In this second volume of A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, John Adams continues his argument against Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot and his theories of "collecting all authority into one center."

Delving into the Italian republics of the middle age, Adams uses pure history, extensive extracts from the works of Italian historians, to demonstrate to the American people, and the world, that the same tumult, corruption and blood that so pervaded those governments of the past, would be the effects of any government so constituted.