♪ ♪ ♪ (theme music playing) ♪ RUBENSTEIN: Hello, I'm David Rubenstein.

I'm gonna be in conversation today with Jeffrey Rosen who is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center.

He's also a professor of law at George Washington University Law School and he's also most recently the author of, “The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America.” We're coming to you from the Robert H. Smith Auditorium at the New York Historical Society.

Jeffrey, thank you for doing this.

ROSEN: Wonderful to be here.

RUBENSTEIN: So let's talk about this book, “The Pursuit of Happiness.” Now, uh, the word happiness is a word that many people probably know what it means.

Maybe you would say merriment or, or having fun.

But in the concept that you're talking about, happiness means something different, right?

ROSEN: It does indeed.

For the founders, happiness meant not feeling good, but being good.

Not the pursuit of pleasure but the pursuit of virtue.

RUBENSTEIN: So when Thomas Jefferson wrote the sentence which became the most famous sentence perhaps in the English language, uh, "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they're endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

People think, "All right, life, liberty, and happiness.

Okay, uh, you should be happy."

But happiness was not what he had in mind when he wrote that, is that correct?

Jefferson, uh, statement was not really about being, having fun, and so forth.

ROSEN: It certainly wasn't.

In some ways, it was the opposite.

And I only discovered this with the remarkable reading project that led to this book.

Can I describe how that happened?

RUBENSTEIN: Go ahead.

ROSEN: So during COVID I came across a reading list that Jefferson would send to kids who were going to law school and asked him the meaning of happiness.

And, he would send a passage from a book I'd never heard of called, Cicero's “Tusculan Disputation”" and the passage said essentially, "The man who has a tranquility of soul, who is neither unduly exuberant nor transported by wanton exultation, he is the happy man of whom we're in quest.

He is the wise man."

I thought, "Okay, that's a interesting definition of happiness and I've never heard of this Cicero book."

Then, um, I looked on Jefferson's reading list and the Cicero book was at the top of a section called, "Ethics or natural religion", along with other books that I'd not read.

Uh, and they were Stoic philosophers like Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Enlightenment philosophers like John Locke and Francis Hutcheson, and David Hume.

So during COVID, I resolved to read the books.

And something came over me, it was, you know, inspired by Jefferson's schedule, ‘cause he would set out when you have to wake up and what you have to read in the morning when you're alert and then you're allowed some easier stuff in the afternoon and literature in the, uh, in the evening.

I'd wake up, uh, before sunrise, watch the sunrise, read from the classical moral philosophy, and I found myself writing sonnets to sum up the wisdom that I'd experienced.

This sounds really weird... (laughs) I never expected to be writing sonnets.

But then I discovered that many people in this period who read this wisdom also wrote sonnets.

Like, Phillis Wheatley, the first great Black poet.

Uh, John Quincy Adams would wake up early in the morning and read Cicero in the original and write sonnets.

ROSEN: So I wrote the sonnets, I read the books, and I spent a year reading this incredible wisdom and it just changed my life.

It blew me away.

I never knew that for most of human history, let alone our history, happiness meant the pursuit of virtue, not the pursuit of pleasure, and by virtue, they meant something particular.

It meant self-mastery, self-improvement, character-improvement, being your best self.

These, uh, ideals they got from their moral psychology which involved using your powers of reason to moderate or master your unreasonable passions and emotions.

ROSEN: And this distinction between reason and passion, I learned, came from, uh, Pythagoras and it was refined by Plato and it's just everywhere.

This is not some secret understanding of happiness.

All the sources I read, uh, Christian and, uh, Stoic and Civic Republican and Blackstone, they all contain the phrase, "the pursuit of happiness," which you can find by word searches.

And they use it in this sense of controlling the only thing you can control which is your own thoughts and emotions.

RUBENSTEIN: So, to make us not feel so inadequate for not doing the same thing.

ROSEN: Uh, sorry.

I know... RUBENSTEIN: You, you were not reading these in the original Latin or Greek, right?

ROSEN: I, I, I certainly wasn't.

And, look, I don't wanna, like, puff myself up here.

It was being inspired by seeing the example of the founders, the idea Jefferson and Adams, exchanging notes about their reading when they're old.

And, Adams was so excited to learn that Pythagoras was said to have traveled, uh, in the East and, and read the Hindu Vedas.

And, and Jefferson tells him that he's become an Epicurean and not a Stoic and, and the idea that these men and women, because the women were just as inspired by the men and kept up the same reading, were able in their old age, to get up early and read and learn and grow, was so inspiring that I just found myself developing the habit of this kind of reading.

