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John Adams On Poli-sci And Induction

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Originally posted by Felipe from d'Anconia Online,

"History is philosophy and policy teaching by example--every history must be founded in philosophy and some policy." I've been rereading John Adams & the Spirit of Liberty by C. Bradley Thompson, and I'm again hero-worshiping this incredible man, this mind behind the revolution.

One of the most important, if not the, most important things I've learned in the past two years is that one's philosophy of life must be learned through induction. That is, on sense-perception and inferences based on sense-perception. In my high school and early college days, I had wrongly found Objectivism to be a justification for having (implicitly) built the foundation of my philosophy of life with "I want" rather than "it is." That is, Objectivism was my justification for my rationalized view of the world.

In rereading Thompson's book, I caught something about John Adams that I hadn't caught before: his stubborn insistence on an inductive approach to political science. This approach struck a chord with me, so I wanted to share the relevant passage (p. 119):

At the core of John Adams's political science was the attempt to apply the scientific method of Bacon and Newton to the "moral and intellectual world." He took seriously the possibility that politics could be reduced to a science, not unlike physics or biology. In an unpublished fragment written at about the same time that the
Defense
[
of the Constitutions of Government of the United States
] was being composed, Adams set forth his methodology in direct opposition to that of the marquis de Condorcet, whom he mentions by name as his antagonist. Adams wrote his
Defense
and the
Davila
essays, in large measure, to counter the a priori hyperrationalist tradition of political science that he associated with Descartes and Condeorcet. He was suspicious, if not overtly contemptuous, of all theories, hypotheses, or conjectures that could not be demonstrated empirically or inferred from observation and the experimental laboratory of history. The scientific method associated with "Imagination," "Hypotheses," and "Conjecture" had consequences for political life that Adams found both dangerous and destructive. The rendency of such theorists was to denigrate common sense for the "fancy" and reasonings of their own genius. Against the rationalist philosophers, Adams thought that a genuine science of politics must rest on two general principles. First, the "Science of Government," he wrote, "can be learned only from experience." Indeed, he thought experience "the only Source of human knowledge." Second, the political sciences, no less than physics, ought to be "founded in or derived from Experiment." Experience and experiment, then, understood and controlled by observation, analogy, and induction--these were the tools used by Adams in establishing methodological guidelines for an empirical approach to the political sciences.

Simply amazing. In addition to this excellent book, I've been reading Polybius's The Rise of the Roman Empire. Perhaps I will have some comments on his work later.

Edited by softwareNerd
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