The Founders’ secret to finding happiness

In his early 20s, Benjamin Franklin recalled, “I conceiv’d the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection.” He had been reading some of the classical Greek and Roman philosophers — Pythagoras, Xenophon, Plutarch and Cicero — as well as scanning the popular magazines of the day for self-help advice.

Based on his reading, he had become convinced that the key to self-improvement was daily self-examination. Accordingly, he devised a spiritual accounting system, drafting a list of 12 virtues: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility and chastity.

Franklin later expanded his list to 13 by adding another virtue a Quaker friend told him he needed to work on: humility. He resolved each day to run through a checklist of whether or not he had lived up to each virtue, placing a black mark next to the virtue where he had fallen short.

Franklin worried that if word got out about his plan for moral perfection, it might be viewed as “a kind of foppery in morals” that “would make me ridiculous.” (Perhaps he imagined the reaction to a book called “Humility, by Benjamin Franklin.”)

Daunted by all the black marks, he eventually abandoned the project. But “on the whole,” he concluded, “tho’ I never arrived at the perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet I was, by the endeavor, a better and a happier man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it.”

Franklin’s conclusion was that “without Virtue Man can have no Happiness in this World.” As the motto for his project, he chose these lines from one of the most widely read books of Stoic self-help philosophy, Cicero’s “Tusculan Disputations”:

“O philosophy, guide of life! O searcher out of virtue and exterminator of vice! One day spent well and in accordance with thy precepts is worth an immortality of sin.”

Thomas Jefferson, like Franklin, was inspired by “Tusculan Disputations” to draft his own list of 12 virtues — he called them “a dozen canons of conduct in life” — that he believed were key to the pursuit of happiness. And Jefferson, like Franklin, accompanied his list of virtues with practical maxims about how to follow each one, beginning with industry, which Jefferson reduced to the following: “Never put off to tomorrow what you can do to-day.” (Franklin’s version was “Lose no time; be always employ’d in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.”)

The pursuit of happiness

Today we think of happiness as the pursuit of pleasure. But classical and Enlightenment thinkers defined happiness as the pursuit of virtue — as being good, rather than feeling good.

For this reason, the Founders believed that the quest for happiness is a daily practice, requiring mental and spiritual self-discipline, as well as mindfulness and rigorous time management. At its core, the Founders viewed the pursuit of happiness as a lifelong quest for character improvement, where we use our powers of reason to moderate our unproductive emotions so that we can be our best selves and serve others.

For the Founders, happiness required the daily cultivation of virtue, which the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith defined as “the temper of mind which constitutes the excellent and praiseworthy character.”

If you had to sum it up in one sentence, the classical definition of the pursuit of happiness meant being a lifelong learner, with a commitment to practicing the daily habits that lead to character improvement, self-mastery, flourishing and growth. Understood in these terms, happiness is always something to be pursued rather than obtained — a quest rather than a destination.

Throughout American history, the meaning of the pursuit of happiness has evolved in unexpected ways. The ancient wisdom that defined happiness as self-mastery, emotional self-regulation, tranquility of mind and the quest for self-improvement was distilled in the works of Cicero, summed up by Franklin in his 13 virtues, and used by John Adams in his “Thoughts on Government.”

After Jefferson inscribed the idea in the Declaration of Independence, it showed up in the Federalist Papers, the essays James Madison and Alexander Hamilton wrote in support of the Constitution, focusing on the promotion of public happiness. It was evoked by Presidents John Quincy Adams and Abraham Lincoln, as well as by the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, to defend the ideal of self-reliance and to advocate for the destruction of slavery. It became the basis of Alexis de Tocqueville’s idea of “self-interest properly understood” and of Justice Louis Brandeis’ idea of freedom of conscience.

The ancient wisdom fell out of fashion in the 1960s and in the “Me Decade” that followed, when our understanding about the pursuit of happiness was transformed from being good to feeling good. But the classical ideal of happiness was resurrected and confirmed in the 1990s by insights from social psychology and cognitive behavioral therapy, which found that we can best achieve emotional intelligence by developing habits of emotional self-regulation — training ourselves to turn negative thoughts and emotions into positive ones — through the power of the imagination.

