I am sitting on my porch with a book in my lap, the same way I have done it for years, and the same way I imagine Thomas Jefferson doing it at Monticello when the noise of government finally fell away. People still walk up and ask the question as if it were an accusation: you are in your prime earning years; what are you doing out here reading? I tell them the truth. I am practicing an old idea that most of modern politics has forgotten how to pronounce. The Greeks called it eudaimonia. Speech-to-text software, and more than a few hurried conversations, turn the word into “pneumonia.” That slip is almost perfect. We have caught a fever about happiness and then treated the wrong disease.
I am not an anti-machine person, and I am not an anti-data-center person. Tools are tools. I use them the way I use a library: to get to the argument faster. What I am against is the siren song that says a meaningful life can be issued by a legislature, mailed as a rebate, or confiscated from a neighbor who hit the jackpot. That song is older than the Democratic platform and older than the American republic. It is the temptation to let someone else define the good life and then charge you for the privilege.
The Declaration of Independence did not promise us a feeling. It promised us a pursuit. That difference is the whole American argument, and it is the argument I keep returning to when the season turns political, and every candidate suddenly wants to sell happiness by the pound.[1]
What Did the Founders Mean by the Pursuit of Happiness?
Schoolhouse history likes a tidy swap. Locke wrote “life, liberty, and property.” Jefferson, we are told, crossed out property and wrote happiness because he was more generous, or more poetic, or less capitalist. The tidy swap is too tidy.[2]
Jefferson had George Mason in front of him. Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights kept both goods on the table: the means of acquiring and possessing property, and the pursuing and obtaining of happiness and safety.[3] Jefferson compressed the line. He did not throw property into the river. He refused to let property pretend it was the whole human good. Locke himself, in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, had already said that the highest perfection of an intellectual nature is “a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness.”[4] The phrase was in the air of the eighteenth century. Adams said the happiness of society is the end of government, as the happiness of the individual is the end of man.[5]
So the Founders were not announcing a mood. They were naming a classical end: a life that can actually be lived well. Happiness, in that older English, is closer to flourishing than to a grin. It is closer to a completed form than to a shopping list. Arthur Schlesinger once wrote about the “lost meaning” of the phrase, and Pauline Maier showed how common the political language of happiness already was in American writing before July 4, 1776.[6] Jefferson did not invent a slogan for a greeting card. He put a thick word in a thin space and trusted a free people to know the difference between a right and a result.
I like to say it this way, because it is how I live it. Happiness is not a second house in Florida, a place in the Upper Peninsula, and a third address in Cincinnati. Those things can be fine. They are not the definition. I have been happier with a book and a family meal of takeout Chinese than with a ledger that looked impressive to somebody else. The money that buys the meal matters less than the hour in which you eat it. If that sounds sentimental, it is only because we have been trained to measure a soul with a bank statement.
What Is Aristotle’s Eudaimonia, and Why Is It Not a PlayStation?
Aristotle calls the highest human good eudaimonia. Translators say happiness. They should also say flourishing, living well, a complete life of excellent activity. Aristotle is blunt about the alternatives. Pleasure is not enough. Honor depends on other people. Wealth is a tool. The human function is rational activity, and the human good is that activity done with virtue, not for a weekend but across a life.[7]
Two features of that definition wreck most modern politics.
First, happiness is an activity, not a stash. Aristotle says a virtuous man who never exercises the virtue is like an athlete who never enters the stadium. You do not become happy by owning the equipment. You become happy by running the race.[8] A free PlayStation in every house would not settle the question. It would only prove we had confused amusement with a soul.
Second, external goods are real and still secondary. Aristotle is not a monk. He knows a man needs enough equipment for a complete life. He does not pretend that catastrophe is a spiritual opportunity brochure. But he will not let the equipment become the prize.[9] That is why I can be making a million dollars a year or fifty dollars a year, and the inner measure does not have to move with the account. The measure is whether I am living a life I can defend: books, family, work I own, a porch that is mine, a conscience that is not for sale.