RUBENSTEIN: Now historically I thought, Jefferson never said that he was an original writer of the Declaration of Independence.

He was taking ideas that were common at the time.

But I thought it was more common at the time to say, "Life, liberty, and property."

Or, "the pursuit of property," not happiness.

When did he come up with the idea of substituting the word happiness for the pursuit of property which was different than happiness, really?

ROSEN: So life, liberty, and property appears in John Locke's second treatise and Locke calls them natural rights.

But Jefferson is writing the Declaration and he's talking about unalienable rights, and property is an alienable natural right because when you form a society you have to alienate or transfer the government the power to regulate a property.

By contrast, you can't alienate your powers to pursue happiness because they're based on your reason.

And reason is central to who you are.

And it's both your duty and your right to pursue it.

But this is really important, again this is not Jefferson being quirky or, you know, a kind of temperamental artist, he had before him James Wilson's reflections on the extent of legislative authority in Britain and George Mason's Virginia Declaration of Rights.

Both of those used the phrase, "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and Jefferson is just synthesizing, as he put it, "Ideas that were widely in the air and were an expression of the American mind."

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

So let's talk about some other people's views on happiness.

Uh, your first person you talk about in the book is Benjamin Franklin, uh, a man considered by some to be probably the most famous man in America at the time.

What were his views on virtue?

ROSEN: So when Franklin's in his 20s, he said, "I resolve to achieve moral perfection."

And he made a list of 13 virtues, it was originally 12, he saved the one he found hardest for last, which was chastity.

He'd just fathered a kid out of wedlock.

Then a Quaker friend told him to add the one he found hardest to work on, humility.

And he made a chart and he put the 13 virtues on the left and every night he resolved to work on a different virtue and to put an "X" mark where he fell short.

He tried this for a while, he found it incredibly depressing because there were all these x marks.

And he, he gave it up but he said he was better for having tried.

And Franklin chose as his motto, a, a line from Cicero's “Tusculan Disputations,” "Without virtue, happiness cannot be."

And, a few weeks after I noticed that motto for Franklin I saw this list of 12 virtues that Jefferson drafted.

They were at the Boars Head Inn in, in Charlottesville at UVA and Jefferson's virtues were almost identical to Franklin's and he also used as his motto, Cicero.

So, I share all this to say, Jefferson was right when he said, "I'm synthesizing what's in the air."

It all came back to Ben Franklin.

RUBENSTEIN: Let's talk about George Washington.

What were his views on virtue?

ROSEN: Washington grows on close inspection.

The reason he was viewed as the greatest man of his age was 'cause he was so self-composed and so self-mastered.

He had a strong temper.

There's this amazing moment at Newburgh when the troops are rebelling and he composes himself on a stage called the Temple of Virtue and calls on the soldiers to exercise virtuous self-masteries.

He says, "If you can just wait to be paid for the war debts, Congress will make you whole."

And then famously, you know, he can't read the paper, he struggles to put on his reading glasses and he says, "Forgive me I've grown old in your service and now I've grown almost blind."

The soldiers weep because this strong, great man is confessing weakness and then they abandon the rebellion.

But Washington, in the farewell address, says, "Without virtue, the Republic will fall.

We're not gonna be able to keep this Republic."

And he shows there that he sees, as all the founders did, there's a connection between personal self-government and political self-government.

Unless, as individuals, we can master our anger and our jealousy and fear and devote ourselves to the public good, we won't be able to achieve that as citizens.

RUBENSTEIN: Let's talk about John Adams.

What were his views on virtue?

ROSEN: Well, he was big on it, uh, and really struggled with it because he was the most famously self-regarding, uh, man of his age.

He was constantly- RUBENSTEIN: Self-regarded meant, biggest ego.

ROSEN: Biggest ego.

He was, he was also complaining that he didn't get proper credit.

He, for drafting the Declaration, he, he thought he should've, uh, been, you know, acknowledged for that.

He wanted the president to be "his elective majesty" and liked all these just sort of pompous forms and he has these incredible fallings out with both Jefferson and his great friend Mercy Otis Warren the ant... the brilliant Antifederalist who he considers the poetical genius of the Revolution and writes these satirical plays based on her own classical writing basically because she criticizes him and says that he's too much of a monarchist.

He favors consolidated power.

But despite his ego, Adams I find incredibly endearing because he wears his heart on his sleeve, he recognizes how much he's struggling.

But he's a lifelong learner.

He's constantly reading and growing.

And, and then at the end of his life you just, his, his beautiful correspondence with Jefferson.

