The Pursuit of Happiness

November 13, 2023
Rosen (Conversations with RBG), a professor of law at George Washington University, travels “into the minds of the Founders, to understand their quest for the good life on their own terms,” in this fast-paced romp through early American political thought. Profiling six well-known founders, as well as other contemporaries such as Abigail Adams and Phillis Wheatley, Rosen attempts to illuminate what “the pursuit of happiness” meant to them. For instance, he suggests that Benjamin Franklin was inspired by Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, a kind of “self-help book,” from which Franklin learned that “without Virtue Man can have no Happiness in this World.” A recommended reading list compiled by Thomas Jefferson forms the backbone of a chapter on “Industry,” and in the concluding chapter on “Silence,” Rosen contends that the founders’ lessons of self-mastery have lived on through notable figures such as Supreme Court justices Louis Brandeis and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, both subjects of his earlier books. He recalls that Ginsburg told him that her mother gave her “precisely the same Stoic advice” that Abigail Adams once gave to her son John Quincy Adams: “Emotions like anger, remorse, and jealousy are not productive,” she said. “They will not accomplish anything, so you must keep them under control.” Rosen’s account sometimes runs thin, with complex authors such as Epictetus and Seneca condensed in rudimentary ways. Still, this is an entertaining window on the American founders’ reading lives.