He predicted that advances in “political knowledge” and the “theory of man” will further erode “causeless discontent and seditious violence.” But while humans are neutral about scientific discoveries, they will never be neutral about politics.
Johnson used the phrase again in a political essay entitled “The False Alarm.” He began by observing that the “improvement and diffusion of philosophy” among his contemporaries had led to a diminution of “false alarms” about events such as solar eclipses, which once aroused terror in the populace. Wounded by this loss, the Princess laments: “what is to be expected from our pursuit of happiness when we find the state of life to be such, that happiness itself is the cause of misery?” They visit the Great Pyramid, where a dear friend of Nekayah is kidnapped by Arabs. Accompanied by his sister Nekayah and a wise, well-traveled poet, he escapes from his utopia and travels around the known world. Rasselas is an Abyssinian prince who lives in the Happy Valley, a paradise in every respect imaginable.
Samuel Johnson in his long fable Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, published in 1759. If Thomas Jefferson did not coin the phrase, who did? Wikipedia (drawing on, I think, an old edition of the Encylopedia Britannica) attributes its coinage to Dr. Blogging on the subject on November 8, 2007, Arianna Huffington lamented contemporary greed, our happy hours and Happy Meals, but concluded, “but the American idea, embedded deep in our cultural DNA, is inspiring us to pursue a much less shallow happiness.” Most recently, in his new book Kids are Americans Too, Bill O‘Reilly erroneously wrote, “the Constitution guarantees us life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” He was corrected by an American kid, Courtney Yong of San Francisco, a city O’Reilly often castigates.
#Pursuit of happiness constitution movie
In the 1980s it was the name of a Canadian rock group whose first big hit was the single, “I’m an Adult Now.” In 1993 the phrase served as the title of a self-help book whose subtitle was “Discovering the Pathway to Fulfillment, Well-Being, and Enduring Personal Joy.” The phrase, coyly misspelled, was appropriated for the title of a 2006 Will Smith movie about upward mobility, the acquisition of wealth, and the triumph of talent over adversity. That comedy became a musical of the same title in the 1940s. It provided the title for a 1933-34 Broadway comedy written by Lawrence Langner and Armina Marshall. The “pursuit of happiness” has led its own life in popular culture. Even more sadly, Jefferson’s own “property” included about two hundred human beings whom he did not permit to pursue their own happiness. To them the pursuit of happiness means no more than the pursuit of wealth and status as embodied in a McMansion, a Lexus, and membership in a country club. And sadly, for many Americans, Jefferson might just as well have left “property” in place. To cross-racial or gay couples bringing lawsuits in court, it has meant, or included, the right to marry. To Europeans it has suggested the core claim-or delusion-of American exceptionalism.
The phrase has meant different things to different people. Nor is that concept “distinctly American.” It is an import, and Jefferson borrowed it.
Jefferson did not substitute his “own” phrase. John Locke lived from 1634 to 1704, making him a man of the seventeenth century, not the eighteenth. When he penned the Declaration of Independence, ratified on the Fourth of July, he edited out Locke's right to ‘property’ and substituted his own more broad-minded, distinctly American concept: the right to ‘the pursuit of happiness.’ "įamiliar as all this sounds, Brook is wrong on three points. In an article entitled “The Pursuit of Happiness,” posted at the Huffington Post July 4, 2007, Daniel Brook summed up what most of us learned in school: “The eighteenth-century British political philosopher John Locke wrote that governments are instituted to secure people's rights to ‘life, liberty, and property.’ And in 1776, Thomas Jefferson begged to differ. Yet the true history and philosophical meaning of the famous phrase are apparently unknown. Conventional history and popular wisdom attribute the phrase to the genius of Thomas Jefferson when in an imaginative leap, he replaced the third term of John Locke’s trinity, “life, liberty, and property.” It was a felicitous, even thrilling, substitution. “The pursuit of happiness” is the most famous phrase in the Declaration of Independence.