People hear that and think I am romanticizing poverty. I am not. I am refusing the opposite romance, the one that says the state can allocate flourishing the way it allocates a tax credit. You cannot mail a man eudaimonia. You can only leave him room to practice it, or crowd the room until he forgets how.[10]
Plato vs. Aristotle: Philosopher Kings, Jedi Knights, and Limited Government
If you want the American argument in one Greek quarrel, start here. The city executes Socrates. Plato, who loved him, answers with a republic in which the wise few rule the many for their own good. The guardians own little, lie when necessary, and impose a harmony the public cannot be trusted to choose. “Until philosophers rule as kings,” Plato says, the cities will have no rest from their troubles.[11]
Aristotle studied in that household of ideas and then pushed the furniture back toward the ground. He is more empirical, more household, more individual. He does not start with a caste of golden souls. He starts with a man who must choose, a family that must hold together, a city that must mix its powers so that no class eats the rest.[12] The debate is not a museum piece. It is the difference between a government that protects your pursuit and a government that performs your virtue in your name.
I have always thought Star Wars is popular philosophy wearing a robe. When George Lucas was at his best, the Jedi looked like knighthood: discipline, apprenticeship, a refusal of cheap power. Then the story showed you the other face. A council of the enlightened, hovering above the Republic, managing fairness, announcing balance, and slowly becoming what Aristotle warned against: a class that cannot imagine the good unless it administers it.[13] That is Plato in space. It is a beautiful picture and a dangerous constitution.
Ayn Rand saw the same fork and planted her flag with Aristotle.[14] You do not have to take her whole system to see why the Founders feared the Jedi option. Once an elite is authorized to impose happiness, it will need your property, your time, and eventually your vocabulary. The Book of Judges already knew the seesaw: no king, and every man does what is right in his own eyes; then a king, and the king takes your sons and your fields.[15] America tried to cut a third path. Not chaos. Not philosopher-kings. A limited government around an unlimited soul.
How Greek Philosophy Reached the Declaration of Independence
Ideas do not float. They ride languages, armies, and churches.
Aristotle taught Alexander. Alexander broke the old map and left Greek cities, Greek speech, and Greek books across a world that had not asked for them.[16] That Hellenistic weather is the weather in which Scripture becomes Greek, in which the New Testament can be written, in which Paul can argue in cities that already have a word for a complete life. I do not claim Alexander meant to pave a road for Christ. I claim history is thick. The Teacher of Righteousness, the Maccabean revolt, the tense priesthoods, John and his cousin in the wilderness—none of that happens in a vacuum. It happens in a Near East already argued over by Greek thought and imperial power.[17]
Rome later sits on that same furniture and, when it can no longer hold the old gods together, leans on the Church to keep a civilization from flying apart. I have spent years in books that tell that long story. Paul Johnson’s A History of Christianity is one of them. Diarmaid MacCulloch’s three-thousand-year account is another, because he is honest that Christianity does not begin at the manger in an empty room. It inherits Israel and Greece.[18]
This is why I say something that makes secular lecture halls flinch. Without the Christian movement, the Aristotelian idea of a dignified individual soul does not arrive in Virginia with enough moral force to become a political principle. Cicero carried the Greek conversation into Latin. Aquinas baptized Aristotle for the schools.[19] The Reformation and the colonial pulpit then taught ordinary people that they stood before God without a philosopher-king in the way. That is not “separation of church and state” as a sterilization protocol. It is the free exercise of a faith that made limited government feel natural instead of suicidal.[20]
Jonathan Edwards and the Christian Platform Beneath American Liberty
I have been talking a lot about Jonathan Edwards, and not because I want to turn the Founders into revivalists in powdered wigs. Edwards is useful because he forced a distinction the modern state keeps trying to erase. Liberty is not the chance to do as you please. Liberty is the healed capacity to love what is good.[21]
The First Great Awakening did not write the Constitution. It did something prior. It taught crowds of uncredentialed people that the most important transaction in a human life happens between a soul and God, not between a subject and a board of guardians. Historians still fight about how straight the line runs from Edwards and Whitefield to 1776. Coolidge, speaking in Philadelphia on the Declaration’s 150th birthday, was not shy about it. He said the religious teaching of the preceding period prepared the mind of the country, and he put Edwards in that company.[22]
What I take from that fight is simple. A Christian account of human dignity—image of God, direct accountability, sin that a committee cannot cure—makes personal responsibility feel like realism rather than cruelty. If man is only appetite plus circumstance, then of course the only “fairness” left is to move piles of stuff from the disciplined to the wrecked. If man is a soul, then the first mercy is to tell him the truth: happiness cannot be injected. It has to be lived.[23]
Why Jefferson Wrote Happiness Instead of Property
Property matters. I won’t pretend otherwise. A man who cannot keep what he earns is not free; he is a tenant of whoever counts the votes. The Fifth Amendment still talks about property because the Founders were not monks. But Jefferson left the word out of the most famous sentence in American politics on purpose, or at least with a purpose that survived the editing.[24]
If he writes “property,” the sentence can be captured by the ledger. If he writes “happiness,” the sentence stays larger than the ledger. Happiness includes the right to acquire, to build, to fail, to start again, to sit down, to open a book, to refuse a treadmill that exists only so someone else can be paid from your exhaustion. Government is instituted to secure those rights, not to emit the outcome the rights were meant to make possible.[25]
Democrats who want to retire Jefferson with Sally Hemings are not, in my experience, primarily interested in the enslaved. They want to turn off the sentence.[26] I took my children to Monticello when I was in my twenties and thirties because I wanted them to see the house, the river country, the laboratory of a mind, and the wound in the same tour. A serious country can hold both. A propaganda country can hold only one. I will not surrender the idea of the pursuit because the man who wrote it failed his own measure. That would be like burning the Gospels because Peter denied Christ before sunrise.
