Jeffery Rosen: Pursuit of Happiness (2025) (video)

Jeffery Rosen: What I learned was that for the founders, the pursuit of happiness meant not feeling good, but being good. Not the pursuit of immediate pleasure, but the pursuit of long-term virtue. And then I want to tell you about how this new understanding has made me a missionary for studying the ideals of the Constitution and the Declaration.

So here’s how this COVID reading project developed. Just around when COVID started, I noticed that both Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson had taken their understanding of the pursuit of happiness from a book by Cicero I’d never heard of called The Tusculan Disputations. First, I was reading Benjamin Franklin, and there’s that part of his autobiography that some of you may have seen. In his 20s, Ben Franklin resolved to achieve moral perfection, and he made a list of 12 virtues that he later expanded to 13. They included temperance, order, resolution, frugality, cleanliness. He saved the one he found hardest for last, and that’s humility. He made a chart, put the virtues on the x-axis, and the days of the week on the y-axis. Every day he resolved to focus on a different virtue and to put an ‘X’ mark in the box where he’d fallen short. He tried this for a while. He found it was incredibly depressing because there were so many ‘X’ marks, and he gave it up after a while, but he felt that he was a better person for having engaged in this serious act of self-accounting and self-reflection.

I knew about this system, which I’d seen before, but what I didn’t know is that he chose as his motto this Cicero book called The Tusculan Disputations. The passage from Cicero that Franklin chose to illustrate the project was, “Without virtue, happiness cannot be.” A few weeks later, I was at the Boar’s Head Inn in Charlottesville, Virginia, home of UVA and the crowning achievement of Thomas Jefferson. On the wall of the hotel room was a list of 12 virtues that Jefferson drafted for his daughters. And they looked a lot like Franklin’s. They included virtues like resolution: “Resolve to do what you ought, and do what you resolve.” Silence: “When angry, count to 10. When very angry, 100.” Jefferson offered these virtues to his daughters.

What was so striking is that when Jefferson was asked to illustrate the virtues and to define happiness, he would send a passage from that same Cicero book that Franklin had used. It was a longer passage that Jefferson copied in his commonplace book when his dad died. He’s 14 years old, trying to overcome his grief, and he copies the passage that Cicero himself had written when his daughter Tullia died. Cicero is trying to console himself. This is from a manual on grief, and it’s from that manual Jefferson takes his core definition of the pursuit of happiness, which says: “He who has achieved tranquility of soul, who is neither unduly exuberant nor unduly despondent, he is the self-composed man of whom we are in quest. He is the wise and happy man.”

So I thought, my goodness, this passage was so important to Franklin and Jefferson, I’ve got to read Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations. But what else to read? Then I found this golden reading list that Jefferson would send to anyone who asked him when he was old how to be an educated person. He’d send this to kids who were going to law school. He’d send this to his friends who were trying to build private libraries. It’s an incredible list both because of the range of the books and also the rigorous schedule that Jefferson prescribes for reading them. The range is inspiring. It includes novels, political philosophy, history, science, and law. What caught my eye was the section on moral philosophy. Sometimes Jefferson called it ethics, and sometimes natural religion. At the top of the list was that Cicero book, The Tusculan Disputations. And then a list of other books of classical and Enlightenment moral philosophy: Cicero’s On Duties, Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, Epictetus, Seneca’s letters, and then Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Bolingbroke, Hume.

I was so struck by the fact that I had not read all of the books on this list. I’ve had a marvelous liberal arts education, and I am so grateful every day to the inspiring teachers of literature—I was an English major in college—and political philosophy, history, and law who I was privileged to study with at all these wonderful universities. But I hadn’t read these books of moral philosophy because they’d fallen out of the curriculum by the time that I was in college back in the 1980s. I remember in the 80s yearning for this kind of guidance about how to lead a good life. The 1980s were the “greed is good” decade, and pop culture was celebrating hedonism and materialism, and I was looking for an alternative to that. I did not find it in Puritan literature, which I was studying as an English major—first of all because I’m Jewish, and also because the Puritan prescriptions of faith purely by grace, without the possibility of good works assuring salvation, was not compelling to me. So I was looking for an alternative. And what I didn’t realize, because these great books had fallen out of the curriculum, is that this is exactly the question that the classical moral philosophers had set out to answer.

