A defence of the constitutions of government of the United States of America: Against the Attack of M. Turgot in his Letter to Dr. Price, Dated the twenty-second day of March, 1778
Contributions
- John Adams
- author
- Charles Dilly
- publisher
- John Stockdale
- publisher
Related resources
- has translation
- Défense des constitutions américaines, ou De la nécessité d’une balance dans les pouvoirs d’un gouvernement libre, par M. John Adams: Avec des Notes et Observations de M. de la Croix, Professeur de Droit Public au Lycée translation has paratext
Notes
Adams was prompted to write his 'Defence' to refute Turgot's charge that the American constitution was too slavishly inspired from Britain.
Stockdale jointly published volumes two and three. It was reprinted in 1794 on Stockdale's initiative since, "Your work on Government has never yet had fair play". (E. Stockdale, p.82)
According to R.R. Palmer, pioneer of the Transatlantic approach to the French Revolution, Adams' 'Defence' was just as anti-aristocratic in approach as the ideas promoted by A.R.J. Turgot, the idol of the 'américanistes', yet this opinion was not shared by contemporaries on the other side of the Atlantic. This grouping centred around Mazzei, Condorcet, Dupont de Nemours and La Fayette strongly opposed Adams' arguments in favour of the division of powers found within the British constitution as the best model of constitutional government, preferring instead to promote their own bicameral form of government.
Adams' main theme was that democracy could not work, that elites were inevitable, and so stability demanded that a constitutional position be given to them. Far from being a defence of America's newly formulated state constitutions, Adams' treatise held up the English constitution as the only defensible form of government.
See R.R. Palmer, 'The Age of Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760-1800' (1959-64, Princeton University Press), vol.1, pp.267-82; and D.O. Thomas, 'The honest mind: the thought and work of Richard Price' (OUP, 1977), pp.170-78.