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

We live in cynical political times. It's easy—common even—to ascribe base motives or rationales to people's actions, particularly in the realm of politics and law. This cynicism is not reserved to our contemporary political landscape; it filters into our view of historical actors. Carli Conklin brilliantly and persuasively compels us to buck this trend and to take seriously the words inscribed in one of the foundational documents of the United States: the Declaration of Independence. Conklin does not ask us to abandon our critical assessment of the founders' intentions; rather she charges us to ground our understanding of these actors in their own times and conceptions of themselves. In a short but thorough examination of a key phrase in the Declaration—"the pursuit of happiness"—Conklin reminds us that context matters.

Conklin argues that "the pursuit of happiness" had substantive and broadly understood meaning in the late eighteenth century. This meaning drew together four different elements: "English law and legal theory, the history and philosophy of classical antiquity, Christianity, and the Scottish Enlightenment's focus on Newtonian science" (8). Together, these elements reflect an understanding that the pursuit of happiness was a process that sought to harmonize man and natural law, through which man strived toward a virtuous life. The result, Conklin asserts, would be eudaimonia, an ancient Greek term for "man's own real and substantial happiness" (8). The happiness that resulted from eudaimonia rested on a virtuous life that united public duty and private rights. Thus, Conklin argues, the phrase embodied "a private right to pursue a life lived in accordance with the laws of nature as they pertain to man and a public duty to govern in harmony with those laws" (134).

Conklin pushes back against scholars who have dismissed the phrase "the pursuit of happiness" as either a substitution for Locke's "property" (to avoid raising the issue of slavery and property in people) or as an innocuous rhetorical flourish. In a historiographical essay in the book's appendix, Conklin challenges interpretations of the phrase set forth by William Scott (Locke's property), John Crowley (pursuit of comfort), Jan Lewis (quiet family life), and Garry Wills (Scottish Enlightenment's public virtue).¹ For Conklin, these interpretations miss the complexity of the phrase by pigeonholing it to one particular meaning or strand of philosophy. Conklin's work builds on these authors, as well as studies of the process of crafting the Declaration written by Carl Becker and Pauline Maier, to give a fuller sense of how the founders understood "the pursuit of happiness" in a nuanced and uncontested way.²

To demonstrate that this understanding of "the pursuit of happiness" was substantive and broadly accepted, Conklin closely examines and compares Blackstone's use of the term in his Commentaries on the Laws of England and Jefferson's use in the Declaration drafts and its final version (approved by the Second Continental Congress). Conklin acknowledges that Jefferson rejected Blackstone's politics and found previous commentaries on English common law more accurate; yet despite these differences, the common way that both Blackstone and Jefferson used "the pursuit of happiness" supports Conklin's interpretation of the phrase and her assertion of its broad and common acceptance. She breaks her analysis into three sections focusing on Blackstone and his Commentaries, the Declaration, and the commonalities in usage in both documents across their different contexts. Concise chapters make the book a quick read and potentially useful for undergraduates or graduate students as well as legal and intellectual scholars of the eighteenth century. Six appendices give readers insight into the historiographies of Blackstone's Commentaries and the Declaration as well as reproductions of key passages and drafts of each text.

Conklin engages in an intensive textual analysis of the phrase "the pursuit of happiness" and delves into the...