John Adams, Adam Smith, and the Passion for Distinction

Of the major American founders, the one who was most perennially disliked by his peers was undoubtedly John Adams. 

The most unpopular writing of this unpopular figure was his Discourses on Davila, a series of thirty-two essays that were published serially between April 1790 and April 1791 in the Federalist-leaning Gazette of the United States, and eventually collected in book form.[1] Adams later marveled that he had had “the courage to oppose and publish his own opinions to the universal opinion of America, and, indeed, of all mankind,” and recalled that these essays “powerfully operated to destroy his popularity.”[2]

The Discourses were meant to speak to the current state of political affairs in America and France, but they took the form, at least initially, of a translation (from the French version) and commentary on Enrico Caterino Davila’s Historia delle guerre civili di Francia (1630), an account of the wars of religion in sixteenth-century France. After a single essay on Davila, however, Adams abruptly shifted course, with little explanation, to embark on a broader rumination on “the constitution of the human mind,” which occupied the next dozen essays.[3] Once he had said his piece on that score, he returned, with similar suddenness and similarly little explanation, to his loose translation of Davila for most of the remaining nineteen installments. Altogether, it was, as Arthur O. Lovejoy comments, “a very Adamsy performance.”[4]

For students of the history of moral and political thought, one of the most noteworthy features of the Discourses is that Adams’s digression on human nature draws heavily on the moral psychology of Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments.[5] Adams not only follows Smith closely in much of his analysis, but also quotes the bulk of part 1, section 3, chapter 2 of Smith’s work, titled “Of the Origin of Ambition, and of the Distinction of Ranks”—more than five straight pages’ worth.[6] Adams never actually names Smith, but rather refers to him simply as “a great writer.”[7] 

Shortly before the Discourses began to appear, we know, Adams had told his twenty-two-year-old son, John Quincy, about “a sett of Scotch Writers that I think deserve your Attention in a very high Degree,” as their works include “Speculations in Morals Politicks and Law that are more luminous, than any other I have read.” He singled out, among others, “Adam Smith … both his Theory of Moral Sentiments and his Wealth of Nations.”[8]

The main theme from The Theory of Moral Sentiments that Adams picks up in the Discourses—and proceeds to ponder for some fifty pages—is what he calls “the passion for distinction”: the desire to be sympathized with or taken notice of, and above all to be honored, to stand out.[9] In the view of both Smith and Adams, this passion is a deep-rooted feature of human nature, one that drives a great deal of human behavior. Smith writes, in the final paragraph that Adams excerpts, that “place, that great object which divides the wives of aldermen, is the end of half the labours of human life; and is the cause of all the tumult and bustle, all the rapine and injustice, which avarice and ambition have introduced into this world.”[10] Adams likewise contends that the “desire of the attention, consideration, and congratulations of our fellow men … is the great spring of social activity,” and indeed that “the history of mankind is little more than a simple narration of its operation and effects.”[11] The analyses of this passion that both Smith and Adams offer are sufficiently rich that it is impossible to do justice to them within the span of a short essay. We can, however, take note of a few of the highlights.

One observation that Smith makes, and which Adams reiterates, is that people are much more likely to notice and admire the rich and well-born than the poor, and that this imbalance of sympathy is the main reason why people desire wealth at all. In the third essay, Adam writes that “the labor and anxiety … that are voluntarily undertaken in pursuit of gain, are out of all proportion to the utility, convenience, or pleasure of riches. A competence to satisfy the wants of nature, food and clothes, a shelter from the seasons, and the comforts of a family, may be had for very little.” 

The principal reason why people want to be rich, then, is that they know that riches “attract the complaisance of the public,” whereas poverty causes people to be “neglected and despised,” such that a poor person “in the midst of a crowd … is in as much obscurity as he would be in a garret or a cellar.”[12] Each of these statements closely mirrors not only the argument but also the very wording of The Theory of Moral Sentiments.[13] (There are quite a few passages in the Discourses that would fail to get past a plagiarism detector, if they were written today.)

Another reflection of Smith’s that Adams echoes is that the desire for honor or distinction often causes people to behave in ways that work against their own happiness. Smith speaks of “all that toil, all that anxiety, all those mortifications which must be undergone in the pursuit of [greatness]; and what is of yet more consequence, all that leisure, all that ease, all that careless security, which are forfeited for ever by the acquisition.”[14] Adams makes a similar point in his eighth essay, just before the long excerpt from Smith. “There is scarce any truth more certain, or more evident, than that the noblesse of Europe are, in general, less happy than the common people,” he remarks, while kings themselves “have the least exercise of their inclinations, the least personal liberty, and the least free indulgence of their passions, of any men alive. Yet … how universal is the ambition to be noble, and the wish to be royal.”[15] (Here too our plagiarism detector finds a close match: Adams writes that people tend to “consider the condition of the great in all those delusive colors, in which the imagination can paint and gild it,” whereas Smith had written that people tend to “consider the condition of the great, in those delusive colours in which the imagination is apt to paint it.”)[16]

One area where Adams moves well beyond Smith is in his meditation on the implications and uses of the passion for distinction in the political realm. He writes, in the second essay, that “it is a principal end of government to regulate this passion, which in its turn becomes a principal means of government. It is the only adequate instrument of order and subordination in society, and alone commands effectual obedience to laws.”[17] 

Adams’s emphasis on the political side of this passion is unsurprising, given that he was primarily a political actor rather than a professor of moral philosophy like Smith—it is truly remarkable that he was the vice president of the United States when he took the time to compose these learned essays—but it was this aspect of the Discourses that provoked the ire of his contemporaries. 

