C. Bradley Thompson

A clarion call from one of America's most profound historians of our Revolutionary and Founding periods to rediscover and fight for our incredibly radical intellectual heritage. This collection of essays and primary sources is like a salve, antidote, and nectar all at once. Whether you're a historian who needs the occasional reminder that others are also pulling in the same direction, or a young person interested in whether there is (or can be) any kind of credible answer to Howard Zinn, the 1619 Project, et al, that doesn't come from the religious right or a similarly unserious source--this is the book you need to get, read, and reread right now. Your life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness may very well depend upon it!… (more)

Thompson's selection of aboloitionist essays chronicles the ideological transitions leading up to the Civil War within the movement itself. Authors range from William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, to Abraham Lincoln. What's interesting to take away from this collection is the manner in which they went about trying to end slavery. In seeing the need to make redress for the wrongs done to an individual's rights, the abolitionist movement implemented a number of methods in order to affect political change. Learning about what exactly they did to secure what was right could be used and applied to many current political issues of our day.

The methods employed ranged from moral suasion on a local level to forming an independent political party to outright rebellion. All throughout these authors were attempting to show how ideas in theory can work out in practical reality. The reason for this conviction was their overarching theme: individual rights. That a man has the right to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. And that no other man, gang, state, or government can deprive him of said rights.

This Reader was itself very easy to read and a good overall selection of abolitionist thought. The principled contrast between intellectuals today and those before them is disappointing, but there is always the fact that so long as people are receptive to the right ideas there's still hope to change for the better. As an aside, it's a shame that a good portion of the writings appeal to a supernatural basis for the Rights of Man. This shouldn't be counted against them too much since an objective demonstration for a fact based morality wouldn't come until 100 years later.… (more)

This book sets the record straight on "the neglected and often abused political thought" of John Adams. It is popular among academic historians to characterize Adams as a once-idealistic revolutionary who became cynical and conservative, and to dismiss his ideas as irrelevant to the development of American political thought. A similar view existed among many politicians and intellectuals during Adams's life.

In this thorough examination of Adams's political thought, C. Bradley Thompson—an Objectivist professor of history at Ashland University in Ohio—reveals a very different John Adams: a profound thinker, a brilliant constitutional architect and a principled, lifelong defender of liberty, whose ideas helped shape the U.S. Constitution.

The brilliance of Adams, according to Thompson, lay in his scientific approach to political science and constitutional design. While his contemporaries in France attempted to deduce proper constitutions from rationalistic "first principles," Adams undertook a systematic study of history to discover the basic causes behind successful and unsuccessful political systems. It was these inductive observations that led him to advocate such vital constitutional measures as separation of powers and checks and balances; history had shown him they would work, and logic had shown him why. Many of his proposals would later become hallmarks of the U.S. Constitution.

The extent of Adams's study and thought was staggering. Fortunately, Thompson presents his intellectual development in terms of essentials, making it readily digestible to the reader. (Still, this is an academic work, and includes a depth of analysis of this Founding Father's writings that may be too detailed for some readers.)

The author shows that most of the critics who question Adams's commitment to liberty have taken various statements out of context. By specifying the proper context, Thompson portrays Adams as an individual who devoted his entire life to discovering how to best preserve freedom in America for many generations. The author says: "I have tried to establish the status and integrity of Adams as an independent thinker, one who would not concede the truth to popular opinion as he attempted to secure the American Revolution with a just and lasting constitutional order."

However, Thompson does not address one of Adams's most notorious actions while President: the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts, which curtailed certain criticism of government officials. These were major assaults on liberty, and a defense of John Adams as a consistent advocate of freedom is incomplete without addressing them.

Despite this omission, John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty is an outstanding presentation of Adams's under-appreciated political thought, and a much-needed act of justice toward an American hero.… (more)