In The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America, Jeffrey Rosen undertakes to examine how leading American Founders learned from ancient writers on moral philosophy, especially the Stoics, to cultivate virtue as the means to attaining happiness. Rosen, the president of the National Constitution Center, reports that the project was inspired by his study, during the COVID quarantine, of eleven books that Thomas Jefferson recommended for a friend’s library, ranging from Xenophon, Cicero, and several Stoic writers to Locke’s Conduct of the Understanding and Bolingbroke, Hume, and Lord Kames. However, Rosen’s admiration for the classical ethical writings that Jefferson and other Founders like John Adams praised leads him to exaggerate their influence on the Founders’ novel political achievement and falls far short of demonstrating that such writings “defined America,” as his subtitle claims. Most notably, Rosen fails to stress how the Founders’ constitutional design rested on considerably different premises from those of ancient writers on politics (as did Locke’s and Hume’s political philosophy). Additionally, he overlooks ironic aspects both of some of the ancient writings Jefferson cited (notably Xenophon’s) and of those composed by one of his key American figures, Benjamin Franklin.

Rosen’s book is divided into twelve chapters, each given a title borrowed from the list of virtues that Franklin, according to his Autobiography, once set out to cultivate as part of a project of achieving “moral perfection.” Franklin reports that he subsequently abandoned the project on account of its unattainability, but nonetheless maintains that its pursuit made him “a better and happier man.” These virtues, in the sequence Rosen gives them, are order, temperance, humility, industry, frugality, sincerity, resolution, moderation, tranquility, cleanliness, justice, and silence (curiously, Rosen omits one of the virtues from Franklin’s list, which Franklin found most challenging to achieve: chastity). However, the contents of each chapter don’t always closely correspond to their titles.

On one point, Rosen finds agreement among all the authors he discusses: that true happiness requires controlling our passions, from a perspective of guiding our conduct by reason rather than irrational desires, or emotions like anger and envy. But this is not in itself a novel thought, for which we needed to recur to the Stoics or the Founders. In fact, Rosen alludes to having received identical advice from the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (citing her mother). Similarly, he reports having received the same admonition against idleness from his own mother that Jefferson gave to his daughter. So why bother to read the Stoics at all, assuming that one profited from having a sensible mother?

Nor does Rosen fortify our incentive to study the classical writers’ teachings by observing that contemporary social psychologists have “confirm[ed] Aristotle’s insights about how emotional self-regulation leads to happiness,” while “cognitive behavior psychologists were confirming Cicero’s and Epictetus’ insights about how tempering our thoughts can reduce anxiety and depression.” Rather, in all likelihood, one’s happiness and self-understanding will be enhanced far more by the careful study of writers like Aristotle and Cicero than by reading the “research” findings of social scientists engaged in reinventing the wheel. Nor, finally, does Rosen demonstrate that Frederick Douglass’s denunciations of racism as the product of “unreasoning hatred,” or of mob violence as the triumph of passion over reason, owed anything to his study of “the classical principles of faculty psychology.”

Along the way, Rosen’s book contains numerous interesting sketches of the admirable lives of such non-Founders as John Quincy Adams (who following his defeat in his 1828 campaign for re-election as president devoted the remainder of his life to serving in the House of Representatives, championing the antislavery cause), Phyllis Wheatley (the enslaved African-American poet whose work was unjustly disparaged by Jefferson so as to justify his claim that black people were inherently inferior to ancient Roman slaves), and Frederick Douglass. But Rosen does not demonstrate that his subjects’ readings and speeches on virtue actually influenced their conduct. The most noteworthy counterexample is Jefferson himself, whom Rosen excoriates for his inexcusable hypocrisy regarding slavery, as well as in his celebration of the independent, thrifty yeoman farmer over the industrial laborer (Jefferson himself was perpetually in debt owing to his extravagance—which led to the selloff of his slaves, entailing the breakup of families, upon his death). Similarly, although Jefferson’s friend-enemy-friend Adams père was a true partisan of justice, his admiration for the Stoics had no apparent effect in taming his widely noted irascibility.

But the problem isn’t merely that Rosen fails to demonstrate that the Founders’ reading of classic treatises on virtue determined either their personal lives or their political achievements (after all, according to Aristotle, moral virtue is acquired by habituation rather than by teaching). The deeper difficulty is that Rosen never addresses the differences between the Founders’ understanding of virtue, and its role in their political enterprises, and the classical understanding. Although Aristotle in his Ethics describes virtue as constituting the core of happiness, he does not use the Lockean term “pursuit of happiness,” which entails the libertarian view of an unending quest for a goal peculiar to each individual, rather than an objective good whose attainment is assisted by wisely written laws. Nor does Franklin himself, in conformity with the outlook of modern liberalism, include in his list such Aristotelian virtues as magnanimity (great-souledness) and magnificence (dispensing one’s funds to sponsor large-scale public projects, such as a temple)—let alone piety.

