Against The Delirium Of 1789 |
Against The Delirium Of 1789
John Adams, Edmund Burke, and the conservative case against utopian politics.
Lars Møller | October 21, 2026
From Wikimedia Commons: John Adams (John Trumbull, 1792)
The French Revolution staged the loss of theoretical innocence in modern Western politics—the moment in history when abstract speculation about human perfectibility first seized the levers of power and proceeded to liquidate the inherited architecture of society.
John Adams and Edmund Burke, working from distinct national and intellectual traditions, identified the cultural rupture with striking convergence. Their shared assessment—rooted in a sober estimate of human nature, a defense of institutional continuity, and a rejection of utopian redesign—retains its force precisely because the West continues to flirt with the same revolutionary fantasies under new ideological banners. The conservative insistence on limits, inheritance, and prudence is not a museum piece; it is a standing warning against the recurrent temptation to treat society as raw material for theoretical reconstruction.
Adams approached the events of 1789 with the instincts of a New Englander steeped in Calvinist anthropology and classical republicanism. He had never required Burke’s example. His political thought matured independently through the experience of framing state constitutions and through a lifelong meditation on the imbalance of human passions. Where Jefferson celebrated the French upheaval as the extension of 1776, Adams saw in it the familiar pattern of enthusiasm unchecked by structure. He judged the attempt at sudden and total social transformation “absurd, ridiculous or delirious,” comparable to the delusions of Cervantes’s knight. The core of his critique lay in the conviction that liberty without institutional restraints dissolves into license and then into despotism. Popular sovereignty, left unmediated by a mixed government of separated and balanced powers, invites the very tyranny it claims to abolish.
Adams’s consistency is noteworthy: the same mind that drafted the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, with its carefully calibrated checks, later as president resisted the Federalist war-hawks who sought open conflict with revolutionary France. The Treaty of Mortefontaine of 1800,........