Luke Mayville
“John Adams & The Fear of American Oligarchy"

Friday, May 27th @ 3:00PM
1 South Main Street (brick house by Dirt Cowboy)

Talk at 3PM, discussion to follow with drinks and hors d’oeuvres provided
**Co-sponsored by the Political Economy Project and Government department


Luke Mayville, Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia's Center for American Studies, will speak about John Adams’s preoccupation with a problem that has a renewed urgency today: the way in which economic inequality threatens to corrode democracy and to bring about an oligarchy, with political power concentrated in the hands of an elite few.

At a time when many American political thinkers focused on the dangers of unchecked democracy, John Adams feared the likelihood that the United States would be dominated by a narrow class of socioeconomic elites. Against those who thought the U.S. was uniquely immune to oligarchy, and also against those who believed that elite power could be dismantled through institutional reform, Adams insisted that oligarchic power would persist in America. Mayville will consider Adams's unique theory of oligarchic power and also his suggestions for how such power might be checked in contemporary democracies.