One of my favorite books of last year was Jeffrey Rosen’s The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America, an overview of how the Founders defined both the word and the pursuit of “happiness.” It sent me to the work of Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus, philosophers who have had a prominent place on my bedside table ever since.
I’m delighted to hear, therefore, that Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center will launch a podcast series based on Mr. Rosen’s book next week. Per its web site:
Pursuit: The Founders’ Guide to Happiness is a 12-part series hosted by Jeffrey Rosen featuring Ken Burns and leading scholars. It explores how the founders understood personal growth as essential to the common good, and how you can put those ideas into practice today.
A little self-helpy, perhaps, but I suspect that the series will have considerable educational and intellectual heft too. You can read more about it here. Mr. Rosen spoke with the Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg about the book here; his new book, The Pursuit of Liberty: How Hamilton vs. Jefferson Ignited the Lasting Battle Over Power in America, will be published by Simon & Schuster in October.
I wrote and published the below — along with its concluding popcult legerdemain — on July 3, 2024.
Every year around this time I try to honor the season by unsuccessfully pestering my wife and children to watch 1776 with me (they can’t be blamed for my failure, I suppose; all that prancing around to ersatz Gilbert and Sullivan, in the guise of a history lesson no less, brings even the most forgiving audience crying to its knees) and reading something that pertains to the historical significance of the moment. I’m about halfway through The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America by Jeffrey Rosen, a constitutional lawyer and the president of Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center, a book that I plan to unsuccessfully pester my wife and children to read.
The subtitle is well-descriptive of the book, which studies the role that classical virtues of Greek and Roman philosophers played in the education, thinking, and actions of the Founders — virtues such as order, temperance, humility, industry, frugality, sincerity, resolution, moderation, tranquility, cleanliness, justice, and silence. Many of the Founders, like Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams, repeatedly cited these virtues and especially Cicero in their writings and thinking, and they wormed their way into the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution as well. Although they held themselves to these high standards, the Founders frequently usually failed to meet those standards (their failure was most spectacularly miserable when it came to slavery), but it was the attempt to better themselves — to pursue “happiness” as it was defined during the Enlightenment, rather than the “happiness” as it’s defined in these more hedonistic days — that provided them with insights into democracy and republicanism.
As I say, I’m about midway through and am loathe to say more about it before I’m finished, but it did cater to my curiosity about the role that architecture and physical surroundings play in the way we think about ourselves and our world. In the early and mid eighteenth century, Philadelphia’s architects embraced the Georgian style of order, proportion, and restraint: even today, the buildings around Independence Mall in Philadelphia remain experienced on a human scale, and the orderly, practical rowhouses and trinities of Olde City and Elfreth’s Alley too seem appropriate to a cozy comfortability.
These were the buildings that the Founders lived and worked in and ate and drank at as they debated the foundational documents of the United States. Even today we can walk in their footsteps and admire the same Georgian order, proportion, and restraint. Alas, the style was not to last — architects around the turn of the century embraced the Federal and Greek Revival styles that led to buildings like the First Bank of the United States a few blocks away from Independence Hall. It appeared as if they were trying to live up to Philadelphia’s reputation as the “Athens of America,” and they were going to have the buildings to prove it, goddammit.
Although it’s a bit of a left-field stretch, there’s another sense in which The Pursuit of Happiness is relevant to today’s Philadelphia. Rob McElhenney’s comedy It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is in many ways Pursuit‘s counter-text. Instead of cultivating the classical virtues of order, temperance, humility, industry, frugality, sincerity, resolution, moderation, tranquility, cleanliness, justice, and silence, the reprobates who frequent Paddy’s Pub in South Philadelphia cultivate the classical vices of disorder, crapulence, narcissism, sloth, extravagance, perfidy, half-heartedness, extremism, chaos, filth, bigotry, and noise. This provides a fertile ground for the show’s frequent satiric forays into politics and culture: Mac, Charlie, Frank, Dennis, and Sweet Dee confront issues like abortion, racism, sexual identity, drug addiction, urban blight, gun control, the MeToo movement, political corruption, and welfare by indulging in these vices without apology, self-control, or self-knowledge, often destroying property and the lives of innocents in the process.
I’m not sure that IASIP can really bear all the weight that I’m putting on it — the show is a gross-out comedy first and foremost, after all. But the show depicts what happens to people and politics when the classical virtues are ignored and the irrational id instead of reason and restraint is given free rein to trample over the rights of others. While the show’s setting in Philadelphia is in part an accident of chance — McElhenney is a Philadelphia native, and the show’s B-roll of Philadelphia locations is affectionate and lovingly knowledgeable — the gang traipses through the same streets as the Founders, an unintended comment on just how far we’ve fallen in the 248 years that have separated them. But if you want to see how we started, read The Pursuit of Happiness; to see where we ended up, watch It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
However you celebrate Independence Day and America’s 248th birthday tomorrow, I hope you make it a good one.