SOURCE: “John Adams and the New Republican Synthesis,” in Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination, Harvard University Press, 1992, pp. 188-209.

In the following essay, Appleby traces the changes in Adams's political philosophy from the time of the American Revolution to the publication of his Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America in 1787.

Early American historians have created a new republican synthesis which attempts to explain how colonial agitators became Founding Fathers.¹ The historians who have produced this synthesis began by exploring the central role which certain key ideas had in shaping the revolutionary events from the 1760s to the close of the eighteenth century. They also have moved toward an understanding of the interaction of thought and action. The resulting synthesis is a blend of idealist and behaviorist concepts in which ideas are seen as having operative force through their control of...