What Is the Government’s Role in Happiness?
The government’s job is to get out of your way without disappearing. That is a narrower job than it sounds, and a harder one. Madison’s line still does the work: if men were angels, no government would be necessary.[27] Men are not angels. So you need law against force and fraud. You need a shield around the porch. You need courts that can tell a thief from a neighbor. You do not need a ministry of flourishing.
Every month people open an electric bill and feel that drop in the stomach. Some of that is the price of a physical world. Some of that is policy dressed up as compassion. When government decides it must manufacture happiness, it discovers it has no happiness in the warehouse. It only has other people’s time. So it takes. It calls the taking fairness. It calls the residue a benefit. And it is shocked—shocked—when the people being harvested stop believing the harvest is a public service.
Representatives are not Jedi. They are not there to impose a vision of the good life on Ohio or on the country. They are there to keep the framework from being eaten: contracts, speech, worship, arms, due process, the right to keep the fruit of work. The moment they start using your success to subsidize somebody else’s refusal of consequence, they have changed jobs. They are no longer guardians of liberty. They are brokers of dependence.[28]
Can Government Distribute Happiness by Taxing Success?
This is the active campaign version of the old temptation. A man goes out, takes risks, hits the jackpot, and the speech begins: tax the rich, because his surplus is the raw material of your comfort. I have watched that speech attach itself to Vivek Ramaswamy in Ohio the way it attaches itself to anyone whose success is visible enough to photograph. The names change. The metaphysics do not.
If your only picture of a human being is a stomach, then the moral task is, of course, to move food. If your picture includes a soul, the moral task is harder. Some people are broke because the world broke them. Some people are broke because they made a string of decisions that would break anyone: addiction, idleness, the refusal to be teachable. A serious country can tell those stories apart. A political machine cannot afford to. Dependent people are reliable. Independent people are inconvenient. They might stay home and read. They might not need the next check. They might not love you at the next election.
Happiness cannot be confiscated from one life and poured into another like fuel. When you sever effort from reward, you do not get fairness. You get resentment on one side and learned helplessness on the other. Aristotle would not have been confused by this. A virtue that is not practiced dies. A city that pays people not to become excellent should not act surprised when excellence becomes scarce.
Why Minimum Wage Politics Often Create Dependence Instead of Dignity
Even a hard, poorly paid job can begin eudaimonia if the work is real and the paycheck is yours. Ownership of a small life is still ownership. The political class that talks down “minimum wage work” is not protecting the worker’s dignity. It is protecting a story in which only a managed outcome counts as a human life.
Artificially jack the wage floor and two ordinary things happen. Some businesses hire fewer people—some cut hours. Prices around the worker rise. The first rung rises, and more people never reach it. Then the same political class arrives with a program for the people who cannot find the rung, and the program requires a larger state, which requires a deeper reach into the people who are still climbing.[29] That is not an accident that keeps happening to kind-hearted people. It is a machine that converts failed economics into loyal constituencies.
I am not against a man earning more. I am against the pretense that a statute can repeal scarcity without repealing somebody’s opportunity. Happiness at the bottom of the ladder is not a higher number on a poster. It is the knowledge that the step you are standing on belongs to you.
