by Jeffrey Rosen, President & CEO of the National Constitution Center
In The Pursuit of Happiness, How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America, National Constitution Center president and CEO Jeffrey Rosen offers a fascinating examination of what “the pursuit of happiness” meant to our nation’s Founders and how that famous phrase defined their lives and became the foundation of our democracy.
The Declaration of Independence identified “the pursuit of happiness” as one of our unalienable rights, along with life and liberty. Rosen profiles six of the most influential founders—Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton—to show what pursuing happiness meant in their lives.
By reading the classical Greek and Roman moral philosophers who inspired the Founders, Rosen shows us how they understood the pursuit of happiness as a quest for being good, not feeling good—the pursuit of lifelong virtue, not short-term pleasure. Among those virtues were the habits of industry, temperance, moderation, and sincerity, which the Founders viewed as part of a daily struggle for self-improvement, character development, and calm self-mastery. They believed that political self-government required personal self-government.
For all six Founders, the pursuit of virtue was incompatible with enslavement of African Americans, although the Virginians betrayed their own principles. The Pursuit of Happiness is more than an elucidation of the Declaration’s famous phrase; it is a revelatory journey into the minds of the Founders, and a deep, rich, and fresh understanding of the foundation of our democracy.
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Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center where he is host of the weekly podcast, We the People. He is also a professor of law at the George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic.
Rosen’s other books include the New York Times bestseller Conversations with RBG: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law, as well as biographies of Louis Brandeis and William Howard Taft.
Selection of frequently cited books on happiness from the founding era:
In his twenties, Benjamin Franklin organized a “club of mutual improvement”—called the Junto—where members met weekly to discuss questions of morals, politics, and philosophy.
Download The Pursuit of Happiness discussion guide as a resource to facilitate conversations and dive deeper into the book’s themes, in the spirit of Franklin.
“A study of the Founding Fathers’ search for self-mastery… In their distinguishing between being good from feeling good, the founders, Rosen hopes, may inspire readers to redefine the meaning of a good life. A thoughtful rendering of America’s history.”
“[A] fast-paced romp through early American political thought… An entertaining window on the American founders’ reading lives."
“Jeffrey Rosen found a ‘gap’ in his education, such as we all have. In filling it he has written a masterpiece of intellectual history about the Founders, renewing, we can hope, our reading of them and what they read. Here is the enriching story of how ‘pursuit of happiness’ never meant pleasure or success, but the self-governing quest, always unachieved, of virtue. This brilliant work is very new about very old ideas that refresh the spirit.”
“To understand who we are, we must begin at the beginning—which is precisely what Jeffrey Rosen does in this remarkable and timely book. By exploring how the American Founders viewed virtue and the fabled (and often misunderstood) ‘pursuit of happiness,’ Rosen offers us a much-needed reminder of the centrality of civic and personal virtue.”
“Using the classical virtues prescribed by Benjamin Franklin as a way of organizing his book, Jeffrey Rosen has put together a remarkable collection of fresh and insightful essays on the Founders. Indeed, his book may be the best and most readable introduction to the ideas of the Founders that we have.”
“A delightful, insightful reminder of a truth obvious to the Founders but forgotten by subsequent generations of Americans: that personal happiness and the health of the republic depend on virtue, which in turn requires regular cultivation. Read this timely book for your own benefit and the good of us all.”
“Jeffrey Rosen’s immensely readable and thoughtful book on America’s founders makes a strong case that a life invested in understanding the past may in fact be a happier one. There are lessons here for preserving our democracy today.”
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