 Good evening. I can speak today. Good evening, everybody. I'm Ellis Brockman. I'm the senior advisor to the archivist. And it's my pleasure to welcome you to what should be a fascinating conversation tonight about what has become probably the defining value of America, the pursuit of happiness. We think it's a great subject to kick off our multi-year celebration of America's 250th anniversary. So thank you all for being here tonight for the first of many events to come. As the home of the Declaration of Independence, we've actually given the pursuit of happiness a lot of thought around here. For me, my wife would tell you that it's Texas barbeque, a good bourbon, and probably time with her. But I promise we'll get a more nuanced interpretation tonight. To do that for us, we have author Jeffrey Rosen in conversation with our boss, the archivist of the United States, Dr. Colleen Shogan. Jeff has also given this topic a lot of thought. In his new book, The Pursuit of Happiness, How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America, he traces the phrase back to the Greek and Roman philosophers who inspired Jefferson and delves into the deeper virtues our founding fathers deemed essential for political self government. It's an interesting and very well researched read, and Jeff will be signing copies at the end of the program if you're interested. When he isn't writing, Jeff serves as the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia and hosts We the People, a weekly podcast of constitutional debate. He is also a professor of law at George Washington University and a contributing editor to the Atlantic. If you're not already impressed, he's also a graduate of Harvard, Oxford, and Yale Law. Now, please join me in welcoming Jeff Rosen and Dr. Colleen Shogan. Jeff, thanks so much for being here this evening to talk about your terrific new book. I'm very excited to hear from you about it. Thank you. And it's such an honor to be at the archives. And it's so exciting to be in this temple of reason and learning and history. And I am so excited to discuss the book. It's fired your book. You couldn't have written it without the archives, right? I could not have written it without the archives and the wonderful work you're doing to preserve the documents here and also to put them online. True. So this is, as Ella said, this is our first event that we are launching to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the United States, which will, of course, occur on July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. So it's very fitting that we're here to talk about one of the most important phrases in the Declaration of Independence. So we'll start out. I mean, it's an interesting topic for a book to write an entire book on really just one phrase inside one document, a very important phrase and a very important document. But tell us, how did you come to even write this book? Why did you write it? It was an unexpected COVID reading project. And it kind of developed through a series of synchronicities. First, I was revisiting Ben Franklin's famous 13 virtues where he resolved to achieve moral perfection by practicing the classical virtues. And I noticed that he chose, as his motto, a phrase from Cicero, a book I hadn't heard of, the Tuscalan Disputations that said, without virtue, happiness cannot be. A few weeks later, I was at the Bors head in in Charlottesville at UVA. And on the hotel room wall was a list of 12 virtues that Jefferson had drafted for his daughters. And they were almost identical to Franklin's things like, if angry, count to 10, if very angry, 100. But then when Jefferson was old and people wrote to him to ask, what's the secret of happiness, he would also offer a passage from this book I'd never heard of, the Tuscalan Disputations that said, he has achieved tranquility of soul and who's neither unduly exuberant or despondent, he is the wise and virtuous and happy man. So basically, I thought, OK, I've got to read Cicero, because it was so important to Franklin and Jefferson. What else to read? Then I came across that amazing reading list that Jefferson would send to kids who were going to law school and people who asked how to be educated. And it was striking, both because of the rigor of the schedule, Jefferson said, you've got to get up before dawn, watch the sunrise, read 12 hours a day, essentially, starting with moral philosophy and then ending up with literature in the evening. And it was also striking because there's this passage called Ethics or Natural Religion. And that had the Cicero book as well as other books of classical moral philosophy, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, as well as Seneca and some Enlightenment philosophers like Hume and Locke and Bollingbrook. So the whole thing happened because I thought, this is a gap in my education. I've got to read these books. They were so important to the founders. And I have this wonderful liberal arts education. I studied with these great teachers at great universities, literature, history, political philosophy, and law. But these great works of moral philosophy just are not assigned anymore. So I sat down to read them in COVID. I developed this weird Jeffersonian schedule of getting up before sunrise, watching the sunrise, writing these sonnets to kind of sum up the wisdom, which it turns out lots of folks did in the founding era when they read these great works. And then using electronic word searches, I was able to look for the phrase, the pursuit of happiness. And what just blew my mind is almost all of these works contain the phrase and they all define happiness not as feeling good but being good, not the pursuit of pleasure but the pursuit of virtue. And then they define virtue in this classical way of self-restraint, self-mastery, character improvement, impulse control, being your best self, being a lifelong learner, essentially achieving the self-discipline that's necessary to be your best self and to serve others. So that was the project. It really was the most meaningful reading project of my life because it changed my conception of not only how to be a good person but also how to be a good citizen. So the phrase pursuit of happiness appears the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. It's one of the unalienable rights, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Tell us a little bit, I mean, you've got to it a little bit in your answer there, but what was the founder's conception of happiness, Jefferson or the founder's conception of happiness? And importantly, how does that differ to how we think about happiness today? Did it draw a little contrast for us? Well, it's the opposite. When you think about happiness today, it's you do you, let it all hang out, follow your bliss, gratifying your pursuing pleasure, basically, and for the founders it was the opposite. It was resisting immediate pleasure so you can achieve the long-term well-being that comes from self-mastery. It is a classical notion. Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics famously defines happiness as an activity of the soul in conformity with excellence or virtue. But because excellence and virtue aren't self-defining, it's not intuitively obvious what that means. Aristotle talks about a mean, emotional moderation, and he has a list of emotions and says there's an excess and there's a deficiency and we have to achieve the moderate version, not exuberance or despondency, but tranquility, for example. And over and over again in the founding literature and in the Enlightenment, you see this antithesis between reason and passion. And this turns out to come from Pythagoras of all people who not only invented the triangle and the harmonic system of triads and fifths, but was a sage on the Isle of Croton who first distinguished between the faculties of reason in the head and passion in the heart and then desire is in the stomach. And the idea is that we have to use our reason to moderate our unproductive passions and desires so we can achieve contractuality and self-mastery. And Pythagoras says, reverence thyself, live first, first be good and then like a God. And he was the one who came up with that daily system of self-accounting that Ben Franklin used as the foundations of his 13 virtues. So it really is classical self-help, a kind of practical advice about how on a daily basis to master the only thing we can control, which is our own thoughts and emotions, that's the stoic dichotomy of control, so that we can use every moment of the day productively to improve our character and just what's so striking is that because the founders just learned so much about this as kids, they're thinking about it constantly, constantly, writing in their private diaries of their own efforts to achieve this emotional self-regulation, beating themselves up when they fail and it just defines their whole moral universe. No, I'll play a little bit of Devil's Advocate because when I was in a seminar, I think I was in graduate school and I was doing some work on Aristotle. One of the students said, and I've always remembered this, this Aristotelian, like you were talking about the self-governance, the using reason, rationality and the governance, the self-regulation and the governance over passions and your emotions, doesn't it sound a little wooden? It makes us think like we're robots rather than human beings that we know or have emotions and have passions. So what would you say to that critique about that? That doesn't sound wholly human to think about people that way. Absolutely, in its most rigorous and austere form, stoicism in particular can seem unattainable, superhuman, wooden. And in fact, Abigail Adams thought so. She's having this great discussion with John about the uses of grief and John does the standard stoic argument of metuscular disputations. Even if a tragedy, a kid dies or you lose all of your wealth, if you just look at things realistically and are grateful for the good times you had, you can move forward. And she said, that's completely unrealistic of my darling Lysander, she called him. She calls herself Portia, that's how classical they are. If something happened to Lysander, I would be crushed. There's a classical response and that's Jefferson who in his letters with Adams at the end says, I think stoicism is unrealistic, I've become an epicurean. But by epicurean, Jefferson did not want and pursued a pleasure, which is the libel on Epicurus, as Jefferson said, but the rational contraction of our desires so that we can meet them. So in other words, don't lack emotion, just rationally moderate them so you can achieve them in a way that'll serve well-being. This philosophical debate came home to me, I had a great debate recently with a welfare hedonist at Oxford called Roger Crisp and the setup for the debate was happiness, virtue or pleasure, basically raising your challenge, isn't it, wouldn't? But after we talked about it, Roger Crisp said, in fact, welfare hedonists agree that we should contract our desires and that by doing that and just viewing things realistically and reasonably, that will actually achieve long-term pleasure. In other words, our long-term well-being is served by resisting immediate unproductive impulses like anger, jealousy and fear so that you can achieve long-term well-being. In that sense, all the philosophers and the theologians debated about is reason stronger than passion or what's the role of conscience. These are important philosophical and theological debates, but they don't detract from the fact that the underlying wisdom is impulse control, the marshmallow test. Remember those kids who either would get one marshmallow if they had it immediately or if they could wait for 15 minutes, they'd get two and the kids who could wait did much better on later in life. So the ancients and the Enlightenment people saw life as a marshmallow test and not totally overcoming emotion and not being so stoic as never to experience grief, but just mindfulness and sober second thoughts. In that sense, there's a lot of consonance between the Eastern and Western wisdom traditions and the Dhammapada, which as we are what we think, life is shaped by the mind is very consistent with the stoic wisdom as well. So one more question before we go on to really