The United States’s Declaration of Independence, authored by Thomas Jefferson and approved by the Continental Congress 250 years ago on July 4, 1776, is foremost a statement of universal liberal values. “All men,” for example, “are created equal.” One famous phrase provides an illustration of the “unalienable Rights” that “men” are “endowed” with “by their Creator”; “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
The last on that list is somewhat mysterious. Jefferson was clearly influenced by his home state of Virginia’s Declaration of Rights written just a month before. His colleague George Mason had noted “pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety” were among the “fundamental rights of mankind.” But prior to that, the phrase’s origin is disputed. The pursuit of happiness is sometimes attributed to John Locke, the seventeenth century English philosopher and “father of liberalism.” Locke equated happiness with reaching one’s potential to live the best possible life. This presumably included wealth and physical and emotional pleasure, but it is more; it encompasses the freedom to tap these latent abilities. Like the thinker Epicurus, however, Locke differentiated pleasures that do not serve the enduring interests of the individual, such as alcohol that furnishes a rapid euphoria but that also exerts deleterious effects on the body and mind. No hedonist, Locke recognized that virtuous quest for personal goals was an essential feature of the pursuit of happiness.
An alternative explanation originates the concept within the eighteenth century as the idea of the legal scholar William Blackstone. Blackstone equated it with eudaimonia, a Greek term that conveyed a sense of well-being brought on by an honorable life. Aristotle describes something like this in The Nichomachean Ethics when he writes, “the good of man is exercise of his faculties in accordance with excellence or virtue.” Jefferson’s collaborators on the Declaration, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, concurred. Franklin enumerated thirteen virtues necessary for “moral perfection” in his work, including resolution, frugality, industry and humility. This understanding of the pursuit of happiness is not as different from Locke’s version as it may appear, but the latter is considered more practical and materialistic given the primacy of property among the rights the great liberal thinker believed individuals enjoyed.
Both renderings of the genesis of the American conceptualization of the pursuit of happiness imply a focus on the practicing rather than the mere seeking of the experience. Neither provides a definitive understanding of the term’s meaning, however. As the font of classical liberalism, Locke’s understanding of man’s righteous behavior is limited to his own capacity to act without interference from others and the state. People should be largely free to define, pursue, and enjoy happiness as they wish. That does not assist our understanding much, and since happiness is innately personal, it is difficult to identify violations of an individual’s right by the state or others. The Blackstonian alternative places greater demands on the person and a more proscribed way happiness is achieved. But it sees happiness as much as a collective obligation than an individual right in the American liberal tradition.
What happened in the decade between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution? When the Founding generation was again asked to think about the natural rights enjoyed by their countrymen in 1787, they omitted any mention of happiness from the Constitution. Four years later, as they crafted a Bill of Rights that supporters of the Constitution had agreed to attach to the document in exchange for support for its ratification, they revealed the decision not to have been inadvertent. The new Fifth Amendment enumerated three rights that Congress was prohibited from depriving without “due process of law.” “Life” and “liberty” remained, but the “pursuit of happiness” was replaced at the end of the tricolon by “property.”
The substitution is likely attributable to the pursuit of happiness’s ambiguity and disagreement over its meaning. But much is revealed by the Founders’ thinking about property. Locke had considered property an essential right and following Shays’s Rebellion and the brief toppling of the government of Massachusetts in early 1787, the Founding class were made acutely aware of how small farmers were squeezed by tight credit, hard currency, and elevated taxes. They believed, as James Madison was to write later in his famous Federalist 10, one of a group of essays designed to persuade New York to ratify the Constitution during the spring of 1788, that the “various and unequal distribution of property” was emerging as the main cause of political conflict. The establishment of a bulwark in defense of property in the Fifth Amendment, rather than the pursuit of happiness, constituted an effort to advance, or at the very least maintain, the economic status of the Founding class within the new nation.
Slavery also cast a long shadow at the Constitutional Convention. Although the word is suspiciously absent from the document produced in Philadelphia, the institution was effectively protected by three of its provisions. A clause in Article I, Section 2 counts “all other persons”—or slaves since they were not “free Persons,” “bound to Service for a Term of Years,” or Indians—as “three-fifths” of an individual for the purposes of distributing among the states seats to the U.S. House of Representatives and collecting from them revenue. Congress was prevented from prohibiting the slave trade until 1808 and fugitive slaves were, as directed by Article IV, Section 2, to be returned “up on the Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.” The new language of rights appeared to exclude enslaved men and women from their enjoyment. You cannot hold property yourself if you are owned. The universal logic of rights, however, suggests that, although already clearly deprived of their liberty, enslaved Americans may have some subversive entitlement to the pursuit of their own happiness, even if it is only in their minds and acted upon surreptitiously in what private moments they enjoyed.