Three of Adams’s arguments on this score are particularly worth noting, which we can take in order of increasing obnoxiousness.

The main political lesson that Adams draws from his analysis is one that he had drawn, and would continue to draw, throughout his career. Because the thirst for distinction is so powerful and so universal, he posits, in all societies—no matter how republican—there will always be a divide between the few and the many, the rich and the poor, the eminent and the obscure, and the only way to manage the conflict between these orders is to institutionalize them by creating two branches within the legislature, one popular and one quasi-aristocratic, along with an independent executive who can maintain the equilibrium between the two. Adams proclaims that “balancing the poor against the rich in the legislature” is “the great art of lawgiving” and even “the essence of a free government.”[18] He regarded this argument as a vindication of the new U.S. Constitution, with its House of Representatives, Senate, and presidency, but his claims about the inevitability of aristocracy ran decidedly against the more democratic or populist inclinations of the nascent Jeffersonian Republicans and (even more) the French revolutionaries.[19]

Another conclusion that Adams reaches in the Discourses is that there is much to be gained by conducting governments with a degree of splendor and ceremony, and by bestowing grand titles on the highest political offices. A balanced government, he argues, can only be “obtained and preserved” by “some signs or other of distinction and degree.”[20] Such visible marks of rank are necessary, in his view, both to induce the most capable individuals to serve in public office and to confer on them the proper sense of dignity. These arguments harkened back to Adams’s proposal in the Senate, just a year or so earlier, that President Washington should be addressed by a suitably majestic title—something along the lines of “His Highness, the President of the United States of America, and Protector of Their Liberties.”[21] Predictably, Adams was mocked for all of this. His detractors dubbed him “His Rotundity” and suggested that his time at Versailles and the Court of St. James’s had left him infatuated with the trappings of monarchy—an accusation that was not just unfair but also somewhat ironic, given Adams’s middling background and stern republican (even puritanical) disposition.

A final moral that Adams draws from his analysis—the most controversial one of all—is that it is often useful for governments to include a hereditary element. He makes this point most directly in the thirty-second and final essay, one that was printed in the Gazette of the United States but (tellingly) not included in the later compilation of the Discourses. Adams notes there that because so many people yearn for high political office and the glory that comes with it, elections to such offices frequently produce a great deal of instability, factionalism, corruption, and discord, which is why most societies throughout history had concluded that “hereditary succession was attended with fewer evils than frequent elections.” He then declares, in his own name, that “this is the true answer, and the only one, as I believe.”[22] 

Nor was this essay an anomaly: Adams had repeatedly predicted, in his correspondence over the previous year or two, that the United States would eventually have to introduce hereditary institutions into its political order, perhaps in the relatively near future.[23]

Adams’s alleged apostasy from republicanism in the Discourses would be used against him in the 1796 presidential election, when he was depicted by the Republican press as an unabashed monarchist who hoped to assume the presidency and then institute hereditary rule in order to pave the way for his son, John Quincy. Such charges were, however, not enough to prevail against his status as the “colossus of independence” and Washington’s vice president. Adams would go on to become one of the least loved presidents that America has ever had, thereby at once succeeding grandly and failing miserably in his own lifelong quest for honor and esteem.

——

[1] See John Adams, Discourses on Davila, in The Works of John Adams, ed. Charles Francis Adams (Boston: Little and Brown, 1851), 6:221–403.

[2] Adams, Discourses on Davila, 227.

[3] Adams, Discourses on Davila, 232. 

[4] Arthur O. Lovejoy, Reflections on Human Nature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1961), 197.

[5] On this connection, see Glory M. Liu, Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2022), 61-66; and Luke Mayville, John Adams and the Fear of American Oligarchy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), chapter 3. Strangely, Adams’s use of The Theory of Moral Sentiments in the Discourses is not so much as mentioned in the lone book devoted to these two figures: John E. Hill, Democracy, Equality, and Justice: John Adams, Adam Smith, and Political Economy (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2007).

[6] See Adams, Discourses on Davila, 257-62. For the chapter in Smith, see Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), 50-61.

[7] Adams, Discourses on Davila, 257.

[8] John Adams to John Quincy Adams, 19 February 1790. John Quincy’s diary indicates that he had already checked The Theory of Moral Sentiments out of the Harvard library some years earlier: see Diary of John Quincy Adams, 17 November 1786.

[9] Adams, Discourses on Davila, 232.

[10] Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 57.

[11] Adams, Discourses on Davila, 245, 234.

[12] Adams, Discourses on Davila, 237–39.

[13] See Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 50–51.

[14] Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 51.

[15] Adams, Discourses on Davila, 257.

[16] Adams, Discourses on Davila, 257; and Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 51.

[17] Adams, Discourses on Davila, 234.

[18] Adams, Discourses on Davila, 280.

[19] Adams writes in the eleventh essay that “a well-balanced constitution, such as that of our Union purports to be, ought … to be cordially supported by every good citizen, as our only hope of peace and our ark of safety.” Adams, Discourses on Davila, 269. However, we know from his correspondence that he believed the framers should have made the presidency stronger and the Senate weaker. See, for instance, John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, 6 December 1787; and John Adams to Roger Sherman, 18 July 1789.

[20] Adams, Discourses on Davila, 270; see also essay four more broadly.

[21] See James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, 23 May 1789.

[22] John Adams, “The 32nd Discourse on Davila,” ed. Zoltán Haraszti, in William and Mary Quarterly 11.1 (January 1954), 90. See also Adams, Discourses on Davila, 249.

[23] See, for instance, John Adams to Benjamin Rush, 9 June 1789; and John Adams to Benjamin Rush, 24 July 1789.