By Marilyn Odendahl
The Indiana Citizen
May 2, 2025
Stuck at home with extra time on his hands courtesy of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, legal scholar and author Jeffrey Rosen started diving into the treatises and tomes the Founding Fathers read as they crafted the nation’s foundational documents and he was surprised at how those books changed his thinking about how to be a good person and a good citizen and how to celebrate America’s 250th birthday next year.
Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, said he was inspired to begin his reading adventure when he learned that both Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson drew their definition of “happiness” from “The Tusculan Disputations,” written by Roman philosopher Cicero in around 45 B.C. Those two Founding Fathers, following the teachings of Cicero, saw happiness not as immediate pleasure, but rather as the pursuit of virtue.
“It changed my life in helping me understand that for the Founders, happiness meant being good, not feeling good,” Rosen said of reading Cicero. He added that as he learned happiness was seen by them to be the result of character improvement and moral conduct, he “also began to understand, more specifically, what they meant by virtue.”
Rosen spoke about his foray into the Founders’ libraries and his resulting book – “The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America” – during his keynote address at the third-annual Indiana Civics Summit held in Indianapolis in April. Hosted by the Indiana Bar Foundation, the event included presentations on various civic education programs available in high schools, colleges and universities around Indiana.
During the pandemic, Rosen digested Cicero and then dived into the books that Jefferson saw as covering moral philosophy or ethics. These books included Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations,” Lucius Annaeus Seneca’s “Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium,” and John Locke’s “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.”
Rosen immersed himself in his reading project not only by plowing through the tomes, but also by mimicking Jefferson’s daily schedule. The author of the Declaration of Independence spent his day in study, rising before dawn to read moral philosophy for two hours before breakfast and then moving on to other subjects, such as political philosophy, ancient history and astronomy, until dinner, followed by Shakespeare and light poetry before bed.
Likewise, Rosen got up before the break of day and read moral philosophy for an hour or two and watched the sun rise. The ideas and ruminations in the books were new to him, he said, even though he had been an English major when he was an undergraduate in the 1980s, and they filled more than an educational gap.
“I remember in the ‘80s yearning for guidance about how to lead a good life. The ‘80s were the ‘greed is good’ decade and I was looking for an alternative to the materialism and hedonism that are celebrated by pop culture,” Rosen said, referencing the movie “Wall Street,” in which the main character, a corporate raider named Gordon Gekko, promotes a culture of greed.
Rosen said, as a young man, he was questioning if “the way to be happy (was to) just do what feels good and let it all hang out. And what I didn’t realize, because these great books have fallen out of the curriculum, is this is exactly the question the ancient moral philosophers set out to answer.”
Being happy was important to the Founding Fathers. They included “the pursuit of happiness” among the unalienable rights listed in the Declaration of Independence, but, Rosen noted, the Founders had a different definition than Americans have in today’s world obsessed with instant gratification.
Rosen said the philosophers read by Franklin, Jefferson, James Madison and the other Founding Fathers saw the ability to strike a balance between reason and passion as the virtue that led to happiness. While we now call that balance emotional intelligence or, in particular, impulse control, Rosen said Pythagoras saw it as the “calm tranquility” that comes when we use our powers of reason to modulate our powers of emotion.
Madison, dubbed the father of the U.S. Constitution, was especially fearful of groups that were ruled by passion, rather than reason. Rosen said Madison believed that people ignited by passion could wrest control from groups exercising reason, allowing self-interest to overpower public good.
To cool any mobs driven by passion, Rosen said, the Constitution was designed so that deliberation was slowed down. Madison was confident that broadsheets and newspapers would help careful thought take root across the country. Citizens would read the complex arguments like those contained in the Federalist Papers, and, Madison believed, according to Rosen, that they would then discuss and debate among themselves the proper balance between liberty and power.
Rosen pointed out Madison’s dream is far from being realized, as the country is more polarized now than at any time since the Civil War.
“Even to describe this Madisonian hope is poignant today, of course, in the age of X and TikTok and Facebook and enraged to engaged,” Rosen said. “This vision of informed citizens reading the Federalist Papers together and being guided by reason, rather than passion, seems elusive. In many ways, because of social media, in particular, we seem to be living in Madison’s nightmare. The possibility of deep reading and listening to different points of view and disagreeing without being disagreeable seems elusive.”
However, Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton provide an example of how Americans can engage and discuss their disagreements without becoming overrun by their emotions.
Rosen pointed out that Jefferson and Hamilton fiercely debated fundamental ideas of the United States government that are still being contested today. The two Founders argued over federal power versus states’ rights, executive power versus congressional power, and a liberal reading, versus a strict constructionist view, of the Constitution.
What is “urgently important to recognize,” Rosen said, is that Jefferson and Hamilton engaged in a productive banter. While they fought about liberty, equality, federalism, separation of powers and the Bill of Rights, they agreed on the value and importance of those principles.
“Hamilton and Jefferson viewed each other, not as enemies to be destroyed, but as respected opponents to be engaged,” Rosen said. “That’s what we have to maintain today, that we are all Federalists, we’re all democratic Republicans, we’re all Democrats, we’re all Republicans. We are not enemies. We must be friends, as Lincoln said, and finding that civic friendship, and not viewing the other side as a faction to be destroyed, is urgently important.”
Dwight Adams, an editor and writer based in Indianapolis, edited this article. He is a former content editor, copy editor and digital producer at The Indianapolis Star and IndyStar.com, and worked as a planner for other newspapers, including the Louisville Courier Journal.
The Indiana Citizen is a nonpartisan, nonprofit platform dedicated to increasing the number of informed and engaged Hoosier citizens. We are operated by the Indiana Citizen Education Foundation, Inc., a 501(c)(3) public charity. For questions about the story, contact Marilyn Odendahl at marilyn.odendahl@indianacitizen.org.
