Jeffrey Rosen talks about his new book, The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America, followed by a panel discussion on the influence of classical writers and thinkers on the founding generation. Panelists include University of Chicago Professor Eric Slauter, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist George Will; and Melody Barnes, executive director of UVA’s Karsh Institute of Democracy. This program was recorded live on February 9, 2024.
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Today’s episode was produced by Advanced Staging Productions, Lana Ulrich, Bill Pollock, and Samson Mostashari. It was engineered by Advanced Staging Productions and Bill Pollock. Research was provided by Samson Mostashari, Cooper Smith, and Yara Daraiseh.
Participants
Melody Barnes is the executive director of the University of Virginia’s Karsh Institute of Democracy and J. Wilson Newman Professor of Governance at the Miller Center of Public Affairs. She is also a senior fellow at UVA Law’s Karsh Center for Law and Democracy. She is chair of the board of trustees of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, the private, nonprofit organization that owns and operates Monticello.
Eric Slauter is deputy dean of the humanities division and the college at the University of Chicago, where he is an associate professor in the English department, an associate faculty member in the Divinity School, and serves as the founding director of the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture.
George Will is an author and commentator who writes a twice-weekly column for The Washington Post on politics and domestic and foreign affairs. He began his column with The Post in 1974, and he received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1977. He is also a regular contributor to MSNBC and NBC News.
Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public about the U.S. Constitution. Rosen is also a professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic.
Additional Resources:
- Jeffrey Rosen, The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America (2024)
- Cicero, The Tusculan Disputations
- Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics
- Melody Barnes, et al, ed., Community Wealth Building and the Reconstruction of American Democracy (2020)
- Karsh Institute of Democracy, University of Virginia
- Eric Slauter, The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution (2009)
- Thomas Jefferson’s Recommended Reading
- George Will, Statecraft as Soulcraft: What Government Does (1984)
- George Will, The Conservative Sensibility (2019)
Excerpt from Interview: Eric Slauter discusses the incorporation of ideas about human nature into the US Constitution, tracing the philosophical debates of the 18th century and highlighting the enduring anxiety among the founders about the virtue of the population and the transmission of constitutional values to future generations.
Eric Slauter: David Hume's first book is called A Treatise of Human Nature. It's one of the great questions that is animating philosophers across this period. We see it in big and small ways in the constitutional debates and in the period of the American Revolution. Everywhere from the nature of bicameralism, right? That bicameralism is preferable because, and should have different terms, term lengths, because the house is always going to be hot and passionate, and the Senate is always going to be cool and reasonable.
Right? And you're trying to structure that, right? As George was saying enlightenment statesmen are not always going to be at the helm. And part of the project is to find those structures that will reinforce virtue for a population that may not have it. The question of virtue throughout this period is of extremely vexed one, and part of it goes to the, to the way in which Montesquieu, for instance, thinks about human nature. And Montesquieu was writing in the 1730s, '40 and trying to really reconceptualize what political thought is going to look like. It's not going to be the old style political theory of John Locke and Grotius and so forth, where you are, you have a kind of fiction of the state of nature. We're really looking at a kind of comparative constitutionalism and it's got a philosophic component in so far as he believes each polity has a different kind of spirit, right?
So despotisms and absolute monarchies operate with the passion of fear. It's central to their operation. Aristocrats operate mostly on honor. And republics can only operate with virtuous citizens, right? So you see a constant stream of anxiety about whether or not the population is sufficiently virtuous to, to support a republic in this period. That's why in 17, in the 1780s, Franklin is looking back at the 1720s, and thinking about his own scheme for moral improvement. He's trying to imagine what are the practices that could be useful no matter what denomination of religion you were, or no denomination that might provide sufficient virtue for a population. If, as you say, self-government is largely going to be about the ability to govern one's self, right?
These theories of human nature are up for grabs in this, in this period. But throughout, what you see is what I would call anxiety I mean, we have anxiety now about the nature of our populations. Jeremiah that you ended your book talk with about that we no longer live in a land of readers. I think you see some of that in this period. Think about all of those early Bills of Rights or Declarations of Rights that precede the state constitutions. Almost all of them. Hamilton makes fun of these in Federalist 84. He says they're like aphorisms that might make sense in a treatise of moral philosophy, but they don't belong in a constitution.