Much as the American Founders praised virtue and urged others to practice it, they weren’t Stoics. Rather, as modern, largely commercial republicans, they lauded virtue chiefly as a means to other goods, including not only political liberty, but also the gains to be made from successful economic enterprise (lazy, dishonest, and dissolute people typically don’t succeed in business, and in a free society, it’s a lot harder to subsist on family inheritances). And as Rosen acknowledges, instead of relying chiefly on civic virtue to maintain a free republic, the Founders devised institutional structures including the separation of powers, federalism, and checks and balances, following the principles of modern philosophers like Bacon and Spinoza, to make people’s selfish passions counteract one another. This institutional realism is all to the credit of the Founders, whose political and economic structures have preserved “the blessings of liberty” while enabling countless poor immigrants to rise to middle-class status, or higher, while also fostering such benefits as widespread education and scientific and medical innovation.

Nor, in fact, were the Founders the only ones to fall short of the virtues they professed to admire: as Rosen admits, some of the ancient writers they admired did too. Cicero, for one, was widely accused of vanity. And the Roman “hero” Cato the Younger (celebrated in Joseph Addison’s eponymous tragedy, a favorite of George Washington) for committing harakiri rather than succumbing to Caesar’s tyranny, was portrayed as something of a madman by the Greek biographer and essayist Plutarch, as well as by one of the most influential modern, liberal philosophers, Montaigne.

As for Rosen’s citation of what he reports was one of Louis Brandeis’s favorite books, German historian Alfred Zimmern’s The Greek Commonwealth, which represents fifth-century Athens “as the time and place where citizens were freest to pursue happiness by devoting themselves to moral self-improvement,” even a cursory reading of Thucydides (with his depiction of the Athenians’ class conflict, avarice, and subjection to demagoguery) would consign Zimmern’s portrait to the category of what Machiavelli called “imaginary republics.” Fortunately, the Founders did not allow their admiration for classical writings to induce them to follow such idealized visions of classical political life when they designed our Constitution, recognizing (as Alexander Hamilton puts it in Federalist no. 9) how “the petty republics of Greece and Italy …. were continually agitated” by a “rapid succession of revolutions” leading them to “vibrat[e] between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy,” owing to their incapacity to control what James Madison calls “the mischiefs of faction.”

Although Rosen himself offers a utopian portrait of a pre-Romantic America that was devoted to pursuing virtue rather than pleasure (what a laugh that would have given the high-achieving but far from ascetic Franklin), he rightly laments the decay of contemporary pop culture as weakening Americans’ capacity to pursue long-term interest as opposed to “immediate gratification.” In this context he cites, by contrast, Alexis de Tocqueville’s attribution to Americans of the doctrine of “self-interest rightly understood,” but adds, as well, Tocqueville’s hope that our capacity to think beyond present pleasures is buttressed by “the spirit of religion.” Yet Rosen apparently sees no role for purely nondenominational governmental encouragement of religion, evidently agreeing with the Supreme Court’s 1980 ruling finding unconstitutional a Kentucky law that required that the Ten Commandments be posted in public school classrooms, “on the grounds that it lacked a secular educational purpose.”

In the end, lamenting the replacement of serious reading in today’s America by social media, which “increases anxiety,” Rosen’s only hope for salvation is that people find “the self-discipline to take the time to read” the great ancient works that inspired the Founders. To this end, he appends a list of the “most cited books on happiness from the Founding era.” He also praises “cognitive therapy,” which incorporates not only the wisdom of Stoicism but “Eastern philosophies such as Taoism and Buddhism” (the latter movements, I add, are recipes for political as well as personal quietism).

Amidst America’s contemporary cultural decay, religious decline, and reign of political demagoguery, Rosen’s remedies seem weak medicine indeed. Why not focus instead on fortifying our system of public and private K-12 education with serious works of literature and history; replace the inculcation of “critical race theory” and gender fluidity with the promotion of patriotism and support of the family; remove all DEI offices from our universities so as to promote civic harmony rather than division; and unabashedly celebrate the role of religion, as Washington and Tocqueville did? This is an agenda on which I am certain both the ancient writers and the Founders would have agreed.