Jefferson’s Porch, Roosevelt’s Badlands, and My Own Monticello
When life got heavy, Jefferson went home. He wrote that nature intended him for the tranquil pursuits of science and that leaving power felt like a prisoner shaking off chains. In retirement, he gave up newspapers for Tacitus and Thucydides, Newton and Euclid, and said he found himself much the happier.[30] After he sold his library to rebuild Congress’s, he said the line I have loved since I first walked that hill in Virginia: “I cannot live without books.”[31]
Theodore Roosevelt learned the same lesson the hard way. On February 14, 1884, his mother and his wife died in the same house, hours apart. He put a great X in the diary and wrote that the light had gone out of his life. Then he went to the Dakota Territory, simplified the world down to cattle, weather, and work, and stayed long enough to remember he was still a man.[32] That is not “self-care.” That is the Rough Rider version of Aristotle. Unplug from the grid of other people’s noise. Choose a smaller field. Practice being alive on purpose.
I do the same thing when the complications pile up. I start unplugging. I sit on a porch that reminds me of the older American houses, and I read. Visitors think I have dropped out. I have dropped back in. A designated place for thought is not a luxury good. It is how a person remembers that he is not a device on the state’s network. Aristotle said the highest activity is contemplation.[33] Jefferson built rooms for it. I have rooms for it. If government ever decides that my unproductive hours are a public resource, it will have declared war on the very right it exists to protect.
Homelessness, Bad Decisions, and the Difference Between Charity and Clientage
I have walked into Canterbury, past the old gates toward the cathedral I love, and seen the same scene you can see outside too many American churches and civic showpieces. People sleeping rough in the shadow of a great Christian building, because the building is a good place to be seen by tourists with sandwiches. I have looked at faces there, and in Los Angeles, and in New York. I do not claim I can read a whole biography off a face. I have spoken with enough of those men to know that many of them are not there because a rich stranger refused them a rebate. They are there because addiction, or a collapsed will, or a long series of refusals, ate the mechanisms by which a person stays housed.
A Christian society is supposed to help. It is not supposed to freeze a man in his worst hour and call the freeze compassion.[34] When a system removes the cost of a bad decision while also flattening the reward of a good one, it trains people out of agency. Then it photographs the wreckage and says, see, this is why we must take more from the competent.
Government’s legitimate role is to keep the road from being blocked so you can walk it in your own way: reading your books, staying with your family, ordering the Chinese food, building a firm, disappearing into North Dakota, disappearing onto a porch, working a first job that nobody at a fundraiser wants to brag about. The state may not decide your values and then bill you for the sermon. The state may not call your success a surplus inventory of happiness to be broken up for parts.
That is why the original quarrel still matters. Plato’s temptation is always to let the few define the good and administer it. Aristotle counters that a human life is an activity you cannot outsource. Christianity carried that dignity through empires that would have been happy to forget it. The American Founders, soaked in both Athens and the Bible, wrote a sentence telling the state to stay in its lane and not interfere with people’s happiness.
Notes
[1] Thomas Jefferson never left a memorandum explaining why he chose the phrase. The Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia at Monticello notes that he was almost certainly influenced by George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights (June 12, 1776), which spoke of “the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” See “Pursuit of Happiness,” Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia, Monticello.
[2] John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1689), Second Treatise, §87 and §123. Locke’s triad is often summarized as “life, liberty, and property,” though Locke’s larger category of “property” includes life, liberty, and estate.
[3] George Mason, Virginia Declaration of Rights, §1 (June 12, 1776). The National Archives notes that Jefferson drew on Mason for the opening paragraphs of the Declaration.
[4] John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Book II, ch. 21. Locke writes that “the highest perfection of intellectual nature lies in a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness.”
[5] John Adams, Thoughts on Government (1776): “the happiness of society is the end of government, as all Divines and moral Philosophers will agree that the happiness of the individual is the end of man.”
[6] Arthur M. Schlesinger, “The Lost Meaning of the ‘Pursuit of Happiness,’” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 21, no. 3 (1964): 326–327. See also Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Knopf, 1997).
[7] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1098a16: the human good is “activity of the soul in accord with virtue.” The Greek εὐδαιμονία (eudaimonia) is commonly rendered “happiness” or “flourishing.” It is not a mood. It is a life well lived.
[8] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1098a7–18 (the function argument) and 1103b26–30: the point of ethical inquiry is not merely to know what virtue is, but to become good.
[9] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1099a31–1099b8 and 1101a14–16. External goods are conditions of a complete life, not the definition of the good itself. A man wrecked by catastrophe is not called happy in the full sense, but neither is a rich man who lives without virtue.
