Peter's Reviews > John Adams

In 2003, the late Historian of American Intellectual Thought, John Patrick Diggins wrote a political biography of John Adams in The American Presidents Series. Similar to the other books in The American Presidents series, Diggins’s biography of John Adams is short, compelling, and well-researched. Diggens’s book has an introduction that introduces themes and the focus of Diggens’s biography. Diggens is interested in the political philosophy of John Adams. Diggins considers John Adams one of the political philosophers of the early United States (19). Diggens writes, "early American political culture involved a struggle among three competing visions. Jefferson looked to the many, Hamilton to the few, and Adams the one, a strong executive who would mediate between the democratic masses and a wealthy aristocracy” (18). Diggins summarizes the early life of John Adams but is mainly focused on his presidency. This book includes a Timeline. The book is also interested in why the Federalist party compared to the Jeffersonian political party which dominated American political life from 1800 until 1828 until the rise of the political party around Andrew Jackson. Diggens argues that the political ideology of John Adams did not die out with his defeat in the election of 1800 but morphed into a strand of the political ideology of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (181, 194). Diggens sees the political ideology of Theodore Roosevelt to be a “fulfillment” of John Adams’s political ideology (191). On a side note, Steve of the blog, My Journey through the Best Presidential Biographies has excellent reviews of several of The American Presidents series biographies.