It's so inspiring he- RUBENSTEIN: You might explain, they, they fell out for many years.

You might explain why Jefferson and Adams stopped talking for maybe 10, 20 years and how they came back together.

ROSEN: Well they stopped talking because they were the founders of the first American political parties and they fought the most contested partisan election in American history.

And, and Adams is the head of the Federalists and favors a strong central government and, and Jefferson the head of the Republicans who wants states' rights and individual liberty and Jefferson is prosecuted by the Adams administration.

Uh, his, his followers are over the Sedition Acts.

But the amazing thing is that after this unbelievable division, they make up.

Abigail engineers the reconciliation.

Adams sends, as a homespun, uh, gift offering his son John Quincy's Boylston rhetoric lectures at Harvard about virtue and happiness.

Jefferson reads them and then they just open up to each other.

And they're, what do they wanna talk about?

They're trading books, they're so excited about the latest books.

And then what's really beautiful and significant is that they're interested in distilling the common wisdom of the East and the West.

And Adams says, "On reflection, my faith can be expressed in the hymn of Cleonthe.

And that is love God and all his creatures, rejoice in all things."

Just a beautiful distillation of that wisdom, and Jefferson says, "On reflection, I started off as a Ciceronian Stoic and I've become an Epicurean."

By which he means not that we should seek pleasure, that was a libel on Epicurus, Jefferson said, but that we should rationally contract our desires that we can virtuously meet them.

And there's just something so open and, and, and, full of wonder about these old men still willing to learn and grow.

It's a model for the pursuit of happiness.

RUBENSTEIN: Well, well, they, they fell out in part because Adams was the second president and Jefferson who got second-highest number of votes in that year came in as vice president.

In those days you didn't have to be in the same party, whoever had the second-highest number of votes became vice president.

So you have the vice president one party and the president another party, but Adams thought he was due a second term as Washington had had a second term.

Jefferson got the most votes in the next election and he became president and making Adams very upset that his vice president ran against him and beat him.

RUBENSTEIN: They never really overcame that until much later in their lives.

So let's talk about, um, Madison.

Uh, what's his relationship with Washington?

What's his relationship with Jefferson?

And what's his relationship with Hamilton?

ROSEN: So Madison is the most reliable window onto the moderate meaning of the Constitution.

He mediates between the strong centralized vision of Hamilton and the sometimes-extreme states' rights vision of Jefferson.

And Madison in the Federalist Papers articulates a theory of public happiness and political psychology that's unique and brilliant and brings together why the pursuit of happiness is necessary for citizens as well as for individuals.

So he studies, uh, psychology at Princeton with President Witherspoon and learns this idea of faculty psychology which says that we have powers of reason in the head and passion in the heart and desire in the stomach and the goal, uh, as Plato said in his metaphor of the charioteer is to use our reasoning power to align the passionate and competitive parts of our soul so we can achieve a balance in the soul.

Madison extracts from this that we should achieve the same balance and harmony in the Constitution of the state that we seek to achieve in our own souls.

And it changes the way I read the Federalist Papers, it's a manual for the promotion of public happiness, a phrase that Madison uses repeatedly.

He, he envisions the president, the Senate, and the House like the desire and passion and reason, all balancing and checking each other.

And he says that, “Unless the states and the federal government can achieve this calm reason, the Republic will fall.” But it all hinges, and this is another part of Madison's synthetic genius, on public opinion.

He reads Condorcet, the French Physiocrat and is, concludes that unless we can educate the public to have this balance in our public opinion that they have to achieve in their own minds the whole thing will collapse.

And he has faith in a new media technology, the broadside press, to slowly defuse reason across the land as a class of enlightened journalists he calls the "Literati" will write things like the Federalist Papers.

And they'll go across the land and people will read them and they'll debate with their representatives.

Because the country's really big it'll be hard for mobs to form quickly and by the time they do they'll get tired and go home, and through this slow deliberative process of public reason we'll achieve the harmony of the state, uh, that will guarantee public happiness.

RUBENSTEIN: Now, for those people who aren't constitutional law experts, what are the Federalist Papers?

ROSEN: They were written by Hamilton and Jefferson to support the ratification of the Constitution of the United States.

RUBENSTEIN: Why did they need to do that?

Wasn't it gonna be ratified easily?

ROSEN: No.

It was very close.

Remember it's proposed, uh, in 1787 but it doesn't have the force of law until the specially called, "Ratifying Conventions" ratify it.

It was very close in Virginia because the anti-Federalists who want strong state sovereignty and reject the idea that we the people of the United States as a whole are sovereign, are against it.