[10] For a clear popular account of eudaimonia versus hedonic pleasure, see the discussion in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. “Aristotle’s Ethics” (Richard Kraut). Flourishing is activity, not a pile of goods.
[11] Plato, Republic 473c–e: until philosophers rule as kings, or kings philosophize, “there can be no rest from ills for the cities.”
[12] Aristotle, Politics I and III. Aristotle begins with the household and the citizen, not with a caste of guardians. He defends a mixed constitution and treats extreme concentrations of power as a constant temptation toward tyranny.
[13] George Lucas has long acknowledged that Star Wars draws on myth, knighthood, and mentor-pupil initiation. The Jedi Council, however it began, becomes a cloistered caste managing the galaxy’s “balance.” That is a Republic problem, not an Ethics problem.
[14] Ayn Rand repeatedly named Aristotle as the only philosopher to whom she owed a genuine intellectual debt. See the appendix to Atlas Shrugged and her essay “The Objectivist Ethics” in The Virtue of Selfishness (New York: New American Library, 1964). Rand’s politics are not the Founders’ politics, but her recovery of Aristotelian individualism is part of the modern American argument.
[15] 1 Samuel 8. Israel asks for a king “like all the nations.” Samuel warns that a king will take sons, daughters, fields, and a tenth. The Book of Judges had already shown the opposite problem: “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25).
[16] Plutarch, Life of Alexander; and the ancient biographical tradition that Aristotle tutored the young Alexander at Mieza. The cultural aftershock of that education was Hellenism: Greek language, cities, and books stretched from the Aegean to the Indus.
[17] The Septuagint translated Hebrew Scripture into Greek in the Hellenistic age. The New Testament was written in Greek. Without that linguistic world, the Christian movement would have traveled a narrower road. See Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (New York: Viking, 2010), opening chapters on Greece, Rome, and Israel.
[18] Paul Johnson, A History of Christianity (New York: Atheneum, 1976). Johnson’s one-volume narrative remains a favorite of general readers who want the political and institutional story without losing the religion itself.
[19] Cicero, in De Finibus and De Officiis, transmitted the Greek conversation about the highest good into Latin moral vocabulary that later Christian and Enlightenment writers still used. Aquinas baptized large parts of Aristotle in the Summa Theologiae.
[20] The First Amendment protects free exercise; it does not exile Christianity from the moral formation of a people. Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1786) was written to keep the state from prescribing worship, not to keep citizens from having a faith.
[21] Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746); and Freedom of the Will (1754). Edwards insisted that true liberty is not mere license—“opportunity to do as one pleases”—but the capacity of a converted heart to love what is good.
[22] Calvin Coolidge, Address at the Celebration of the 150th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Philadelphia, July 5, 1926. Coolidge argued that the Declaration’s principles were prepared by the religious teaching of the preceding period, and he named Jonathan Edwards among those who had “aroused the thought” of the colonists.
[23] Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
[24] On “happiness” as a political term already common in American writing before 1776, see Pauline Maier, American Scripture, and the Gilder Lehrman essay “The Harmonizing Sentiments of the Day.” Jefferson compressed a public language; he did not invent a private slogan.
[25] Declaration of Independence, final text adopted by Congress, July 4, 1776: governments are instituted “to secure these rights,” and the people may alter or abolish a government that becomes destructive of those ends, organizing new powers “as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
[26] On Jefferson’s contradictions, including slavery and the Hemings family, the honest reader does not need a campaign commercial. He needs Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), and the documentary record at Monticello. The argument of this essay is not that Jefferson was a saint. It is that the sentence he wrote still tells the truth about what a free government is for.
[27] James Madison, Federalist No. 51: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Limited government is a theological and anthropological claim before it is a procedural one.
[28] See Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions (New York: Basic Books, 1980), and The Vision of the Anointed (New York: Basic Books, 1995), on the difference between process and result, and on elites who treat other people’s lives as raw material for a designed outcome.
[29] Minimum-wage literature is contested, but the basic price-control logic is not mysterious: raise the legal price of low-skill labor and some hours, some jobs, and some first rungs disappear. For a classical statement, see Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson (New York: Harper, 1946), ch. 19.
[30] Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, January 21, 1812: “I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus & Thucydides, for Newton & Euclid; & I find myself much the happier.” Founders Online, National Archives.
[31] Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, June 10, 1815: “I cannot live without books; but fewer will suffice where amusement, and not use, is the only future object.” After the British burned the Capitol library in 1814, Jefferson sold his collection of more than 6,500 volumes to Congress. He immediately began assembling another library. See Endrina Tay, “I cannot live without books,” Monticello.
