Just finished Founding Brothers by Joseph Ellis and recommend it.  Adams and Jefferson were the first partisans (that makes George Washington the only nonpartisan U.S. President) and were bitterly opposed, but came to find peace through correspondence in their senior years. Jefferson supported the French Revolution as a continuance of the American war. Adams found this comparison wrongheaded, and the French unfit for Republican government. Before the 12th Amendment the runner up was the VP and it was possible to have two bitter  opponents in the top two executive positions. Imagine President Trump with VP Hillary. I stumbled across this origin of the word, ‘ideology’. Also interesting to note is the French origin of ‘intellectual’ during the Dreyfus trial.  https://www.rebelyid.com/2011/04/the-origin-of-the-intellectual/

 

Founding Brothers by Joseph Ellis

Adams suggested that Jefferson had misread the meaning of the French Revolution—sincerely misread it and not just manipulated it for political purposes—because of a faulty way of thinking conveniently conveyed by the new French word, “ideology.” Napoleon had popularized the word, which had first been used by the French philosophe Destutt de Tracy, whom Jefferson had read and admired enormously. Adams claimed to be fascinated by the new word “upon the Common Principle of delight in every Thing We cannot understand.” What was an “ideology”? he asked playfully: “Does it mean Idiotism? The Science of Non Compos Menticism. The Science of Lunacy? The Theory of Delerium?” As Adams explained it, the French philosophes had invented the word, which became a central part of their utopian style of thinking and a major tenet in their “school of folly.” It referred to a set of ideals and hopes, like human perfection or social equality, that philosophers mistakenly believed could be implemented in the world because it existed in their heads. Jefferson himself thought in this French fashion, Adams claimed, confusing the seductive prospects envisioned in his imagination with the more limited possibilities history permitted. Critics of Jefferson’s visionary projections, like Adams, were then accused of rejecting the ideals themselves, when in fact they were merely exposing their illusory character.54

 

“Ideology,” then, had provided Jefferson with a politically attractive pro-French platform, which had turned out to have enormous rhetorical advantages no matter how wrong it proved in reality. Jefferson had thought that France was the wave of the future and England was a relic of the past. “I am charmed by the fluency and rapidity of your Reasoning,” Adams observed, “but I doubt your Conclusion.” England, not France, was destined to become the dominant European power of the nineteenth century, Adams correctly predicted, though he, like Jefferson, retained a deep suspicion of English designs on America, a permanent legacy of their mutual experience as American revolutionaries. “They have been taught from their Cradles to despise, scorn, insult and abuse Us,” Adams wrote of the English, adding in his most relentlessly realistic mode that “Britain will never be our Friend, till we are her Master.” Both Adams and Jefferson, it turned out, were too deeply shaped by the desperate struggle against England to foresee the Anglo-American alliance that flourished throughout the Victorian era and beyond.55

 

Ellis, Joseph J.. Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (pp. 238-239). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.  P.238

 

 

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