Before Happiness Was a Feeling
Byron Borger July/August 2025A journey into the minds of the founding generation.
The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America, by Jeffrey Rosen (Simon & Schuster, 2025).
While most modern people read less than their forebears, they certainly read less Greek and Roman philosophy. Spending hours combing through complex teachings from the ancient world is a hard choice when Netflix or ESPN is calling. Yet it is a striking fact that our Founders were fluent in even obscure Greco-Roman authors and texts. Many read the Bible, often the New Testament in Greek, but it seems that nearly all well knew insights from the likes of Cicero and Seneca, Plutarch and Epictetus. Astonishingly, these revolutionaries spent their mornings reading books with titles such as Tuscan Disputations and Memorabilia of Socrates.
In a stunning appendix to his recent book, The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America, law professor and constitutional scholar Jeffrey Rosen lists the 10 most often cited books among the Founders on the nature of happiness. More than half were classical writers, and the others were deeply influenced by these Mediterranean ancients. This includes the Scottish Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (a favorite of both the elder and younger John Adams) and the French judge and philosopher Charles de Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws (“The single most-cited book of the founding era,” says Rosen, a favorite of Hamilton and the subject of a famous dream by Adams).
Rosen’s book is informative intellectual history at its very finest. He describes it as “an attempt to travel into the minds of the Founders to understand their quest for the good life on their own terms.”
“By reading the books they read and following their own daily attempts at self-accounting,” Rosen explains, “we can better understand the largely forgotten core of their moral and political philosophy: that moderating emotions is the secret to tranquility of mind, . . . that personal self-government is the secret of political self-government.”
As Rosen’s book recounts, the influence of the Greek philosophers on the political mindset and social theories of the Framers is exceedingly evident and continues to fly in the face of those who insist that the United States was formed as a Christian nation. The Pursuit of Happiness, however, is focused mainly on documenting a more specific claim about the worldview of the Founders: namely, that they—often with great intention and noble effort—took seriously the teachings about self-improvement and virtue of these pre-Christian self-help philosophers. Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, and many of their associates were engaged in a conscious battle to control their passions. As Ben Franklin put it in 1735 in his best-selling Poor Richard’s Almanack: “If Passion drives, let Reason hold the reins.” That would be “Divine Reason,” according to the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca and his followers. (It was advice Franklin could not always live up to; his autobiography tells of his zeal for matters of temperance despite his frequent, discouraging failure to demonstrate daily growth in this virtue.)
From Rosen’s captivating opening chapter about Franklin’s famous failures, he grips readers with stories and anecdotes, excerpts of memoirs, and impeccable research on what books were read, by whom, and when. The Pursuit of Happiness is, at once, a rigorous guide into the vast literature of Greco-Roman virtue formation and a study of revolutionary-era psychology. Oh, how diligent gentlemen such as Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson were in attempting to live lives of self-reflection and honor. And, oh, how they wrote about it in their letters and journals. Franklin, Rosen tells us, talked so much about his self-improvement courses that friends convinced him to add humility to the list of virtues he was attempting to embrace.
Defining Virtues
One of the early insights we get from Rosen is that the well-known phrase from the Declaration of Independence—“the pursuit of happiness”—was drawn, without doubt, from its regular use among the ancient classics. It meant more than mere material pleasure (or consumer culture, as we moderns might think) or the joy of having personal liberty and freedom, fine as that may be. Happiness was, for the most popular Greek and Roman thinkers—not to mention those in the biblical theological traditions—a matter of what today we might call peace of mind. It meant a certain inner resilience formed by the habit of training the mind to have serenity, even during the stressful times of life’s tempests. Happiness, for the most well-known Founders, as well as for lesser-known firebrands such as the influential James Otis or the respected, well-educated Abigail Adams, was rooted in notions of self-mastery, virtue, and the reasonable embodiment of goodness.
At the outset, Rosen tackles a thorny question: How could men like Adams, Franklin, and Jefferson imagine themselves virtuous—and be committed to morally compelling notions of freedom and liberty—even as they held Africans as slaves or endorsed the vile practice?
For some, their own moral vision seems to account for the fact that that they held to, or grew into, anti-slavery principles and abolitionist hopes. Franklin, by 1781, no longer enslaved others, and by the end of his days he had become the president of the Philadelphia Society for the Abolition of Slavery. For others it was a tragic lack of coherence and integrity. They reproached themselves for matters of gossip or impolite talk, but failed to see the horror of their complicity with the slave trade.
If the Founders were guided by virtue, however inconsistently expressed, and if virtue is shaped by habits of the heart (or, as they might say, of the mind), how did they study and apply the guidance of the Greeks to shape their character?
Part of the answer, according to Rosen, lies in the Founders’ understanding of “order.” As the fourth-century theologian and confessional writer Augustine put it, our desires—our loves—are disordered. A rehabilitation project is needed. And, while gospel-based Christians understand the need for God’s grace in this transformation, from the inside out, for most of the political leaders of the Colonial and Revolutionary era, it was a matter of sheer self-improvement. They strove to acquire proper balance and order, informed by reason. In this they were more Stoic or Epicurean, perhaps, than Christian. They drew more upon Plato than the apostle Paul.
Founding Virtues
The Pursuit of Happiness is an extraordinary resource for those wanting to understand eighteenth-century American ideals. It digs deeply into what was then assumed about the nature of happiness and how to obtain it. It explores how this, in turn, fueled the Founders’ commitments to the politics of liberty, which could sustain republicanism. This relationship—between virtue and liberty—is one echoed by contemporary author Os Guinness, who continues to hammer home in recent books, such as A Free People’s Suicide and The Magna Carta of Humanity, the idea of a “golden triangle” composed of interdependent angles of virtue, faith, and freedom.