The other thing that really struck me about Jefferson’s list was his schedule. He said, “You’ve got to get up every morning before dawn, read the moral philosophy for 2 hours, watch the sunrise, then read ancient history and political philosophy, then lunch, then science, astronomy, and physics and so forth, then dinner, then you’re allowed a little Shakespeare and light poetry for mild entertainment. And then to bed, 12 hours a day, 7 days a week.” So, I don’t know what got into me, but it was COVID and we all had more time. So, I tried the Jefferson schedule. I got up every morning, I read the moral philosophy for 2 hours, I watched the sunrise—which is the most beautiful thing you can do any morning of the day, it is just glorious to make that a daily habit.

And then I found myself writing sonnets to sum up the wisdom of the moral philosophy that I’d read, which I know sounds incredibly weird because I had not written sonnets before. I later found out that all sorts of people in the founding era would read this moral philosophy and write sonnets, including Hamilton. The great Phillis Wheatley, the first published Black poet in America, wrote incredibly inspiring sonnets of virtue based on her reading. And then John Quincy Adams, one of my great heroes, would read The Tusculan Disputations and the Bible in the White House, watch the sunrise, write sonnets opposing slavery, and then walk along the Potomac. It’s just remarkable. There’s something in this wisdom that craves to be summed up in harmonious, practical form.

So, that’s what I did. And what I learned changed my life. As I said, it was a revelation to me. And there’s no other word strong enough to describe the force of the insight that for the founders, for the ancients, and for people throughout human history, happiness has meant not feeling good, but being good. Not the pursuit of immediate pleasure, but the pursuit of long-term virtue. What I came to realize by reading the wisdom literature is that by “virtues,” the founders and the ancients meant something in particular. They meant self-mastery, self-improvement, character improvement, being your best self, overcoming your ego-based passions and emotions so that you can serve other people and connect to the divine. It is ultimately a quest for moral perfection, and it was rooted in the classics and in the Bible. Jesus in Matthew says, “Be perfect.” And the founders and the ancients took seriously the injunction to try in our own imperfect way to become a bit more perfect every day, and in fact every hour. The pursuit of virtue requires daily, hourly mindfulness to master your unreasonable passions and emotions so that you can achieve that calm tranquility and self-mastery that Cicero said defines happiness.

To prepare for the honor of this talk, I asked some friends who are members of the LDS church in what ways the church cultivates virtue. And I was so struck by how focused and how mindfully the church has been committed to the practical cultivation of virtue since the beginning. My friend Sheldon Gilbert, the new head of the Federalist Society and one of my former students and a former colleague at GW Law School, called my attention to Luke 2:52, which says, “And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man.” Sheldon shared with me that the LDS church views these as the four pillars of personal development: intellectual, physical, spiritual, and social, and encourages youth to think about what you’re doing every day to improve intellectually, physically, spiritually, and socially.

And then I just had the most wonderful conversation before the talk with Vice President Collings, who has a really important new book on divine law that explores so thoughtfully the way that scripture enjoins study of the Constitution and the virtues. Vice President Collings called my attention to the passage: “…according to the laws and constitution of the people, which I have suffered to be established, and should be maintained for the rights and protection of all flesh, according to just and holy principles; That every man may act in doctrine and principle pertaining to futurity, according to the moral agency which I have given unto him, that every man may be accountable for his own sins in the day of judgment.” I’ve learned how central the idea of moral agency and accountability is to the church, and was really inspired to learn about Section 4 of the Doctrine and Covenants, which I know you all know, and I’m told that if I ask you to stand and recite it, you can.

So, please give me the honor of doing that. Would you please stand and recite Section 4 of the Doctrine and Covenants? I’ll get you started: Now behold, a marvelous work is about to come forth… [Audience recites] Beautiful. Beautiful. So meaningful. Thank you so much for that.

