In The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America, Jeffrey Rosen undertakes to examine how leading American Founders learned from ancient writers on moral philosophy, especially the Stoics, to cultivate virtue as the means to attaining happiness. Rosen, the president of the National Constitution Center, reports that the project was inspired by his study, during the COVID quarantine, of eleven books that Thomas Jefferson recommended for a friend’s library, ranging from Xenophon, Cicero, and several Stoic writers to Locke’s Conduct of the Understanding and Bolingbroke, Hume, and Lord Kames. However, Rosen’s admiration for the classical ethical writings that Jefferson and other Founders like John Adams praised leads him to exaggerate their influence on the Founders’ novel political achievement and falls far short of demonstrating that such writings “defined America,” as his subtitle claims. Most notably, Rosen fails to stress how the Founders’ constitutional design rested on considerably different premises from those of ancient writers on politics (as did Locke’s and Hume’s political philosophy). Additionally, he overlooks ironic aspects both of some of the ancient writings Jefferson cited (notably Xenophon’s) and of those composed by one of his key American figures, Benjamin Franklin.
Read Full Article »
