Richard Alan Ryerson's magnificent new book, John Adams's Republic: The One, The Few, and the Many, is both humbling and inspiring in its unsurpassed mastery of the political thought of one of the principal American founders. It is now easily the leading book on Adams, and, more generally, the new standard for future scholarship on Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, and Washington.

Ryerson argues that Adams was “an original,” someone who “appears to resemble no other person of his time and place” (416). What sets Ryerson's account apart from others is his comprehensive description of the development of Adams's ideas over time. Rather than dwelling on the normative implications of Adams's ideas, Ryerson gives us over five hundred pages devoted to what Adams believed and when he believed it, emphasizing what made Adams different to his equally famous contemporaries. Specifically, Ryerson focusses the lens on Adams's view of aristocracy and his understanding of the executive.

With the confident patience of the editor who knows when and why his subject spent energy on a document, Ryerson guides the reader to pivotal moments in Adams's intellectual development, pointing to where political events on the ground affected (and in some cases were affected by) Adams's judgment with respect to constitutional design. For example, Ryerson writes that Adams's 1772 oration at Braintree was the “fullest expression of his developing constitutional thought” between 1766 and 1773 (92). Yet Adams the “provincial lawyer from Massachusetts” became “an American” by 1775 (125), and with this movement “his understanding of the constitutional foundation of a free state had fundamentally changed” (100). Namely, Adams now argued as Novanglus that Massachusetts was an independent republic connected to the British republic by the king. According to Ryerson, the source for this new argument was James Harrington, whose Commonwealth of Oceana “offered Adams something that Sidney and Locke could not: a clear link to a republican past” (147). Thus Adams “moved beyond the dominion basis of colonial America” and now argued the “far more radical” claim that the relationship between the colonies and the British monarch had always been voluntary (151). Ryerson shows that this development in Adams's understanding of empire strengthened the foundation for his unique view of republican constitutionalism, but it also presaged a transition in Adams's standing in his own country. Adams moved from the periphery of American thinking to its center in 1776, but then America moved away from Adams.

Unlike his contemporaries, Adams described England as a republic. Ryerson shows that Adams was able to call England a republic in part because he was less committed to separation of powers than were other Americans. Rather, Adams consistently wrote of three legislative branches. In this, he considered the executive as part of the legislative power, and thus his unrelenting emphasis on the veto. Adams succeeded in placing the veto in the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 and therefore in influencing the Federal Convention of 1787, but he was less successful in convincing fellow Americans that the executive “must be,” as Ryerson puts it, “an integral and acknowledged part of the legislative power” (230). By giving the executive a recognized role in the legislative process, the Constitution would encourage an alliance between the executive and democrats against aristocrats. Because aristocrats normally “overawe the people's representatives in popular assemblies,” the executive veto was needed as security against aristocracy run amok (311). What Ryerson shows, then, is that Adams's fear of aristocracy culminated not only in his insistence on an upper house for aristocrats but also in an empowered executive. In particular, because the legislative power was sovereign, not the people, the executive's participation in legislation was absolutely necessary.

It should also be noted that Ryerson's book is filled with gems for students of Adams. Ryerson concludes that Adams probably did not study “anything remotely resembling political theory” as a student at Harvard (29). He suggests that Adams was a “social climber,” and, by the 1770s, “on the basis of both his public and private writings, the quiet judgment can only be that John Adams indeed regarded himself as an aristocrat” (413). He points out that Adams should not be credited with the American innovation of submitting a constitution for special ratification; rather, that credit belongs to Massachusetts more broadly because Adams did not have a hand in drafting that part of the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 (228). He also notes that Adams's Defense shows that Adams revealed an “utter misunderstanding” of democracy in Athens (301). These are just a few examples that stood out for this reader.

As to what is missing, some readers might expect more comparison with Adams's contemporaries. For example, Ryerson makes much of Adams's creation of a strong executive, by which he mostly means a veto. But he does not spend much time on the New York Constitution of 1777 or on Jefferson's Constitutional drafts in 1776, which did not propose a veto but were nonetheless ahead of Adams in other ways with regard to a strong executive. There are other places where comparison with Jefferson would have sharpened and deepened Ryerson's account. But this is asking more from a book that already does more than seems possible. Ryerson's book is a monumental achievement and a testament to a lifetime of careful and serious scholarship.