What does the Pursuit of Happiness mean?

Jeffrey Rosen's new book about American ideals

Can reading change your life? It is a common claim. Often, when someone says that book changed my life and I ask them how, their answers are vague and vacillating. Books move us and affect us, but they do not always change the way we live. In The Pursuit of Happiness, Jeffrey Rosen shows that reading books really did change the Founders of the USA, and their successors like Douglass, Lincoln, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The Pursuit of Happiness is not only a stimulating guide to the Founders’ moral and intellectual mission, it is a welcome counterpoint to the recent genre of self-help-nihilism and it’s cousin self-help-success. This is the opposite of both The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck and Atomic Habits. If you read this book, you will learn what ideas the Founding Fathers held, where they read them, and why those ideas were important to the development of the republic. Self-help for Jefferson and Adams meant reading Cicero.

Rosen began thinking about this topic when he started getting up before dawn to read ten works of Enlightenment moral philosophy that Jefferson recommended as part of the long list of books he sent to a friend in 1771 when asked what a gentleman ought to have in his library. As he read, Rosen took notes, which he organized into sonnet form. This simply happened to him, and it felt unusual, but he later learned that many others in the Founding era (Phillis Wheatley, Alexander Hamilton, and so on) also made notes in verse. (John Quincy Adams said he would have been much happier as a literary writer than a politician.)

Rosen discovered in his research that the phrase “the pursuit of happiness” is common across many of Jefferson’s readings. And every time it comes up, it seems to spring from the same source: Cicero. Happiness, in this sense, does not mean pleasure, but virtue, a much more multifarious and polytropic concept than is often recognised.

Virtue is the well-spring of personhood. Samuel Johnson once wrote that “the natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure but from hope to hope.” In those flights, we seek the virtues, which are not only benevolence, justice, self-command, prudence, temperance, and so forth, but the whole habit of excellence, which the Greeks called aretē. What we hope for is not pleasure but accomplishment: the feeling that we have cultivated our talents and used them for good, and the awareness of the ways in which the flights of our mind have led us to higher, better hopes, rather than being merely the dreams of one who is stranded at the place where they started.

In Rosen’s words: “the Founders viewed the pursuit of happiness as a lifelong quest for character improvement.” To be happy, one must improve in the virtues, which Smith defined as “the temper of mind which constitutes the excellent and praiseworthy character.” For Aristotle, virtue and excellence were inseparable. These are the sources of the great American idea that we are all free to “develop our faculties” as Justice Brandeis put it.

This meant the Founders focussed on controlling the passions with reason. Abigail Adams told her son John Quincy that “the due government of the passions has been considered in all ages as a most valuable acquisition.” Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s mother told her something similar. Locke talks about the pursuit of happiness in the Essay and says, again, that we must control our desires through deliberation. Rosen says this idea was a constant presence in American public life—Madison, Lincoln, Douglass—until the 1960s, the “Me Decade”. Now modern psychology has revived the idea that happiness relies on “developing habits of emotional self-regulation… through the power of the imagination.”

Reading was central to the Founders’ self-regulation. “I have given up newspapers for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid, and I find myself much the happier”, Jefferson wrote to Adams. Adams told his son that he ought always to keep a book of poetry with him: “You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket. You will never have an idle hour.” (This is akin to the advice that aristocrats like Lord Chesterfield were giving to their sons back in England at a similar time.) Reading was central to how they nurtured self-command, the virtue that made Washington so important to the USA, and which was at the heart of Lincoln’s achievements.

Rosen’s book is brisk and detailed, readable and informative. It is the result of deep, wide reading, and gives a through-line from the founding of the republic to modern times. He regrets that when Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a girl, she read, at school, many of the same books that the founders read, but that today this has fallen out of style. Between 1837 and 1960 the McGuffey Reader sold more than 120 million copies. Full of Bible passages, prayers, homilies, the McGuffey Reader was a “standard moral philosophy text” for generations of children. Once the Supreme Court held that public funding couldn’t be used for religious instruction, the book fell out of circulation. The Court has said repeatedly that reading religious texts is permissible, but the book has gone. I am aware that many Americans still very much do receive a traditional moral education, but there is surely a lack today, as Rosen argues, of the sort of education the Founders relied on.

At the end, Rosen gives a swift account of modern narcissism—the “me” generation; the psychology of self-gratification; Jonathan Haidt, Jean Twenge, and social media. But he ends optimistically. We all carry the works of civilization in our pockets. If we want children—or ourselves—to read the great works, to nurture our virtues and develop self-command, then “all we need is the self-discipline to take the time to read them.”

Many of the Founders read early and late. They rose at dawn to study the Bible and sat up by a candle to read the ancients. The young John Adams wrote in his diary:

I am resolved to rise with the Sun and to study the Scriptures, on Thurdsday, Fryday, Saturday, and Sunday mornings, and to study some Latin author the other 3 mornings. Noons and Nights I intend to read English Authors. This is my fixt Determination, and I will set down every neglect and every compliance with this Resolution. May I blush whenever I suffer one hour to pass unimproved.

We like to talk today about how busy we are, about how easy we would find it to read Scripture at dawn if we had servants and a housewife, and so on. The fact is that time-use surveys show us spending hours watching television and minutes reading books. We can find time, if we wish, to read a little more. Fifteen minutes of serious reading is not so much. We know that it would be beneficial. We know we would feel better with a book, that it has more of permanence to offer us than another hour of Netflix. America was founded on the idea of reading as a means of pursuing happiness. From Washington to Ginsburg, the great Americans stand as a shining example to us all. Sometimes, reading with moral intent really can change your life.

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The Pursuit of Happiness, David Rosen