# About Jeffrey Rosen’s The Pursuit of Happiness **URL:** **Published:** May 6, 2024 --- ## The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America AVAILABLE NOW. _The Pursuit of Happiness_ provides a sustained meditation on the Declaration’s famous phrase and explores how understandings of happiness and self-government are importantly connected to a free and prosperous republic. February 2024 • PUBLISHED BY Simon \& Schuster • [Purchase on Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/Pursuit-Happiness-Classical-Inspired-Founders/dp/B0C94XR8TM/) **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. Jeffrey Rosen, the president of the National Constitution Center, 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. ### Praise for _The Pursuit of Happiness_ “With insight and wit, legal scholar Rosen shows how classical philosophy inspired the Founders. . . . Rosen’s noteworthy book offers a better understanding of philosophy and American history.” – Booklist “\[A\] fast-paced romp through early American political thought. . . . An entertaining window on the American founders’ reading lives.” – _Publishers Weekly_ “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.” – _Kirkus Reviews_ “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.” – David W. Blight, Yale University, author of _Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom_ “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.” – Jon Meacham, author of _And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle_ “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.” – Gordon Wood, author of _Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution_ “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.” – H.W. Brands, author of _Founding Partisans: Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, Adams and the Brawling Birth of American Politics_ “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.” – Ken Burns, Emmy Award-winning filmmaker of _The American Revolution_ “The Founders had no internet to educate them, but they did have advice books, contemporary and ancient. Jeffrey Rosen guides us through them to see what the Founders meant by happiness, and how they hoped to secure it. And, he suggests, we could do the same today.” – Richard Brookhiser, author of _Give Me Liberty: A History of America’s Exceptional Idea_ ### About the Author A photograph of Jeffrey Rosen from the chest up. Jeffrey Rosen is President and CEO of the National Constitution Center, where he hosts _We the People_, a weekly podcast of constitutional debate. He is also a professor of law at the George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor at _The Atlantic_. Rosen is a graduate of Harvard College, Oxford University, and Yale Law School. He is the author of seven previous books, including the New York Times bestseller _Conversations with RBG: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law_. His essays and commentaries have appeared in _The New York Times Magazine_; on NPR; in _The New Republic_, where he was the legal affairs editor; and in _The New Yorker_, where he has been a staff writer.