Friends, you are uniquely well-prepared for the daily cultivation of virtue because you live it, and you know the importance of attempting in your daily life, in a really practical way, to live up to those virtues that you just recited, including temperance and prudence and the rest. You know from the spiritual self-accounting system that the church has offered to see how you’re doing every day—which is of course a version of Ben Franklin’s system—that it really is a daily and hourly quest. We all fall short because nobody is perfect, except as Franklin said, “Imitate Jesus and Socrates” in your attempt to be perfect. Well, we can try. We’re not going to achieve it, but we can become more perfect in trying.
Another thing that I learned from my reading is that this quest to become more perfect through the daily cultivation of virtue is common to all of the wisdom traditions. For the classical people, it goes back to Pythagoras. Who knew? I didn’t. That Pythagoras, in addition to inventing the triangle and the harmonic system, if that weren’t enough, was also the philosopher who identified a fundamental struggle in our souls between reason, passion, and desire. He located reason in the head, passion or emotion in the heart, and desire in the stomach. He said we have a duty every day to use our powers of reason to moderate or modulate our unreasonable passions and emotions so we can achieve the calm, tranquility, and self-mastery that defines virtue, excellence, and perfection of the soul.

Plato popularized Pythagoras’s division of the soul with his metaphor of the charioteer representing reason, who had two horses. One was noble and the other was appetitive. The goal of the charioteer is to ensure that the two horses are pulling in the same direction. That antithesis between reason and passion is ubiquitous throughout the founding. You see it both in the moral literature and in the political literature. That’s why James Madison defines a “faction” as any group, a majority or a minority, animated by passion rather than reason, devoted to self-interest rather than the public good.

Now you see, and I did with new clarity, the central connection the founders offered between personal and political self-government. Unless I, as an individual, can overcome my unproductive passions and emotions like anger, jealousy, and fear, get out of my own head, and start focusing on others, then I won’t be able to join with my fellow citizens to keep the republic as part of a virtuous state. That’s why the founders were not sure that the experiment would succeed, because it all requires citizens on an individual, daily basis finding that self-mastery to be more perfect. They insist that the whole key to the success of the experiment is that kind of personal and political civic virtue.
The pursuit of happiness book asks, how did the founders embody these virtues in their lives? They talked about it a lot, and of course, the best way to learn history is through storytelling. It’s so exciting and meaningful just to tell the stories of the founders and learn about their struggles. What struck me so much is not that they were perfect—because they were of course far from perfect, because they were human—but how mindful they were about their own struggles to achieve perfection. They’re talking constantly in their diaries and letters and conversations about their failures and the ways on a daily basis that they fell short, but always trying to do better.
I start the discussion of John and Abigail Adams with their remarkable decision while they were dating to make a list of each other’s faults. I can report that this is not a great dating strategy. They almost stumbled over it because John Adams was one of the most famously vain and self-regarding men of his age. He’s obnoxious and disliked, as the musical 1776 says. He’s always storming about the fact that he’s not getting enough credit for the American Revolution and he’s not appreciated enough. But Abigail soft-pedals this in making a list of his faults. She says, “You’re so brilliant that some people might find you intellectually intimidating.” He counters with his typical tact, “Well, you should read more and play the piano more, plus you’re pigeon-toed.” She, with great self-possession, replies, “I will try to practice and read more, but gentlemen should not comment on a lady’s posture.” Remember, they’re getting all this from Pythagoras, because Adams has read Pythagoras’s golden virtues, and so has Abigail, who’s just as voracious a reader as he is.
Despite this beginning, they marry and go on to have one of the most moving intellectual, romantic, and spiritual meetings of the soul in American letters. They take all of their emphasis on self-improvement and bring it to their son, John Quincy Adams.

If I had to pick a hero from the founding era, at least one, it has to be Quincy, because he’s so mindful in trying to live the virtues. He’s getting this constantly from his dad, and especially his mom. I thought having a Jewish mom could be challenging at times; it turns out that having a Puritan mom is even harder, because she was never off his case. She was constantly enjoining him to be more perfect. She reads from Proverbs—the one that says, “He who is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he who rules his spirit than he who takes a city.” She’s applying the wisdom, and Quincy gets from this a constant sense that he’s making a hash of it and falling short, that he’s not mastering his temper enough, he’s indolent, and he’s not productive enough.