Patrick Henry and so forth.

George Mason and, uh, Edmond Randolph refuse to sign because there's no bill of rights.

Jefferson, in this amazing letter to Madison, says he has two objections to the Constitution.

One, there's no bill of rights.

And two, he's afraid that at some point in the distant future a demagogic president because he can run for reelection might lose the election by a few votes, cry foul, enlist the states who voted for him, and refuse to leave office.

It's in the Jefferson letter to Madison on the Constitution.

Jefferson's solution is a one-year term limit for the president because the president won't be tempted to steal an election, but it's his fear of centralized power and a too-strong executive is so strong that in Virginia it goes down to the wire and both Madison and John Marshall in the Virginia Ratifying Convention, citing the Federalist Papers, are able to just bring it over the edge.

RUBENSTEIN: So how many Federalist Papers were written?

ROSEN: Is it 87?

Uh, I hope that's right but, something like that... RUBENSTEIN: Less than that.

But, uh, and then, then they were published anonymously.

Why where they published anonymously?

ROSEN: It was a norm to have anonymous, uh, publications, uh, and they were supposed to, uh, appeal based on reason rather than on the identity of the speaker.

RUBENSTEIN: And they were all written, though, by three people.

One is, uh, Hamilton, the other is Madison, uh, and five or so by John Jay, right?

ROSEN: Yes, indeed.

RUBENSTEIN: So you had 57 White, Christian property-owning men together for four months and they come up with this document and then later the, the, uh, Bill of Rights is drafted really by Madison, um, with some amendments.

Um, today the country is not all White Christian property, owning men, yet we're governed by a document that's more than 200 years written by people who are different than the diversity we have in the country now.

What, uh, what would happen if we had a new Constitutional Convention, which is permitted in the Constitution, and we had more representative, uh, people there representing the country?

What do you think the Constitution would be?

Would it be much different than the constitution we have?

ROSEN: Well first let's talk about the fact that it was White Christian men who ratified this and it's very important to talk about slavery.

How is it possible that these men who said they were devoting their lives to the pursuit of virtue, which included industry, frugality, uh, could benefit from slavery?

And what I learned is that they didn't even try.

They recognized their hypocrisy.

All of the enslavers from Virginia viewed slavery as inconsistent with the natural rights in the Declaration of Independence and in moments of candor they acknowledged that it was simple avarice or greed that let them to continue to exploit enslaved labor.

Patrick Henry has this amazing quote where he says, "Is it not amazing that I myself who believed that slavery is immoral, myself owns slaves?

I won't justify it, I won't attempt to.

It's simple avarice.

I can't do with the inconvenience of not, uh, having slaves."

And Jefferson was even worse.

I mean, uh, on close examination Jefferson does not come out well.

He combined complete hypocrisy in always saying that slavery should end, at some point in the distant future with being unwilling to end it in his lifetime with of course the fact that he was surrounded at Monticello by his own enslaved children who he freed on his, uh, deathbed but freed no other enslaved population.

And he lived way above his means.

He loved, he was addicted to the luxury of Monticello despite his exultation of Roman frugality and he just didn't wanna give up the lifestyle.

So, on the one hand, um, it shows that the founders were quite notoriously unsuccessful in living up to some of their mo-most important ideals.

But the reason the document survived is because the ideals were so and are so inspiring and ennobling and it's so meaningful to me to see Frederick Douglass on the streets of Baltimore paying in bread.

He paid boys to teach him how to read because his wicked mistress refu... was told not to teach him how to read because then he might want freedom.

And what does he do with his bread?

He buys this book called "The Columbian Orator,” which is a collection of the same classical moral philosophy that inspired Franklin and Adams, and Jefferson.

And reading that resolves him to end slavery, and he becomes the most inspiring abolitionist of his time, invoking what he calls self-reliance which was his definition of the pursuit of happiness, self-mastery, self, uh, character improvement and being your best self.

So it's a very inspiring reminder that those ideals which you said are, were deeply betrayed by, uh, many of the founders at time of the founding inspired future generations, future freedom fighters.

And this, this is a glorious legacy of liberty.

Remember Frederick Douglass said, "It's a libel on those founders to say this is a pro-slavery document.

It's a glorious liberty document and it's got to be defended as such."

RUBENSTEIN: But if the delegates to the Constitutional Convention had not agreed to let slavery occur there would've been no Constitution, is that right?

ROSEN: That's right.

RUBENSTEIN: Why did Madison at the Constitutional Convention say we don't have time or we don't need a bill of rights and why did he change his mind?

ROSEN: He said we don't need a bill of rights for two reasons.

