He is distinctive within the revolutionary generation for calling attention to the fault line that ran through the middle of the Jeffersonian creed, which presumed the compatibility and coexistence of equality and freedom. Adams insisted that the freedom to pursue one’s happiness in the marketplace essentially ensured the triumph of inequality in American society. And that argument, in retrospect, is the chief source of his relevance for our ongoing debate about economic inequality, since it exposes the illusion that equality is the natural order that can be recovered by a “reset” of the
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