In my foray into what is surely an inexhaustible reserve of happiness-oriented literature, I have noticed that you can hardly swing your favorite stuffie without striking it against an allusion to “the pursuit of happiness.” The phrase is everywhere. Writers of all stripes use it, and it appears with varying degrees of reference to its original, Jeffersonian context in the Declaration of Independence, as well as with varying degrees of irony. (I myself employed the phrase just yesterday, when I was mulling over the place of introverts in the psychological landscape of the U.S.) The ubiquity of the phrase seems to be a testament to its rootedness in the fecund loam of the American subconscious.
But what does it mean, anyway? In writing his rough draft of the Declaration, which already included this bit about “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” Jefferson claimed to have “turned to neither book nor pamphlet.” This doesn’t mean he wasn’t influenced by anything, of course, but that he was more concerned with channeling the muse of prospective statehood than constructing a document with a clear ideological lineage. But even as scholars have done a fine job establishing that lineage in the time since – Gettysburg College historian Timothy J. Shannon, for example, identifies the English philosopher John Locke and the Virginia statesman George Mason as two of Jefferson’s major sources – the exact nature of Jefferson’s “happiness” remains a bit murky. Shannon’s perspective is that Jefferson, as an Enlightenment thinker, connected happiness with the potential power of reason to improve the lives of individuals and the condition of society as a whole – which often meant taking advantage of opportunities to increase wealth and improve living conditions:
“In Jefferson’s world, reasonable people pursued happiness by migrating from poverty and deprivation in the Old World to the natural bounty of the New. They pursued happiness by adopting new techniques that improved crop yields and livestock breeding. They built ships, roads, and canals that opened new markets and sped commerce.”
In other words, there might be less of a need for constitutional hermeneutics than one might tend to assume. From Jefferson to your average Amazon Prime member (that’s me!), it seems possible that the American “pursuit of happiness” has been bound up with technological advancement and material progress for close to two and a half centuries. Shannon continues:
“Happiness meant being able to provide for your family without fear of famine, incessant warfare, or an exploitive aristocracy. In his essay “Information to Those Who Would Remove to America,” [Benjamin] Franklin called this condition a “general happy mediocrity.” Today, we call it a stable, middle-class society, where people who work hard can reasonably expect freedom and prosperity for themselves and their children.”
WHAT IS HAPPINESS? 