According to The Pursuit of Happiness by Jeffrey Rosen, president of the National Constitution Center, the famous phrase from the Declaration of Independence is best understood through the influence of Greek and Roman writers on the founding generation.
Benjamin Franklin wrote that "without Virtue Man can have no Happiness in this World." In his autobiography, Franklin recalled a project that he had undertaken based on Cicero's Tusculan Disputations, a Stoic philosophy self-help book, to define and practice a list of 12 virtues. During the first year of Covid, Rosen (Conversations with RBG; Louis D. Brandeis) worked his way through a list of books popular among the Founders, and discovered that most of them used the phrase "pursuit of happiness" and that they defined it in terms based on Tusculan Disputations and the quest for virtue.
Rosen sets forth his case with profiles of members of the founding generation--and the virtues for which they strove--plus a few who later shaped the U.S. government. As he researched, Rosen processed what he learned by setting his observations down in verse. He later found out this was a method some of his subjects also used, and he charmingly includes some of his poems as introductions to the chapters. Some make for positive examples, such as Benjamin Franklin's example of temperance. But Rosen's realistic evaluation never loses sight of the ways in which his subjects failed, especially those who admitted that virtue did not permit for holding people in bondage but did so anyway. The result is a fresh understanding of the opportunity for self-improvement as a founding principle of the United States. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library