Life, Liberty, And The Pursuit Of Happiness

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness is a spirited reexamination of the most famous words in American history, and the remarkable international context from which they emerged.Thomas Jefferson never actually penned the phrase for which he is best known. "The preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness" was how he originally put it, before the first ampersand was scratched out, along with "the preservation of." In a statement as pithy-and contested-as this, a small deletion speaks volumes. And indeed, that final, iconizing revision was the last in a daisy chain of revisions stretching across the Atlantic and the English Channel and back. The precise contours of these three rights have never been pinned down-the words themselves are so slippery as to practically fall off the tongue-and yet in making these words into rights, Jefferson reified not only the hopes (and debates) of a group of rebel-statesmen, but also those of an earlier generation of Enlightenment thinkers who could barely imagine a country like America.Historian Peter Moore's Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness unmasks the transnational history of this most American of ideas. Before Jefferson, there was the English historian Catherine Macaulay, who wrote in 1768 of the "Virtue, liberty, and happiness of society." Samuel Johnson used the phrase "pursuit of happiness" in his 1759 novella Rasselas (a book whose working title was "The Choice of Life"). John Wilkes, a radical journalist and politician, toppled a British prime minister in the early 1760s as supporters on both sides of the Atlantic chanted "Wilkes and Liberty!" (he inspired the men who would proclaim, "No taxation without representation"). Meanwhile, in France, Diderot, Voltaire, and Rousseau would debate these ideas while corresponding with thinkers in England. Everyone, it seemed, had "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness" on their minds; this book shows why, and reveals how these still nascent ideals made their way across an ocean and started a revolution.