What did the Declaration mean by the "pursuit of happiness?"
About this video
The speaker argues that we misread the phrase "pursuit of happiness" in the Declaration of Independence. In the 18th century, people also meant public or social happiness: serving the larger public good, which the speaker compares to our idea of national security. Because the young United States was fragile and surrounded by threats, everyone needed to think of the common good rather than private desires.
You'll be able to
- explain the difference between private happiness and public (social) happiness as 18th-century Americans used the terms.
- explain why the speaker compares the founders' idea of happiness to national security.
- use the historical context of 1776 to explain why the public good mattered so much to the founders.
Key words
- Private happiness
- Personal enjoyment and comfort, like vacations or treats, pursued for yourself.
- Public (social) happiness
- The well-being of the whole community, which citizens work to protect and uphold.
- Res publica
- A Latin phrase meaning "the public thing" or the things that belong to everyone; the root of the word republic.
- Public good
- What benefits the whole society rather than just one person.
- Insurrection
- A violent uprising against the government from within a country.
Transcript
The pursuit of happiness, this is such an excellent line in the declaration of independence, and yet we misunderstand it completely. So when we imagine pursuing happiness today, we imagine it as private happiness, driving at Tesla or going on nice vacation or eating ice cream, all of these things we imagine as the pursuit of happiness. But in the 18th century, they had a second concept of happiness in addition to what they called private happiness. They called it public or social happiness, and you can find this in all of the letters of the founders. They essentially imagined it in the way that we today imagine national security as the need to think of the state, of something outside of ourselves, of the larger good, of the public good, and to
give our lives to upholding that public good. Not always pursuing our private happiness, pursuing things that are I guess what the Romans would call the Res Publica, the things public. The 18th century way of reading the declaration of independence would be to say, we want life, liberty, and we want the ability to pursue the public good, freedom from outside attack and freedom from inside insurrections. That's why I say that it's much closer to the idea of national security than to eating ice cream on a spring day. We have to remember the context, is that the United States in 1776 is this very fragile little entity surrounded by these really scary monarchies and also within itself having all potential dissenters,
slave insurrections, loyalist insurrections. Everybody needed to essentially come together to think of the larger good rather than their own self absorbed desires. It's interesting, to re read the declaration of independence with fresh eyes on happiness.
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