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.