[32] On February 14, 1884, Martha “Mittie” Roosevelt died of typhoid fever, and Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt died of Bright’s disease, hours apart, in the same New York house. Roosevelt wrote in his diary, “The light has gone out of my life.” He left infant Alice with his sister and went west to the Dakota Territory. See Theodore Roosevelt National Park, “Theodore Roosevelt the Rancher,” National Park Service.
[33] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics X.7–8. Contemplation (theoria) is the highest activity, which is why a porch, a book, and an unhurried hour are not laziness in the Aristotelian sense. They can be the peak of a human life if the rest of the life has been ordered toward virtue.
[34] Charity that preserves agency predates the welfare state. The Christian distinction between helping a neighbor and creating a client runs from the Pauline collections for the poor to later debates inside the Church of England itself.
Bibliography for Further Reading
Primary Texts
Adams, John. Thoughts on Government. 1776.
Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Terence Irwin. 2nd ed. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999.
Aristotle. Politics. Translated by C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998.
The Bible. Especially Judges; 1 Samuel 8; and the Pauline language of liberty and responsibility.
Cicero. De Officiis et De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum.
Edwards, Jonathan. A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. 1746.
Edwards, Jonathan. Freedom of the Will. 1754.
Jefferson, Thomas. The Declaration of Independence. 1776. Drafts and final text in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 1, and at Founders Online.
Jefferson, Thomas. Letters to John Adams, January 21, 1812, and June 10, 1815. Founders Online, National Archives.
Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. 1690. Book II, chapter 21.
Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. 1689. Second Treatise.
Madison, James. The Federalist No. 51. 1788.
Mason, George. Virginia Declaration of Rights. June 12, 1776.
Plato. Republic. Especially Books IV–VII on the guardians and the philosopher-king.
Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiae. Treatises on happiness, law, and virtue.
The Founding and the Phrase
Allen, Danielle. Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality. New York: Liveright, 2014.
Ellis, Joseph J., ed. What Did the Declaration Declare? Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999.
Maier, Pauline. American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence. New York: Knopf, 1997.
Schlesinger, Arthur M. “The Lost Meaning of the ‘Pursuit of Happiness.’” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 21, no. 3 (1964): 325–327.
Thomas Jefferson Foundation. “Pursuit of Happiness.” Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia. Monticello.org.
Yarbrough, Jean M. American Virtues: Thomas Jefferson on the Character of a Free People. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1998.
Christianity, Greece, and Transmission
Copleston, Frederick. A History of Philosophy. Vols. 1 and 2. London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1946–1950.
Johnson, Paul. A History of Christianity. New York: Atheneum, 1976.
MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. New York: Viking, 2010.
Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Christian Tradition. 5 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971–1989.
Stark, Rodney. The Rise of Christianity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.
Awakening, Virtue, and the American Mind
Bonomi, Patricia U. Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Coolidge, Calvin. Address at the Celebration of the 150th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Philadelphia, July 5, 1926.
Kidd, Thomas S. The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.
Marsden, George M. Jonathan Edwards: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.
Noll, Mark A. America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Jefferson, Monticello, and the Wound in the House
Gordon-Reed, Annette. The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008.
Malone, Dumas. Jefferson and His Time. 6 vols. Boston: Little, Brown, 1948–1981.
Tay, Endrina. “I cannot live without books.” Monticello.
Thomas Jefferson’s Libraries. Retirement Library Catalog. Monticello / Library of Congress.
Roosevelt, Work, and the Hard Reset
Morris, Edmund. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1979.
Roosevelt, Theodore. Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail. New York: Century, 1888.
National Park Service. “Theodore Roosevelt the Rancher.” Theodore Roosevelt National Park.
Modern Arguments About Flourishing, Incentives, and the State
Hazlitt, Henry. Economics in One Lesson. New York: Harper, 1946.
Murray, Charles. In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988.
Rand, Ayn. The Virtue of Selfishness. New York: New American Library, 1964.
Sowell, Thomas. Knowledge and Decisions. New York: Basic Books, 1980.
Sowell, Thomas. The Vision of the Anointed. New York: Basic Books, 1995.
Kraut, Richard. “Aristotle’s Ethics.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
—
Go somewhere and be happy. The pursuit is still legal.
In the age of disclosure, the politics of heaven will not be administered from a capital.
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Rich Hoffman
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About the Author: Rich Hoffman
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
