John Adams and the Prophets of Progress

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The reader of this book will be listening in on conversations between John Adams and the 18th-century English and French writers—Bolingbroke, Rousseau, Voltaire, Turgot, and a dozen others—whose books he read. For as he read, Adams kept up a lively argument through the penetrating remarks he wrote down in the margins of his books, thus recording what amounted to real dialogues with their authors. Here are these dialogues: brief excerpts from the text, accompanied by Adams’ notes, with sagacious commentary by Zoltan Haraszti. This book presents the most important material about Adams and his political and religious thought that has come to light in the past sixty years—and it makes fascinating reading.