A Revoir to the Lords

Yesterday, in the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/08/world/europe/08britain.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

England is considering subjecting the House of Lords to elections. From the standpoint of our research over the last month, this is the institution that Adams thought was essential to a balance of powers in the UK, along with the monarch. If England makes the House of Lords based on election, will it mean that the ideals of the French Revolution have overtaken England, in the end? Was the opposition of Adams for nothing?

Conservatism and Sexual Revolution

Previous comments from previous posts, which are very insightful, have led me to take a second look at an aspect of Adams's biography, his arrival to France for the first time as a diplomat.

The biographer, Shaw, explains that Adams was struck by how forthright a bourgeois French lady was about physical intimacy. He also described certain delights that took place in the theater.

What Shaw indicates, is that Adams was ambiguous about this situation. He describes in his letters how much he delighted in these situations. He never seemed to fully repent of them, though, he did not like what he saw in the libertine behavior of Franklin in Paris.

At the same time, he never seemed to speak of in his letters the moral decadence of France leading up to the Revolution. Voltaire and his associates were clearly engaged in a campaign to subvert French morals. The story of Adams on his arrival to France seems to indicate that Adams was ambiguous about France. He did not seem to identify this as part of the problem leading up to the French Revolution. He saw it more as one that involved a lack of knowledge about political institutions.

Is there a blindness here? In other letters, Adams seems aware of the need for a moral order to uphold any constitution. Though, he does not seem to be concerned about the ambiguous at best moral order in France on his arrival. In his critiques of the revolution, he tends to emphasize more the political failings, not the failings of the moral life of France.

Progressivism and the French Revolution

I have before me a book titled "The Progressive Revolution." I have not read it yet, but just the back cover tells us that the dichotomy that was set up during the french revolution persists in the US to this day. The book says that it want to examine the revolution known as progressivism. IT opposes itself to this revolution. The counterrevolution is a return to natural rights, limited government, separation of powers, and constitutionalism. The revolution is committed to progressivism, centralization, unlimited government, and direct democracy.

This mirrors the general positions leading up to and during the French Revolution. John Adams saw himself on the side of the Anglomanes, who advocated bicameralism and constitutional checks and balances. Jefferson saw himself more on the side of the Gallomanes, who advocated a national, unified, central legislature as the center of power.

These debates persist.