Politics & Power Quote by John Adams

Adams compresses an entire political fear into eight words: that power, left to personality, becomes a mood swing with uniforms. "A government of laws, and not of men" is less a civics slogan than a warning flare from a revolutionary who had watched kings rule by whim and colonies get jerked around by patronage, favoritism, and "exceptions" for the well-connected.

The phrasing is doing deliberate work. "Of laws" signals impersonality: rules that apply even when the ruler is angry, charismatic, beloved, or convinced of his own virtue. "Not of men" is pointedly plural, because Adams isn't only swatting at monarchs; he's side-eyeing factions, demagogues, and even fellow patriots. The subtext is suspicious of human nature in office. He assumes leaders will rationalize self-interest as necessity, and crowds will forgive it if the leader feels like "one of us". So the antidote isn't better men. It's constraints.

Context matters: Adams helped draft the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, where this ideal appears in spirit and structure. The early republic was improvising legitimacy, trying to replace inherited authority with procedures that could survive succession. Laws become the continuity technology. Courts, legislatures, written constitutions, due process: boring on purpose.

There's also a quiet admission here about democracy's vulnerability. Popular government doesn't automatically defeat arbitrary power; it can simply redistribute it. Adams is staking the republic's moral claim on predictability, not purity. The line endures because it names the central bargain of liberal governance: we trade some speed and drama for a system sturdy enough to restrain our heroes and our villains.