John Adams's Montesquieuean Moment
Enlightened Historicism in the Discourses on Davila
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5306331 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jonathan Green (0000-0002-0143-181X, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2016 |
| Volume | 77 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 227-251 |
| Publication date | 2016-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of the History of Ideas (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0022-5037 • E-ISSN: 1086-3222 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/jhi.2016.0016 |
| PMID | 27763406 |
| OpenAlex | W2427692923 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 5 |
At the outset of the French Revolution John Adams penned a series of Discourses of Davila, philosophical ruminations on the sixteenth-century French Wars of Religion. Recent historians have read these Discourses in terms of Adams's Machiavellianism-his conviction that men's passions lead to violence, if unrestrained. But this reading overlooks the extent to which Adams intended his Discourses as a particular investigation into the French nation's character, and into whether the revolutionaries could lay claim to a native, French tradition of mixed constitutional government. Situating the Discourses vis-à-vis Adams's contemporaneous reading of Montesquieu, this article argues for an underappreciated historicist dimension to his thought
Art · Character (mathematics) · Conviction · Epistemology · Historicism · Literature · New Historicism · Passions · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Reading (process) · American Constitutional Law and Politics · European Political History Analysis · Law · Philosophy · Political Theory and Influence · Psychology · Religious studies
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |