Long before "the one percent" became a protest slogan, American founding father John Adams feared the power of a class he called simply "the few"the rich. Mayville presents the first extended exploration of Adams's preoccupation with a problem that has a renewed urgency today: the way in which inequality threatens to corrode democracy and empower a small elite. Adams believed that wealth is politically powerful in modern societies not merely because...

Scholars have examined John Adams's writings and beliefs for generations, but no one has brought such impressive credentials to the task as Richard Alan Ryerson in John Adams's Republic. The editor-in-chief of the Massachusetts Historical Society's Adams Papers project for nearly two decades, Ryerson offers readers of this magisterial book a fresh, firmly grounded account of Adams's political thought and its development. Of all the founding fathers,...