The Declaration of Independence built an argument for the detachment of the thirteen states from Britain and provided a vision for the society in which Americans believed they should live. It required the approval of the small group of revolutionaries who attended the Continental Congress. Its core liberal values were shared and its objective, the end of British rule, readily achievable from its simple proclamation. The Constitution is quite different. It is inherently political and practical. Here the goal was union—or one “more perfect” than that established by the Articles of Confederation ratified in 1781—and the creation of a new national government that would make “the supreme Law of the Land” and presumably, unlike those of the states, could “insure domestic Tranquility,” “provide for the common defence,” and “promote the general welfare.” The approval of nine of thirteen diverse states consisting of merchants, yeoman farmers, and plantation owners, English, Scotch-Irish, and Germans, cosmopolitan and parochial, Anglophobe or Francophobe, was required for the plan to take effect. The new government established by the Constitution was complex and different too. It consisted of three intricate branches, each with different memberships selected using different methods to serve different groups of constituents for different terms and collectively exercising broad powers as they rested on top of states that had previously enjoyed sovereignty. The delegates who authored the Constitution in Philadelphia and the thousands of Americans empowered to consider its ratification over the following twelve months—either as formal delegates to state conventions or the voters who selected them—deliberated, argued, negotiated, amended, and very nearly did not come to the level of accord necessary for its enactment.
The Constitution’s supporters were unsurprisingly forced to make concessions. Most importantly, they agreed to champion a Bill of Rights through the inaugural Congress that was designed to restrict the power the new federal government was to exercise over the people. These first ten amendments to the Constitution as they became resembled a pledge to the new nation’s doubters, commonly known as the Anti-Federalists, that Americans could go about their business with the freedom they had enjoyed when they were governed exclusively by the state in which they lived. As such, these skeptics wanted concrete guarantees, not lofty rhetoric and amorphous aspirations. The right to property—as well as other rights embedded in the first ten amendments to the Constitution such as the freedom of speech, trial by jury, and protection from self-incrimination—was tangible. The pursuit of happiness may have appeared elusive, and difficult to protect, by comparison.
To effectively extend the reach of the rights enumerated by the Constitution to include newly freed Black men, the country’s leaders, in constructing the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, simply replicated the phrase “life, liberty, and property” in a second “due process” clause. Following the Civil War, it would not only be the federal government that was restricted in its actions by this language, but the states as well. By then, however, any right to pursue happiness had been forgotten. According to the Law professor Carli Conklin, the phrase has been mentioned in about one hundred U.S. Supreme Court decisions, but largely as a synonym for the freedom to enjoy property or take a course of action directly related to one’s career, personal life or use of leisure time. The pursuit of happiness was first mentioned by the Court, for example, in 1823 in a case concerning the property rights of Virginia residents who held claims to land in Kentucky. Here, it was seen as a rhetorical substitute for property.
Today, many Americans presumably aspire to happiness, but nobody talks seriously of its pursuit as a right. It is just something people do to make their lives better. Regardless, Americans are apparently unhappy; at least compared to citizens of other wealthy democracies. According to the 2026 World Happiness Report compiled from the Gallup World Poll, the Scandinavians are the world’s most contented people—a “happiness score” is derived from asking respondents to place their current experience from one-to-ten, with one depicting their “worst possible life” and a ten their “best possible life.” Other European nations score highly and the United States trails Anglophone countries like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom as well as Hemispheric counterparts Costa Rica and Mexico.
Of course, if movement is a function of the pursuit of a better situation for oneself, then the United States might be seen as a happy place; its net migration rate in raw numbers is consistently higher than for any other country. But observers believe Americans are gloomy. Their discontent is attributed to factors such as social media, economic inequality and a rising cost of living, deteriorating health outcomes, growing political polarization and distrust, and a decline in social capital as people spend less time together.
So, as we reflect upon 250 years of the United States, the retreat of the pursuit of happiness from public consciousness is revealing. Increasingly united and self-confident in 1776, Americans saw happiness, whatever its precise meaning, as aspirational; it was a central feature of a healthy life and a thriving society. Although not always attained, it was accessible to all. In 2026, happiness appears almost as an afterthought or, for those who contemplate it, illusive, an unaffordable luxury, and something that is generally private and nearly always materialistic. Some politicians and researchers worry greatly about the evaporation of American happiness. Many of the public might like to be happy but are resigned to an existence of moderate and sporadic enjoyment. As citizens of a wealthy country, Americans surely have the means to pursue—and obtain—happiness but in this fractious, immodest, and self-absorbed technological age little of the mentality to do so.
