Constitution increasingly became a central channel through which national constitutional principles were applied to the U.S. Throughout the 20th Century, the 14th Amendment to the U.S.
To understand what this may be requires a bit of background. Nonetheless, we Americans have a continuing habit of taking recourse to the Declaration to understand ourselves and our government.īeyond that, there may be a more practical constitutional import in the not-too-distant future. Life and happiness give form and shape to the liberty that the Declaration affirms.Īll of this may seem like a quaint historical observation. Liberty is encapsulated within equally significant commitments to life and to happiness. In the theory of the Declaration, liberty is not the entire universe of the American project. It seems to assume an objective moral order from which a person may not alienate himself. That the “pursuit of happiness” is an inalienable right-one that cannot be given away-and that governments have been tasked to protect it suggests a relationship between government and humanity’s moral ends in tension, if not in outright contradiction, with modern liberalism. This certainly includes a right to material things, but it goes beyond that to include humanity’s spiritual and moral condition. So “the pursuit of happiness” means something like occupying one’s life with the activities that provide for overall wellbeing.
We might even think of it in the sense of vocation. In this sense “pursuit” means occupation or practice. While less employed today, this secondary meeting nonetheless remains in use when referring, for example, to the pursuit of medicine, or the pursuit of lawyering, etc. observed in an obscure book chapter that “pursuit” has a particular meaning at the time of the Declaration. The upshot is that “happiness” in the Declaration should be understood centrally as a sort of virtuous felicity, perhaps in the sense of Greek eudaimonia, although one refined by Christian sensibilities.Īrthur Schlesinger Sr. So, too, Article 3 of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 affirms that “religion, morality, and knowledge” are “essential to the happiness of mankind.”Īffirmations of these kinds could be multiplied many times from documents and speeches of the time. these cannot be generally diffused through a community but by the institution of the public worship of God and of public instructions in piety, religion and morality.” The Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 affirms that “the happiness of a people and the good order and preservation of civil government essentially depend upon piety, religion and morality, and. But taking it in its popular sense, as referring to the immediate augmentation of property and wealth, nothing can be more false.
Taking the word “interest” as synonymous with “ultimate happiness,” in which sense it is qualified with every necessary moral ingredient, the proposition is no doubt true. In correspondence between James Madison and James Monroe in 1786, Madison notes that “happiness” cannot simply be identified with meeting people’s interests, but includes a higher reference: There is no maxim in my opinion which is more liable to be misapplied, and which therefore needs elucidation, than the current one that the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong.
It included the right to meet physical needs, but it also included a significant moral and religious dimension. It meant prosperity or, perhaps better, well-being in the broader sense. “Happiness” in the public discourse of the time often did not simply refer to a subjective emotional state. But this reading of the Declaration’s “pursuit of happiness” is wrong on both scores. Further, the Declaration doesn’t guarantee the right to happiness, the thought usually goes, but only the right to pursue what makes you happy. The right to “the pursuit of happiness” affirmed in the Declaration of Independence is taken these days to affirm a right to chase after whatever makes one subjectively happy.
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