Rosen does not primarily reckon with the political implications of the Founders’ interest in virtue, but in his vivid prose and masterful storytelling it becomes clear that these magnificent thinkers who were creating and sustaining a revolutionary movement unlike anything the world had seen were deeply aware that their social innovations would be sustained by the morals and characteristics of a virtuous people. With all their frailties and colorful idiosyncrasies, they strove to reorder their passions to represent themselves with moral distinction.
Rosen includes plenty of discussion of political theories and explorations of historical watersheds, but he focuses most intently on the personal virtues embodied, with lesser or greater fruitfulness, by the Founders. Curiously but happily, he also includes a Colonial-era black poet and at least two nineteenth-century leaders, Frederick Douglas and Abraham Lincoln.
Rosen explores 12 key virtues as they relate to the pursuit of happiness. Each primary virtue is linked to a particular person or pair of leaders. Temperance, for instance, is the key to “Ben Franklin’s Quest for Moral Perfection.” Humility is the trait that seems nearly out of reach for John and Abigail Adams and their own “self-accounting.” The chapter called “Industry” focuses on Thomas Jefferson’s reading list. There is a fascinating chapter about the debts of James Wilson and George Mason, through which Rosen explores the virtue of frugality.
Rosen’s chapter on the great black poet Phillis Wheatley—and “the enslaver’s avarice”—is extraordinary. As Rosen explains, the wife of Wheatley’s enslaver was under the influence of the evangelical preacher George Whitefield, who inspired her to educate Wheatley. She taught Wheatley the classics, Greek moral philosophers and poets such as Virgil, Ovid, and Horace, as well as English poets such as Alexander Pope and John Milton. In 1772 a prestigious panel was convened, which included the future president of the Continental Congress, John Hancock, to examine Wheatley’s work. Its findings refuted those who questioned how this enslaved woman could write poetry so deeply shaped by Greek sensibilities.
In a chapter subtitled “George Washington’s Self-Command” we learn about the value of resolution. We learn about the moderation of—get this!—Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. There is an entire moving chapter about the eventual reconciliation between Adams and Jefferson, through which we learn about what the Greeks called “tranquility.” In a surprising chapter—entitled “Cleanliness”—our assumptions about what that entails are challenged, and we discover the remarkable composure found in John Quincy Adams.
The second-to-last chapter is about the virtue of justice, and it is a great reflection on the “self-reliance” of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. I am still pondering the implications of the new insights offered there.
In a moving summarizing paragraph Rosen writes: “By defining the pursuit of happiness as equal opportunity for education, Frederick Douglass called on America to fulfill the promise that had been imagined by Ben Franklin in his Autobiography, inscribed by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, thwarted by the compromises over slavery through the Constitutional Convention, resurrected by the abolitionist movement and by John Quincy Adams in Congress and Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, and finally inscribed in the Reconstruction amendments to the U.S. Constitution. It would take another century for the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King Jr. on the Washington Mall to resurrect the promise once again and begin to make it a reality.”
Modern Virtues?
Mr. Rosen offers two more features in this extraordinary book to make it that much more relevant and interesting to readers in our fast-paced, postmodern setting. First, he offers a poem about each of the primary virtues discussed. This is both brilliant—it helps us reflect on the ancient wisdom in a fresh, artful way—and useful, as it slows us down, helps us focus, perhaps to be inspired ourselves by the reordering of our values that is so needed in our contentious culture.
Second, Rosen offers a final chapter on yet another moral characteristic, but he does not align it with any historical American figure. Instead, he implies that it is for us today. It is, surprisingly, on the virtue of silence. He starts with a story from 1926 when Justice Louis Brandeis was inspired by Thomas Jefferson to “write the greatest free speech opinion of the twentieth century.” Readers of Liberty may know the case called Whitney v. California, which was about Anita Whitney, a white woman who was prosecuted for making a speech against anti-lynching laws. Over the summer of 1926, Brandeis, the first Jewish Supreme Court justice, had read The Life and Letters of Thomas Jefferson, by Francis Hirst. It contained, Rosen tells us, “Jefferson’s original draft of the Virginia Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom.” Rosen cites a long excerpt from Brandeis’s Whitney opinion about the pursuit of happiness, which he calls “constitutional poetry.” As with the other chapters of his deeply researched, historical study, Rosen explores what was said on this momentous occasion, and what was meant by it. He looks at the books that were read and what influenced them. And he ingeniously recognizes that both Jefferson and Brandeis wrote about the value of silence—the need to temper and refine speech with studied reflection and reason.
Pushing back on today’s social media ethos, Rosen takes us on a whirlwind tour of public intellectuals from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Alexis de Tocqueville, from educator Horace Mann to contemporary social scientist Jonathan Haidt. Perhaps we still need to hear Christopher Lasch, the social critic of the 1970s, whose book The Culture of Narcissism Rosen paraphrases: “The contemporary focus on self-gratification rather than self-improvement has transformed our understanding of the pursuit of happiness.”
Yet Rosen is upbeat, inviting us to read more, to read deeply, and to allow ancient wisdom to reform our deepest desires. If classical writers influenced the lives of America’s founders and best leaders, perhaps we too would do well to explore their ancient books. Start here.
Article Author: Byron Borger
Byron Borger, along with his wife, Beth, is proprietor of Hearts and Minds bookstore (www.heartsandmindsbooks.com), a Christian bookshop in Dallastown, Pennsylvania, which aims to “create a new space for serious, reflective readers.” He blogs regularly about recently published titles that focus on Christian living within today’s world.