And what he means is that, that they're just highly didactic. They're things like Virginians, the freedom of the press is one of the great bulwarks of liberty and can only be restrained by despotic governments. Now, that's not an enforceable provision. That's not Congress shall make no law respecting the freedom of the press. And so the language of all of those early state constitutions, their Bills of Rights were highly moral. They speak the language of ought to rather than shall. So even something like the future eighth Amendment appears not as excessive fines, shall not be imposed, but excessive fines ought not to be imposed. Because they were trying to guide legislators and so forth. I am as you learned, I'm a great collector of pocket constitution, so I was very happy to get a new one this, this, this weekend. And I've spent the last year or so buying them on eBay. What I've learned from that is that, and I mean this as no disrespect to the learned law professors, lawyers, judges, and committee members here. But the Constitution was mostly over time in American history, read by children, I think.
I have some early copies here of examples of, of children's copies of the Constitution. This one from 1787 that was owned by an 8-year-old named Nathaniel Gleason. I mean, imagine the joy of an 8-year-old getting a copy of the Massachusetts Constitution as a present.
We tend to think of the pocket constitution as largely a post Watergate effect. But in fact, Tom Payne is the great theorist of the pocket constitution, 'cause he says in his debate with Edmund Burke, "If you can't pull up a constitution out of your pocket, you don't really have one." And he says in the Philadelphia state legislature, that's exactly what the legislators did. And every family had a copy and, and so forth. So shortly after Shay's rebellion, the printer, Isaiah Thomas sensed there was a market, this was a rebellion that happened, insurrection that shut down courthouses. And that called for radical changes to the state constitution. Isaiah Thomas and Worcester thought, "I see a market here."
Nobody really knows what's in that constitution 'cause it’s not easily available. But if I produce a pocket version then people will know at least if it's good or bad. The printer takes no takes no particular position. But like those other early state constitutions, the Bill of Rights is a highly didactic kind of thing, and you can treat it as something to be catechized about. The Massachusetts government, in 1805, decided to recommend for all public schools, for all common schools, the Constitution, the Declaration, and Washington's farewell address. This copy, as a shout-out to some of the teachers in the room was in the school district Library.
This one, I showed to Shaun earlier because he had mentioned Jackson's nullification proclamation, but it's a copy owned by a young woman named Phoebe Hartnett in the 1830s. And it includes not only the Declaration, the Constitution, and Washington's farewell address, but also Jackson's proclamation against nullification. And why this is important, and why I think it is so important that the Constitution Center focus so much attention on that next generation, it's that the revolutionary generation was extremely worried, very anxious. They were anxious about their, the generation that had been, lived under monarchy and was going to experience a regime change to a republic. And they were worried about how their children were going to continue that revolution and continue that form of government. And I think that anxiety has never really gone away.
Excerpt from Interview: Melody Barnes reflects on the founders' concerns about virtue, civic health, and the survival of the nation, drawing parallels between their worries and contemporary issues, emphasizing the importance of addressing long-term challenges and fostering civic virtue to ensure the country's well-being.
Melody Barnes: And it's really, it's interesting, and it's something that certainly comes out in your book as well, when you think about if you fast-forward to the period when the founders, many of them were reaching the end of their life, the things that they were concerned about as they had spent most of their life developing self-government setting out the ideals and the values for the country, this idea of virtue both personal self-government as well as public self-government that they believe was absolutely necessary, for the reasons you described during your book talk, that in, if we were going to move forward as a country, we have to put aside our selfish short term short term selfishness for long-term pursuits.
And the ability to exercise and move forward in those values in a way that would allow the nation to move forward was absolutely critical. By the end of their lives, they were concerned that the nation that they had helped create was in fact not, maybe not going to survive. And for Jefferson, he was concerned very deeply concerned about the geographic disputes and this dispute around slavery. And certainly, if you are at the University of Virginia, if you come to Monticello, and if you haven't, I encourage you to be there. You find yourself in a place where you have to grapple with and think what it was like to be Jefferson walking those grounds, walking through Mulberry Row having owned over the period of his life, 607 people, and the things that you describe in your book.
