JOHN ADAMS AND THE SPIRIT OF LIBERTY America's finest eighteenth-century student of political science,  John Adams is also the least studied of the Revolution's key figures. By the  time he became our second president, no American had written more about our  government and not even Jefferson or Madison had read as widely about questions  of human nature, natural right, political organization, and constitutional  construction. Yet this staunch constitutionalist is perceived by many as having  become reactionary in his later years and his ideas have been largely  disregarded. In the first major work on Adams's political thought in over thirty years, C.  Bradley Thompson takes issue with the notion that Adams's thought is irrelevant  to the development of American ideas. Focusing on Adams's major writings,  Thompson elucidates and reevaluates his political and constitutional thought by  interpreting it within the tradition of political philosophy stretching from  Plato to Montesquieu. This major revisionist study shows that the distinction Adams drew between  "principles of liberty" and "principles of political architecture" is central to  his entire political philosophy. Thompson first chronicles Adams's  conceptualization of moral and political liberty during his confrontation with  American Loyalists and British imperial officers over the true nature of justice  and the British Constitution, illuminating Adams's two most important pre- Revolutionary essays, "A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law" and "The  Letters of Novanglus." He then presents Adams's debate with French philosophers  over the best form of government and provides an extended analysis of his  Defence of the Constitutions of Government and Discourses on Davila to  demonstrate his theory of political architecture. From these pages emerges a new John Adams. In reexamining his political thought,  Thompson reconstructs the contours and influences of Adams's mental universe,  the ideas he challenged, the problems he considered central to constitution- making, and the methods of his reasoning. Skillfully blending history and  political science, Thompson's work shows how the spirit of liberty animated  Adams's life and reestablishes this forgotten Revolutionary as an independent  and important thinker. This book is part of the American Political Thought series.