“Unlocking Humanity: The Surprising Secret Behind What Makes Us Truly Human”
But going back to the idea that humans are gonna human and you’ve got to account for that, much more significant in his system were the extreme checks and balances on every branch of power, and sometimes, as with the bicameral legislature, even checks within itself.
In all, as he so aptly put, attempting to make a “government of laws, not of men”, and one where the government was designed to promote the well-being of all its citizens, not just those in charge or the elite of a society.
So this brings us back to the question of what specifically did he come up with then? Well, see if this sounds familiar to you. To begin with, he proposed a three branched government comprising the executive branch, a bicameral (two house) legislature, and a judicial branch, with each branch having a check on the others.
For just one example here, unique among the colonies at the time was the existence of a governor elected by the people, not the legislature, and giving that governor veto power as an additional check against the legislature. At the time in most of the colonies, their constitutions had power largely concentrated in the legislatures who would in turn elect their chief executives, but this system could be, and indeed was at the time, being heavily abused in some of the colonies. But with Adams’ system, this allowed the people to choose that head honcho, who could then check the legislature, and, to an extent, the legislature checking that person in turn.
Adams first proposed something like this general system in his pamphlet Thoughts on Government, which heavily influenced several state constitutions including Virginia, New York, and, of course, Massachusetts. A half philosophical and half practical document, he begins,
