How the Pursuit of Virtue Is the Only Road to Happiness

A common saying is that we stand on the shoulders of giants. Americans stand on the shoulders of their forebears, specifically the founders of this republic. But whose shoulders did the founders stand on?
Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitutional Center and one of the most respected American constitutional scholars, spent his time wisely during the pandemic. He studied the philosophers, scholars, and religious leaders—Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, George Mason, John Quincy Adams, Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln—who influenced the views of later 18th- and 19th-century Americans.
Mr. Rosen’s new book, “The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America,” discusses how before and after the Revolution, these Americans sought to emulate virtuous classical figures. Mr. Rosen was inspired to write the book after he read Jefferson’s recommended list of 10 books on classical and Enlightenment moral philosophy. The successes and failures of the founders’ pursuit of virtue are thematic in the book.
As the title and subtitle suggest, the “pursuit of happiness” (derived from the unalienable rights clause of the Declaration of Independence) revolves around the pursuit of the virtuous life. As Mr. Rosen indicates clearly in his work, the famous phrase hardly originated with Jefferson’s greatest work, but stemmed from the great past philosophers, such as Socrates, Cicero, David Hume, and John Locke.
Mr. Rosen begins with Franklin’s 13 virtues: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility. As the book progresses, jumping from founder to founder, Mr. Rosen breaks down how our founders sought to exhibit these virtues (at times successfully, at times not).
The author pinpoints the virtues that the founders personified and those that eluded them. Interestingly, some of these early Americans were quick to criticize their shortcomings, such as Franklin and Adams with vanity, and Washington with anger. This in itself was an example of virtue—sincerity and humility, to be exact.
Mentions of numerous philosophical works are scattered throughout “The Pursuit of Happiness,” but several had the largest effect on these early Americans. Among those are Cicero’s “Tusculan Disputations,” Seneca’s “Morals,” Locke’s “Treatises on Government,” Trenchard and Gordon’s “Cato’s Letters,” and, later in the book, “The Columbian Orator,” a collection of those great works read by Douglass.
Toward the end of the book, Mr. Rosen identifies a moment in American history when this understanding went off the rails. He writes: “As the silent generation of World War II gave way to the ‘me’ generation of baby boomers, the hedonism of the 1960s gave way to the narcissism of the 1970s and the materialism of the 1980s. ‘You do you’ became the new mantra and everyone had an unalienable right to define their own bliss.”
Mr. Rosen presents the wider scope of the problem by referencing the virtuous ideals of justices Louis Brandeis and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and how they received an education in the public system that still respected and taught those classical thinkers. Mr. Rosen notes that by the time he was in public school, those lessons had been jettisoned.
The author is clearly grieved at what we have dismissed. Indeed, we have dismissed the origins of our country’s concrete and objective “pursuit of happiness” for an abstract and subjective pursuit in both the material and perverse. We have done so at our own peril; and tragically, America has only begun to witness the fruits of that perilous pursuit.
“The Pursuit of Happiness” is a must-read for so many reasons. I believe it is a roadmap toward personal, societal, and national redemption. In a country of advancements and economic wealth, we often only look toward the future at what new technologies, however trivial, lie ahead. But as Mr. Rosen makes abundantly clear, it is time—indeed, it has long been time—to look backward in order to move forward. Perhaps then, we can climb back onto the shoulders of those past greats.