Book Review: John Adams and the Fear of American Oligarchy, by Luke Mayville

• Author: Jeremy D. Bailey
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591717725301
• Date: 01 December 2018
• Published date: 01 December 2018
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

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Political Theory 46(6)
history of the people and the cultural traditions of its citizens. Power
always moves within the borders of its symbolic mediation. In people’s
minds, power is always imagined, shaped as it is by the ever-changing
configuration of their affective life and their reasonableness. The truth of
the (social) ontology of power is that society is a self-organizing system
that is able to construct itself by depending on the way people imagine
and understand the role they play in it. Spinoza belongs among the first
thinkers who formulated a non-normative liberal policy, based on the rec-
ognition of the self-organizing possibilities of the multitude. This princi-
ple, as Saar’s clear and profound book convincingly shows, is still a
productive contribution to contemporary discussions of politics, power,
and democracy.
John Adams and the Fear of American Oligarchy, by Luke Mayville. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2016. 232 pp.
Reviewed by: Jeremy D. Bailey, Department of Political Science, University of Houston,
Houston, TX, USA
DOI: 10.1177/0090591717725301
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 distinctive-
ness, 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

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Book Reviews
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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...