Publishers Weekly
11/13/2023
Rosen (Conversations with RBG), a professor of law at George Washington University, travels “into the minds of the Founders, to understand their quest for the good life on their own terms,” in this fast-paced romp through early American political thought. Profiling six well-known founders, as well as other contemporaries such as Abigail Adams and Phillis Wheatley, Rosen attempts to illuminate what “the pursuit of happiness” meant to them. For instance, he suggests that Benjamin Franklin was inspired by Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, a kind of “self-help book,” from which Franklin learned that “without Virtue Man can have no Happiness in this World.” A recommended reading list compiled by Thomas Jefferson forms the backbone of a chapter on “Industry,” and in the concluding chapter on “Silence,” Rosen contends that the founders’ lessons of self-mastery have lived on through notable figures such as Supreme Court justices Louis Brandeis and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, both subjects of his earlier books. He recalls that Ginsburg told him that her mother gave her “precisely the same Stoic advice” that Abigail Adams once gave to her son John Quincy Adams: “Emotions like anger, remorse, and jealousy are not productive,” she said. “They will not accomplish anything, so you must keep them under control.” Rosen’s account sometimes runs thin, with complex authors such as Epictetus and Seneca condensed in rudimentary ways. Still, this is an entertaining window on the American founders’ reading lives. (Feb.)
Booklist
"With insight and wit, legal scholar Rosen shows how classical philosophy inspired the Founders. . . . Rosen's noteworthy book offers a better understanding of philosophy and American history."
David W. Blight
Jeffrey Rosen found a ‘gap’ in his education, such as we all have. In filling it he has written a masterpiece of intellectual history about the Founders, renewing, we can hope, our reading of them and what they read. Here is the enriching story of how ‘pursuit of happiness’ never meant pleasure or success, but the self-governing quest, always unachieved, of virtue. This brilliant work is very new about very old ideas that refresh the spirit.
H.W. Brands
A delightful, insightful reminder of a truth obvious to the Founders but forgotten by subsequent generations of Americans: that personal happiness and the health of the republic depend on virtue, which in turn requires regular cultivation. Read this timely book for your own benefit and the good of us all.
Richard Brookhiser Richard Brookhiser
"The Founders had no internet to educate them, but they did have advice books, contemporary and ancient. Jeffrey Rosen guides us through them to see what the Founders meant by happiness, and how they hoped to secure it. And, he suggests, we could do the same today."
Jon Meacham
To understand who we are, we must begin at the beginning—which is precisely what Jeffrey Rosen does in this remarkable and timely book. By exploring how the American Founders viewed virtue and the fabled (and often misunderstood) ‘pursuit of happiness,’ Rosen offers us a much-needed reminder of the centrality of civic and personal virtue.
Ken Burns
Jeffrey Rosen’s immensely readable and thoughtful book on America’s founders makes a strong case that a life invested in understanding the past may in fact be a happier one. There are lessons here for preserving our democracy today.
Gordon Wood
Using the classical virtues prescribed by Benjamin Franklin as a way of organizing his book, Jeffrey Rosen has put together a remarkable collection of fresh and insightful essays on the Founders. Indeed, his book may be the best and most readable introduction to the ideas of the Founders that we have.
Richard Brookhiser
"The Founders had no internet to educate them, but they did have advice books, contemporary and ancient. Jeffrey Rosen guides us through them to see what the Founders meant by happiness, and how they hoped to secure it. And, he suggests, we could do the same today."
Kirkus Reviews
2023-10-21
A study of the Founding Fathers’ search for self-mastery.
Rosen, president of the National Constitution Center and author of Conversations with RBG, offers a revisionist perspective on the nation’s values by examining how happiness was viewed by Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton. From reading classical thinkers such as Cicero, Epictetus, and Xenophon, along with David Hume, John Locke, and Adam Smith (Rosen appends a reading list), the founders came to believe “that the quest for happiness is a daily practice, requiring mental and spiritual self-discipline, as well as mindfulness and rigorous time management.” Far different from the self-serving gratification of desires, happiness results from having a balance between reason and passion. They thus believed that “moderating emotions is the secret of tranquility of mind; that tranquility of mind is the secret of happiness; that daily habits are the secret of self-improvement; and that personal self-government is the secret of political self-government.” Each man, Rosen reveals, enacted a lifelong project of self-discipline. Adams, for example, struggled to subdue his vanity. Ridiculed “as one of the most self-regarding men of his age,” he worked to cultivate humility. As for Jefferson, he strove for industriousness, “cultivating his mind, body, thoughts, and faculties in order to achieve the mental tranquility he was determined to maintain at all costs.” Tranquility, the basis for happiness, comes “not in the success or failure of our efforts to achieve inner harmony but from the pursuit itself.” Along with examining sources that were significant for the founders, Rosen reveals how those texts shaped the ideas of influential figures such as Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln. In their distinguishing between being good from feeling good, the founders, Rosen hopes, may inspire readers to redefine the meaning of a good life.
A thoughtful rendering of America’s history.