He said it would be unnecessary or dangerous.

Unnecessary because the Constitution itself is a bill of rights.

Congress is given no power to infringe free speech and therefore it won't try.

And two, it's dangerous because we have so many rights from the hand of God or nature that to write them down would be impossible.

Um, and if you did make a list people might wrongly assume if it wasn't written down it wasn't protected.

But he changed his mind because he was gonna lose a House election in Virginia and in order to win reelection he listened to the voice of the people supporting the Bill of Rights and that was the story.

RUBENSTEIN: Well also he argued, I think, that the states had their own bill of rights and that was gonna protect, uh, people but ultimately he changed his mind.

So if you were, um, able to change the Constitution any way today, you're a constitutional law scholar and, you know, it's not a perfect document for sure.

What would be the changes that you would make?

ROSEN: The Constitution Center just had the most inspiring project that asked just that question.

And we convened three teams of scholars, basically to draft their own constitutional amendments.

And what blew our mind is that in just a week, these very ideologically diverse scholars, among really well-known conservatives and liberals and libertarians, agreed on five amendments to the Constitution.

And I felt like I was listening to a modern-day convention.

That's how high the level of discussion was.

And here are the five amendments.

End the natural-born citizenship requirement for president.

Two, term limits for Supreme Court justices.

Three, make amending a little bit easier.

Four, make it a little harder to impeach and easier to convict in the Senate.

And five, end the legislative veto.

Remember before 1980 Congress could say no to executive actions by majority vote?

The Supreme Court struck that down.

These scholars thought it would be great to empower Congress to do its job and allow it to assert itself on majority vote.

RUBENSTEIN: Hey, wow.

And they didn't, what about, uh, ending money in elections?

ROSEN: That was not something they agreed on.

The progressive team did want to do that and they wanted to make the Constitution more democratic.

The libertarians basically didn't want any changes except they wanted to put, "and we mean it" after every expression of enumerated power.

RUBENSTEIN: And... ROSEN: And, but the, but the conservatives and the progressives almost agreed on eliminating the electoral college and having a popular vote.

But I, I stress this because isn't that inspiring?

It just shows that in all partisanship in this country, if you create a platform for civil dialogue and bring together really thoughtful people and who, they didn't have to agree, but who, who, who've studied constitutional history, there are structural reforms that we actually can agree on.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

So, I'm going to Philadelphia, let's say, and I have a couple extra hours.

Why shouldn't I spend my time at Independence Hall where the Constitution and the Declaration were drafted rather than go to the Constitution Center?

What's the argument for going to the Constitution Center?

What am I gonna get out of that?

ROSEN: Well the Constitution Center has the best view of Independence Hall in America, and... RUBENSTEIN: Okay, okay, what else do you have there?

ROSEN: Well we have a Declaration of Independence thanks to you which you very generously... RUBENSTEIN: But you, also have statues of all the signers, don't you?

ROSEN: We have statues of the signers.

It's so inspiring to, just go there.

It's so low-tech but so powerful.

Their presence is so palpable.

And you see these men, Jefferson is in Paris, Adams is in London.

But there's Washington at the front of the room, at 6'3" the tallest guy in the room, Madison at 5'3" behind him.

Hamilton proud and slim and strong.

What he lacked in, uh, stature he made up in fiscal responsibility is the line.

But, what's so meaningful is why was it possible that this group of men were able in a, a few months to draft this enduring document.

And there may have been a divine favor as Franklin thought.

But it's their ideas.

And what's so inspiring for me about this project, which has made me even more determined to teach and, uh, and, and defend the American idea is it's the books they read as kids.

They shared a commitment to reason.

These were men of the Enlightenment, and they have this shining faith that you could prove the proposition that a government could be founded not on force and violence but by reason and conviction, as Hamilton put it in Federalist 1.

And this idea that as kids, they just struggled to read books and master their tempers and be good people so that they could prepare themselves for public service and set aside their egos and their parties and try to achieve the common good, and they are able to encapsulate that learning in this short, brief document of freedom, never before tried in human history to codify it.

And that they succeeded.

And Madison couldn't believe it.

He thought if you had another convention it would mess things up and you should just, uh, take this.

But it's, it's, it's a shining faith and reason and it's so important that we defend it today.

RUBENSTEIN: Alright, so, I wish I had been a law school student when you were teaching constitutional law because you obviously bring enthusiasm to the subject and a passion for it.

So congratulations for what you've achieved with the Constitution Center and this book.

So, thank you for a very interesting conversation.

ROSEN: Thank you so much.

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