There’s this amazing passage in his diary. He’s something like 32 years old, he’s just turned down an appointment to the US Supreme Court, he’s minister at St. Petersburg, and he says, “If only I weren’t so indolent. If I had more self-discipline, I might have ended war and slavery.” He set a very high bar for himself! “But as it is, I’m wasting too much time at the theater, I’m drinking too much Madeira, I’m just making a total hash of it.” He, of course, is the contrary. He’s incredibly productive. He becomes a professor of classics at Harvard, where he teaches Cicero, in particular his favorite book, The Tusculan Disputations. He’s elected President of the United States.
Then he has two terrible blows that cut him to the quick. First, he loses re-election in 1828. Around the same time, his oldest son, George Washington Adams, commits suicide. It’s an incredibly sad story. Imagine having the burden of being named George Washington Adams and all of those expectations. Adams was a very demanding father, and he wrote a series of letters—From a Christian Father to His Son—which are very inspiring, learned parsings of Proverbs and the Bible. But it was just too much pressure to impose on a son, and George Washington Adams descends into alcoholism and jumps off a steamship.

Adams doesn’t know how he can continue, so he spends a year returning to the most profound texts he knows: Cicero and the Bible, and he reads them daily. Based on his close reading of the Bible—in particular, a passage where Jesus promises to free the captives—Adams resolves to become the most fervent white abolitionist of his time. He reaches a similar conclusion to the one that Joseph Smith reached when he read the scripture and concluded that it forbids slavery. Vice President Collings gave me the passage from Joseph Smith; it’s just amazing today. It was around the same time that he and Quincy Adams are concluding that the Bible forbids slavery. Adams then gets elected to the House of Representatives, the first president to return to the House. He becomes a fervent abolitionist based on his scriptural reading. He denounces the gag rule, which forbids the reading of abolitionist petitions. He introduces a constitutional amendment to end slavery. He then votes against the Mexican War. He yells “No!” and then collapses in the House. He’s carried to a sofa, and his last murmured words are, “I am composed.” He gets that from Cicero, from The Tusculan Disputations. Remember that passage Jefferson would hand out? “The perfectly self-composed person is he who has achieved virtuous self-mastery.” It is just a breathtaking, mindful, virtuous end to a virtuous life, and Adams got it from his deep reading and study of scripture.

There’s so much else to say about other founders and their own struggles to achieve self-mastery. I was very struck by the fact that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, when they are old—after they’ve written the Declaration together, fallen out over politics in the bloodiest battle in history where the republic almost came apart in 1800, and reconcile—what do they want to talk about? Spiritual self-mastery. That’s the topic they’re corresponding on when they’re old.

Adams is so excited when he learns that Pythagoras, the founder of Greek moral philosophy, may have traveled to the East and read the Hindu Vedas. Adams is struck by the fact that the central lesson of the Vedas—renounce attachment to external events and enjoy eternal salvation—is the same lesson as the Stoic dichotomy of control, which says: don’t focus on trying to control the thoughts and actions of others; focus on the only thing you can control, which is your own thoughts and actions and self-mastery. Adams thinks if it can just be shown that Pythagoras read the Gita, then it will establish that all the wisdom traditions of the East and the West are devoted to this same idea of spiritual self-mastery. The Dhammapada says, “We are what we think. Life is shaped by the mind.” Adams sums up this learning into his own mature creed, which he attributes to the Hymn of Cleanthes: “Love God and all his creatures, rejoice in all things.” And Jefferson, after a lifetime of disciplined reading, concludes that he is no longer a Stoic but an Epicurean. But he means by that not heedless pleasure-seeking or hedonism—that’s a libel on Epicurus by the Stoics. For Jefferson, mindful Epicureanism requires the rational contraction of our desires so that we can mindfully meet them. It’s incredibly moving to see Adams and Jefferson leading such morally serious lives at that stage.