You've got Adams who is deeply concerned about virtue. Do we have enough civic virtue in our country to sustain what we have created? Does the population have that kind of self-control? And they've got Washington who's worried about partisan faction. Hamilton, who's worried about whether or not the federal government is robust. And I think when you look at the things that they were concerned about at that time, an answer to your question, it's also mirrored in the kinds of things that we are deeply concerned about today. And I think we are having a conversation with those same concerns at this moment. The history and the legacy as a result of the regional conflict, that was, that was slavery a debate about, and we talked about it some last night, about the role of the federal government in our lives and the way that that plays out, certainly the partisan faction.
And whether or not we can take the time to move beyond the reflexive reaction to problems to really grapple with what the long-term implications are going to be. And do we have the health in our body politics that is a result of civic virtue to grapple with these problems in a way that allows our country to move forward? I think those are the questions they were thinking about then. Those are the questions that we are still grappling with today. And that long-term civic health question, the body politic, it is no mistake that we described this in physical terms is not healthy.
So what are the habits? How do we exercise the muscles? What can we learn from this period and from the other philosophers and intellectuals of this day and the days that followed so that we can establish those muscles so that we can build them, and so that our nation is healthier, that our nation is able to survive?
Excerpt from Interview: George Will discusses the concept of "State Craft as Soul Craft," emphasizing that government inevitably shapes the character of citizens, and he attributes the shift from speech to expression to a broader cultural rejection of the concept of human nature, leading to contentious debates over identity and values in modern politics.
George Will: The title of the book was State Craft as Soul Craft. The subtitle was more important. What government does. Not what government ought to do, but what government cannot help but do, that is whatever regime you have will shape the souls of the citizens. So when you establish a regime, you're saying, "This is what we hope it will impress, we hope it will leave on people." And the economy, that's why it's called political economy, that we have the transactions, the cooperativeness, the commands, whatever, you are necessarily, when you establish a regime, you're establishing an aspiration for the character of people.
Which is why our politics always has been full of energy and high stakes because you are arguing about the souls of the citizens at all times. I'm standing between you and nourishment and strong drinks, so I will subside.
But it seems to me, Jeffrey, if you wanted or something changed when you're saying, "Well, how did we get here?" It's when we went from free speech. Speech is about someone else. It's about persuasion. It requires patience. That's what democracy requires. We went from free speech to free expression. Expression about you. We went from a kind of other regarding virtue speech to solipsism, expression was inherently good, protecting the expression, nevermind that people have anything worth expressing.
It's the sheer expressing of it that matters. I think it doesn't. I'm not a little ray of sunshine at any time. At least of all on the cusp of the difficulties we're having because I think we've gone from speech, which is reasonable, persuasive, and other regarding expression, which is self-absorbed.
Jeffrey Rosen: I must ask though, 'cause I think that you can provide an answer. Why did that shift occur from speech to expression, from virtue to autonomy? In, in the '60s it was a cultural shift, but it must have been reflecting an awful lot of other shifts. Why did it happen?
George Will: I think what happened, and this goes all the way back to the 19th century. You can blame Marx, you can blame Hagel for Marx. Nevermind what happened in the 19th century, and it's live in the third decade of the 21st century, is we decided there really is no such thing as human nature. That we are only people who require, acquire the impress of our particular surroundings, our culture. Once you say that, then the stakes of politics become enormous because politics and culture, everything becomes political because you are deciding with the laws you write, and what you teach in schools, what culture will leave, what impress on people.
And when consciousness itself becomes a project, what you get is today. You get the woke and the anti-woke arguing with extreme heat, and bitterness. Because what is at stake is the human nature we're going to acquire, not the human nature we have. Whereas, the 30th president, the last one with whom I fully agreed, I refer of course to Coolidge.
Coolidge said in his magnificent address on the Declaration of Independence. So that there's a human nature and how restful it's settled. If there are humans, if there are natural rights, rights that are essential to the flourishing of people, of our natures, how settled, how restful it is. When you drop that idea you get today, which is not restful.
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