Ezra's Bookshelf

The Pursuit of Happiness

by Jeffrey Rosen · 368 pages · ~6.5 hrs

HistoryPhilosophy

Recommended on

buy on bookshop.org →
Jeffrey Rosen, president of the National Constitution Center, profiles six founders to explore what 'the pursuit of happiness' meant in their lives and thought. Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton understood happiness not as pleasure but as the classical ideal of virtuous self-government. Rosen traces how each founder pursued this ideal and how their understanding became foundational for American democracy. The book draws on extensive primary sources—letters, diaries, reading lists—to reconstruct what happiness meant in the eighteenth century. Rosen shows how the founders drew on Cicero, Seneca, and other classical sources that have since faded from common knowledge. He argues that recovering this tradition offers resources for contemporary life, when happiness is often reduced to emotional satisfaction. The writing is accessible and narrative-driven, making intellectual history available to general readers. For anyone seeking to understand what the Declaration's most famous phrase meant to those who wrote and signed it, this book offers careful scholarship with contemporary relevance.

For fans of

Reviews