Some of you might be interested in this book. To quote from a review by Christopher S. Grenda in the Journal of American History (volume 107 issue 1):
In The Pursuit of Happiness in the Founding Era, Carli N. Conklin seeks to disclose the original meaning of the phrase "the pursuit of happiness" in the Declaration of Independence. She maintains that the phrase was neither a synonym for private property or public spiritedness nor a foreshadowing of latter-day notions of personal fulfillment. Rather, Conklin argues that the authors and editors of the Declaration of Independence—Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin—as well as those who debated and approved the document in the Continental Congress understood the "pursuit of happiness" to mean the pursuit of virtue, the striving to live according to natural law.
7 comments:
That sounds like the sort of thing that is partially true and overlooked for years as the colonial common understanding moved away from virtue, and thus gets overemphasised on the pendulum swing of rediscovering that truth at the expense of values that are less approved of in the 21st C, such as property and self-fulfillment.
Let me know how close my prejudice was to the truth, please. And thanks for the reference, that I can at least skim.
John Adams actually had a somewhat different view of the pursuit of happiness than Conklin claims.
All men are born free and independent, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights, among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.
He wrote that into his A Declaration of the Rights of the Inhabitants of the Commonwealth Of Massachusetts, and he wrote it into the 1780 Constitution of Massachusetts as Part the First, Article I.
Eric Hines
Eric, thank you for the reference. That will be very helpful in a few weeks, when I teach the Declaration.
LittleRed1
Glad to help.
That Article stands today in Massachusetts' Constitution, with this sentence added, via Article CVI, which amended that Art I: Equality under the law shall not be denied or abridged because of sex, race, color, creed or national origin.
Conklin's claim doesn't seem to hold today, either, at least not as a universal "foreshadowing...."
Eric Hines
Have you read Conklin?
What the author is proposing is of course a straightforward reading of Aristotle’s ethics, which were then the standard model for learned men.
I would contend that they saw the acquiring of private property as a necessary element of "the pursuit of happiness", as any man making something of his talents should benefit and thereby acquire property, which will in turn benefit his future generations- which is absolutely part of "the pursuit of happiness". It is certainly not the whole of it, of course.
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