The Pursuit of Happiness in the Founding Era: An Intellectual History by Carli N. Conklin (review)

Developed by Aristotle, adopted by Thomas Aquinas, and embraced by countless others, the concept of happiness (eudaimonia) as the summum bonum for law and society is the subject of a vast and sophisticated philosophical and theological literature. Carli N. Conklin is surely correct that William Blackstone’s statement about the “paternal precept, ‘that man should pursue his own happiness,’” in an introductory chapter of his magnum opus “was common among the latitudinarian Anglican theologians and Scottish Common Sense philosophers of his day” (pp. 13, 8). Prompted by her encounter with this quotation, Conklin sets out to “[explore] the meaning of the pursuit of happiness as it was used first by Blackstone in his Commentaries on the Laws of England and then in the Declaration of Independence” (p. 7). Originally a dissertation at the University of Virginia, the text of this monograph appears substantially verbatim in Conklin’s “The Origins of the Pursuit of Happiness” in the Washington University Jurisprudence Review (vol. 7, no. 2 [2015], pp. 195–262).

The precept that Conklin believes Thomas Jefferson borrowed appeared in seven editions of the Commentaries before Blackstone altered it in 1778 to “man should pursue his own true and substantial happiness” (p. 220n12). These introductory quotations are the closest Blackstone ever came to using the phrase “pursuit of happiness.” The word happiness rarely appears elsewhere in four volumes of Commentaries. Blackstone’s source has not been identified, but one finds the first quotation in Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui’s Principles of Natural Law (1748), where it was presented as a well-known maxim.

Conklin portrays Blackstone’s reference to happiness as a “point of convergence” woven from four strands of thought: English law, classical antiquity, Christianity, and the Scottish Common Sense school (p. 206n4). Yet happiness disappears for pages at a time in digressions about King Alfred, Bishop Joseph Butler, Blackstone’s architectural metaphors, Newtonian science, and much else—written virtually exclusively from secondary sources. Based on one journal article, Conklin links Blackstone with Butler (who died in 1752) as thinkers who “discussed epistemology in ways that reflect the writings of Thomas Reid, a key thinker of the Scottish Enlightenment,” though Reid did not publish his Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense until 1764 (p. 32).

Lacunae spoil the argument for Jefferson’s reliance on Blackstone. “What are we to make of the fact that the phrase ‘pursuit of happiness’ was not edited at all,” Conklin asks, “either by Jefferson, [John] Adams, or [Benjamin] Franklin, within the Committee of Five, or within the Continental Congress as a whole?” (p. 55). Did it have a commonly understood “substantive meaning” (p. 55)? The likely answer is that Jefferson and his colleagues knew the concept from John Locke’s chapter on power in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Having accepted Garry Wills’s contested argument in Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (Garden City, N.Y., 1978), Conklin never confronts Locke’s use of the phrase. Neither did she consult the evidence in Herbert Lawrence Ganter, “Jefferson’s ‘Pursuit of Happiness’ and Some Forgotten Men” (William and Mary Quarterly, 2nd ser., vol. 16 [July and October 1936], pp. 422–34, 558–85), or Arthur M. Schlesinger, “The Lost Meaning of ‘The Pursuit of Happiness’” (William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., vol. 21 [July 1964], pp. 325–27).

In recent decades, historians of ideas such as the late Caroline Robbins (whose essay on the pursuit of happiness in Absolute Liberty: A Selection from the Articles and Papers of Caroline Robbins [Hamden, Conn., 1982] has also escaped Conklin’s notice) have transformed our understanding of modern history and political thought. Conklin’s The Pursuit of Happiness in the Founding Era raises many questions. With keyword-searchable books, periodicals, and newspapers readily available, a reliable monograph documenting the concept...