I do have to say a word about Jefferson and slavery. It was striking to see the degree of his hypocrisy. How is it possible that someone who exalted the virtues of frugality and self-mastery, and also believed that slavery violated the Bible and natural law, not only continued to own slaves but at his death only freed a handful—his own children by Sally Hemings, keeping a promise to her? I did find clarifying a quotation from Patrick Henry right after he had delivered the “Give me liberty or give me death” oration. He said, “Is it not amazing that I myself, who believe that slavery violates the Bible and natural law, myself own slaves? I won’t justify it. I won’t attempt to. It’s simple avarice or greed. I can’t do with the inconvenience of living without it.” That brutal moment of candor—I know that it’s wicked and immoral and violates the Bible, but I like the lifestyle and don’t want to give it up—was basically the same confession that Jefferson and the other enslavers of that generation made. It doesn’t excuse their moral hypocrisy, but it does help us realize that they were well aware of it.
Contrast Jefferson with someone like George Washington. So self-mastered. He did free his slaves on his death, and his greatest moment is at Newburgh when the soldiers are about to rebel. He mounts the Temple of Virtue and appeals for prudence and self-mastery and says, “If you can just wait a little longer, I’ll ensure that you’re paid. Don’t engage in a military coup and crush the experiment at its core.” He goes to read a letter from a friend and struggles to read, puts on his reading glasses, and says, “Forgive me, gentlemen. I have grown old in your service, and now I have grown almost blind.” The soldiers weep because they’ve never seen him express humility and weakness before. It’s that remarkable combination of self-mastery and humility that makes Washington the greatest man of his age.

At the end of his life, Washington warns that the experiment will fail unless “We the People” find virtuous self-mastery and are able to find the political self-government necessary for personal self-government. He’s not sure that the experiment will succeed. Nor are Madison, Hamilton, and the Constitution framers. It all depends on virtue. Madison in particular is worried about the excesses of mob democracy. He says in all large assemblies, of whatever character composed, passion never fails to wrest the scepter from reason. Even if every Athenian had been Socrates, Athens would still have been a mob.

Madison is especially optimistic about a new media technology that allows broadside newspapers to be dispersed throughout the land, and is hopeful that citizens will read complicated arguments like the Federalist Papers in the newspaper. Based on their close reading, they will slowly diffuse reason across the land, setting aside their partisan passions, listening to competing points of view, and guided by a new class of enlightened journalists and statesmen he calls the literati. Reason will slowly diffuse across the land. Just to share this vision shows how far we are from that world. We live in an age of “enraged to engage” on social media, where posts based on passion travel further and faster than those based on reason. We are amusing ourselves to death, retreating into our filter bubbles and echo chambers, not listening to other points of view, not respectfully deliberating, and in those ways, we are living in a version of Madison’s nightmare.
But I want to share with you, as I close, the big takeaways from my reading project and then an injunction for all of you. The takeaway was to get back into the habit of deep reading. I’d fallen out of the habit of reading for stuff that wasn’t related to my deadlines, because I’m addicted to these screens and spending so much time on my phone. That weird, clarifying, spiritually stretching, uplifting project of spending two hours every morning reading changed my habits. I’m not catching the sunrise every morning, and I don’t want to pretend that I’m a virtue-monger, and I’m not reading moral philosophy for two hours every morning. But I do have a new rule that when I wake up, I am not allowed to browse or surf until I’ve read. I have to read for a half hour or an hour. And it’s just changed my life. I’ve just finished a new book about how the battle between Hamilton and Jefferson has defined all of American history, and it allowed me to do that. And I just learn something new every day.

So that’s my injunction to you. Carve out time to read. And not just for your classes, but for your own elevation, for your self-improvement, for your spiritual and moral benefit. It’s just a habit like all those other habits of virtue, but it’s completely great.
And then the final thing I want you to do is continue to take advantage of the fact that you are blessed to be at this great university, which has put learning about the Constitution front and center. Your president is so visionary in making that one of the pillars of your education. What I want to say is that you have a right, an opportunity, and even a duty to do it. Unless you learn about the principles of the Constitution and the Declaration and the American idea, unless you understand how important it was for the framers to listen to different points of view, to disagree without being disagreeable, and to go deep on the principles that define this nation, then the republic will fall.
My final injunction is from John Quincy Adams, who I told you is my hero. On the jubilee of the Constitution—George Washington’s 50th anniversary in 1839—Quincy fears civil war, and he says the only thing that will prevent civil war is learning about the principles of the Constitution and the Declaration. And then he quotes the book of Deuteronomy, based on his close reading of the Bible, and he says, “Take these principles as frontlets between your eyes. Place them upon your doorposts. Bind them to your hands and your arms. Whisper them to your children before you sleep. Make them the principles of your political salvation.”

That’s how important it was for John Quincy Adams for us to learn the principles of the Declaration and the Constitution. I know you are going to do exactly that. And I thank you for the blessing of being able to talk to you today. Thank you so much.