The Founders talked incessantly about their struggles for self-improvement and their efforts to regulate their anxieties, emotions and perturbations of the mind. They tried to calm their anxieties through the daily practice of the habits of mindfulness and time management.

Aristotle said that good character comes from the cultivation of habits, and it’s remarkable how much time and energy many of the leading members of the founding generation devoted to their own lifelong quests to practice the habits that would improve their character. They took seriously the Pythagorean injunction to use every hour of the day to cultivate their minds and bodies. They created disciplined schedules for reading, writing and exercise, and they kept daily accounts of their successes and failures in living up to the ideals they found in the books of ancient wisdom, trying to use each moment productively by living in the present with calm but intense purpose and focus. The Founders may not have meditated, but they practiced the habits of mindfulness.

Finding happiness through self-governance

Following the classical and Enlightenment philosophers, the Founders believed that personal self-government was necessary for political self-government. In their view, the key to a healthy republic begins with how we address our own flaws and commit to becoming better citizens over time.

In the Federalist Papers, Madison and Hamilton made clear that the Constitution was designed to foster deliberation so that citizens could avoid retreating into the angry mobs and partisan factions that can be inflamed by demagogues. Ancient Athens had fallen because the demagogue Cleon had seduced the Athenian assembly into continuing the war with the Peloponnesian League; Rome had fallen because the people were corrupted by Caesar, who offered them luxury in exchange for liberty. Only by governing their selfish emotions as individuals could citizens avoid degenerating into selfish factions that threatened the common good.

The way for citizens to create a more perfect union, the Founders insisted, was to govern themselves in private as well as in public, cultivating the same personal deliberation, moderation and harmony in our own minds that we strive to maintain in the constitution of the state. Madison would have urged us to think more and tweet less.

In this sense, the Founders believed that the pursuit of happiness regards freedom not as boundless liberty to do whatever feels good in the moment but as bounded liberty to make wise choices that will help us best develop our capacities and talents over the course of our lives.

They believed that the pursuit of happiness includes responsibilities as well as rights — the responsibility to limit ourselves, restrain ourselves and master ourselves, so that we achieve the wisdom and harmony that are necessary for true freedom.

“Obviously freedom must carry with it the meaning of freedom to limit oneself,” the composer Leonard Bernstein said of Beethoven’s choice of a single note in his “Eroica Symphony.” “Freedom is not infinite, not boundless liberty, as some hippies like to think — do anything you want, anytime, anywhere you want to. No, freedom isn’t that. It means being free to make decisions, to determine one’s own course.”

Bernstein went on to connect Beethoven’s struggle to balance freedom and harmony in the symphony with the same freedom of citizens to govern themselves in a democracy. “In Beethoven, as in democracy, freedom is a discipline, combining the right to choose freely, with the gift of choosing wisely.”

Citing Cicero’s famous analogy between “harmony in song” and “concord in the State,” John Adams, too, compared the harmony of a well-tempered state constitution to the harmony of a well-tempered orchestra. “As the treble, the tenor, and the bass exist in nature, they will be heard in the concert,” Adams wrote in his “Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America.” “(I)f they are arranged by Handel, in a skilful composition, they produce rapture the most exquisite that harmony can excite; but if they are confused together, without order, they will ‘Rend with tremendous sound your ears asunder.’” This was the classical understanding of the pursuit of happiness: the freedom to make daily choices about how to balance emotion and reason that lead to truth, order, harmony and wisdom, aligned with the divine will or the natural harmonies of the universe. The Founders understood the importance of our spiritual nature, and for many of them, the pursuit of happiness was a spiritual quest.

By attempting to travel into the minds of the Founders, we can begin to understand their quest for the good life on their own terms. By reading the books they read and following their own daily attempts at self-accounting, we can better understand the largely forgotten core of their moral and political philosophy: 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.

It’s not a surprise that the Founders often fell short of their own ideals of moral perfection. But what is a surprise is the seriousness with which they took the quest, on a daily basis, to become more perfect.

Excerpted from “The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America” by Jeffrey Rosen. Copyright 2024 © by Jeffrey Rosen. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.

This story appears in the July/August 2024 issue of Deseret Magazine . Learn more about how to subscribe .