of monarchical and aristocratic orders would not solve the perennial problem of aristocratic power.
Political Heretic
John Adams's most careful readers would eventually discover that he was a sharp critic of what the ancient Greeks called oligarchy, meaning rule (arche) by the few (oligos). C. Wright Mills found in Adams a shrewd critic of the power and status of elites. Likewise, the political theorist Judith Shklar identified Adams as the source of a longstanding American tradition of decrying and criticizing elite domination.
And yet this characterization would likely have surprised many of Adams's contemporaries. By the time the debate over the proposed Constitution was raging, Adams's Defence had left many with the impression that he was committed to the aristocratic and monarchical institutions of the old world. After all, the first volume could be read as a defense of institutions resembling the British Crown and the House of Lords. Far from a critic of oligarchy, Adams appeared to be an apologist for aristocratic forms, calling for the embodiment in government of the aristocratic and monarchic elements of society. When James Madison first read Adams's Defence in the summer of 1787, he feared that that the work would "revive the predilections of this country for the British Constitution," and he wished that "the remarks in it which are unfriendly to republicanism may not receive fresh weight from the operations of our governments." Madison's cousin, the Reverend James Madison, went further. In publishing the Defence, Adams was "insidiously attempting ... to overturn our present Constitutions ... plotting Revolutions." The reverend surmised that Adams, having spent so much time abroad, had been infected by the charms of monarchy. "I fear his Optics have been too weak to withstand the Glare of European Courts."
This perception was not wholly ungrounded. Adams's Defence was a vigorous argument in favor of the ancient idea of balanced government, which the British constitution was widely thought to embody. Adams originally set out to write the work in response to a published letter penned by the celebrated French finance minister Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot. Writing in 1778, Turgot had assaulted several of the American constitutions for their seeming imitation of the British model of balanced government. With independent governors and bicameral legislatures, the configuration of power in several of the American states closely resembled the British balance between the king, the Lords, and the Commons. Instead of forming a true republic, "formed upon the equality of all citizens" and requiring that all authority be brought "into one, that of the nation," the Americans had imitated the English balance, "as if the same equilibrium of powers which has been thought necessary to balance the enormous preponderance of royalty, could be of any use in republics." Adams, from the very beginning, intended his treatise as a defense of the equilibrium of powers that Turgot so detested. His Defence was an apology of sorts, aimed at those, especially in America, who "entertained sentiments similar to these of M. Turgot."
By responding to Turgot, Adams was entering a great transatlantic debate over the merits of balanced government. Should the corrupt monarchical and aristocratic structures of Europe be replaced by something like the balanced constitution of Britain, or should reformers reject the idea of balanced government altogether in favor of a republican model of unified national sovereignty? In debating the merits of balanced government, eighteenth-century writers confronted an ancient idea elaborated most succinctly by the Greek historian Polybius. According to him, the three basic constitutional forms were each intrinsically unstable. Given time, monarchy (rule by the one), aristocracy (rule by the few), and democracy (rule by the many) would each decay, respectively, into corrupt rule by the one (tyranny), the few (oligarchy), or the many (mob rule). The key to avoiding corrupt government was to replace "simple and uniform" constitutions with a balanced form that brought together "all the good and distinctive features of the best governments." Such a scheme ensured that "none of the principles should grow unduly and be perverted into its allied evil." Balanced government prevented decay by way of a balance of power that neutralized "the force of each" against that of the others.
In the Atlantic world of the eighteenth century, the British constitution stood as a living example of the ancient theory. Beginning in the seventeenth century, it had become common for Englishmen to understand the institutions of the king, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons in terms of the classical theory of balanced government. The British system gained an international reputation in the mid-eighteenth century with the publication of Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws. For Montesquieu, as for many English interpreters, the British constitution had avoided domination by the democratic element of society by instituting a "body of the nobles" as a separate part of the legislative power. "In a state," he wrote, "there are always some people who are distinguished by birth, wealth, or honors." If mixed with the common people in a single chamber of government, men of this class would lose interest in the state. Most acts of legislation would oppose them, and therefore "the common liberty would be their enslavement and they would have no interest in defending it." The only way to keep the nobles attached to government was to follow the British example and erect a House of Lords, a body that would grant them political advantages proportionate to their social advantages.
Whereas radical French reformers like Turgot and Condorcet rejected this line of reasoning, Montesquieu's praise of the British constitution became a bedrock for the conservative Anglomanes. To give one prominent example, Montesquieu's theory was presented to the Constituent Assembly of 1789 by the Anglomane politician Gérard de Lally-Tollendal. In the first concrete plan submitted to the assembly, Lally-Tollendal proposed a second legislative chamber whose members would be appointed for life by the king. Defending his proposal in the terms of Montesquieu's doctrine, Lally-Tollendal argued that by dividing legislative power among competing social elements, the constitution would strike a perfect equilibrium, thereby avoiding domination by any single class interest.
John Adams's readers would understandably interpret his Defence as aligned with the Anglomane thought of the period. From the first pages of the work, Adams drew quite heavily on Jean Louis De Lolme's The Constitution of England. And indeed, Adams's Defence would itself become something of a touchstone for European Anglomanes. When Gérard de LallyTollendal proposed an English-style system of balanced government to the French Constituent Assembly in 1789, he appealed to Adams's Defence for support.
Adams's association with Anglomane ideas was especially damning considering that by the late 1780s the intellectual current of the Atlantic world had turned decisively against notions of balanced government. It was an ideological turn centuries in the making. Advocates of absolute sovereignty, such as Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes, had argued powerfully against the division of governmental power among social classes. Stable and authoritative rule required that legislative authority emanate from a single, undivided source. And by the late eighteenth century, the absolutist line of argument took a democratic turn as arguments for a united, popular sovereignty gained widespread appeal. Across Europe and even in the American colonies prior to the Revolution, the role of nobility in society and politics faced heightened scrutiny as noble status became increasingly associated with monetary wealth and as nobles were increasingly viewed as using their privileged access to government to multiply personal fortunes. To divide up the people's sovereignty and to grant a part of it to a self-dealing nobility was an insult to republicanism. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau put it, defenders of balanced government were like those Japanese conjurers who "cut a child to pieces before the eyes of the audience; then, throwing all the members one by one into the air, they cause the child to fall back again, alive and perfectly reassembled." Rousseau intimated that even if a child could survive such a stunt, a republican political community would not be so lucky.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1 A Perennial Problem 23
2 The Goods of Fortune 58
3 Sympathy for the Rich 95
4 Dignified Democracy 124
Conclusion: American Oligarchy 148
Notes 155
Bibliography 193
Index 205
What People are Saying About This
John Adams and the Fear of American Oligarchy is a most timely, valuable, and enlightening book. It shows conclusively that Adams was one of the sharpest critics of oligarchy among the American founders and, indeed, in the history of political thought. The book will generate much-needed discussion in political thought, American political studies, and contemporary democratic theory.
—John McCormick, University of Chicago
Remarkably well-written and astonishingly lucid, John Adams and the Fear of American Oligarchy makes an absolutely central point about Adams’s thought, persuasively reestablishing him as a genuine democrat in his ultimate sympathies.
—Sanford Levinson, University of Texas Law School
A needed examination of Adams’s political thought on wealth-based aristocracy.
—Choice