the heart of the book, which is how you exemplify the concept of happiness in several of our early Americans of prominence or founders. So the other virtue of a democracy is liberty. In fact, it's life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. So some of what you're saying, they're making a lot of choices, moderation, self-regulation, things like that. That seems juxtaposed to liberty. That doesn't sound like what we think about liberty and freedom. So aren't democracies, isn't the virtue of, doesn't Plato say that a virtue of a democracy is liberty, is freedom? So if that's the case, then is at times happiness in tension with liberty or the freedom to do what you want. Such a great question, just goes to the very heart of the matter. So the founders distinguish between liberty and license and license, which is the immediate gratification of pleasure leads to Caesar and the fall of Rome because all previous republics have fallen swayed to demagogues who flatter the people and in exchange for immediate pleasures and luxuries like corn or bread or circuses, persuade the people not to be vigilant in defending true liberty and to surrender to autocrats and thus the democracy and the classical formulation can turn to the mob just as monarchs can turn to tyranny and aristocracies to oligarchies. So for the founders, personal self-government is necessary for political self-government. Far from being in tension, they think the whole American experiment is gonna fall unless people can find the self-restraint, the moderation, the self-mastery to do two things. First, to learn enough about the history of liberty so that they'll defend it when it's under siege. And second, to vote wisely, to choose moderate, temperate, virtuous leaders who instead of being driven by ambition or avarice, which are the classical sins, will tend to the public good. And that's why at the end of their lives, many of the founders are unsure about whether the experiment will succeed because they're never before, have we tried to establish an experiment based on reason and conviction, not force or violence, as Hamilton says in Federalist One, and what will determine whether or not we're able to do that. To maintain liberty in the true sense is whether we're able to achieve virtuous self-mastery. So let's march through some of the highlights of the individuals in your book, the sketches that you lay out. First we'll start with Franklin because we have to start with Franklin because he's sort of the centerpiece and he's one of, there's other heroes, but he's one of the heroes of your book. And I think people are thinking about Ben Franklin these days because there's this new Apple mini-series with Michael Douglas highlighting Ben Franklin. So talk to us about, you referenced him before, but how did Franklin, how did he reach, how did he attempt to achieve happiness through self-moderation? What was his methodology and was he successful? So it's so great that the mini-series is doing well and as we were discussing, I just read in the Washington Post that Michael Douglas is a fan of the Stoics. So I wanna get him a copy of the book. It's definitely, it should be a natural audience. Franklin tries to achieve virtue through the Pythagorean system of the 13 virtues and I have to say a friend and I tried the Franklin system not a few years ago. The local rabbi at Addis Israel recommended a Hebrew version of the Franklin system because there's an 18th century rabbi who translated the Franklin virtues into Hebrew. And like Franklin, we made a list of the virtues. You have a little notebook that you kept. Totally, and then you pick a different virtue every week and you make an X mark at night when you've fallen short of the virtue. Like Franklin, we found it incredibly depressing because there's just a temperance, X, X. It's very hard on a minute-by-minute daily basis to actually practice these virtues. And like Franklin, we gave it up but we did find that it was useful just to be mindful of how you do and the experiment is helpful. Franklin is the master self-improvement guy. He not only tries this 13 virtue system but forms a club, the junto, which is designed to create a united party of virtue. And he gets this from John Locke and copies Locke's recommendations about self-improvement as the motto for this club. And it's so amazing that Franklin, at the end of his life, attributes all of the success that he may have had to his conciliating and moderate temperament. I mean, just think of it, he tamed the lightnings. He directed the Gulf Stream. He was the most famous scientist in the world but he said it was just the fact that he learned not to be too tendentious in asserting opinions. He learned to say not it is so but it appears thus to me. And that moderation allowed him to be the main conciliator at the Constitutional Convention and actually bring everyone together. So it's really striking. And throughout his life, the book he always wanted to write but never did was essentially the art of virtue which was gonna expand on the 13 virtues. It's important just because it shows how, despite his polymath genius, this was most important to him and he wanted to teach it to kids as well. George Washington, in a similar vein, also sort of a hero in your book, his major challenge is his temper. Washington has, he gets angry at times and he shows it. So how does Washington approach trying to self-regulate when it comes to his temper and are there times in which he's not fully successful in doing that? The most familiar times are with his mom and Ron Cherno suggests that his hyper-critical mother, Martha Washington, may have created in Washington a grave hair trigger temper and a desire to master it and he's writing notes in his commonplace book as a kid based on his reading of Seneca and of all the moral writers who say that he who masters his temper who is slow to anger is greater than he who take the village to quote the proverb. And then Washington, there are just a few moments when he's president, when he loses his temper, when he comes to the Senate to deliver an address and they're disrespectful and don't listen to him, he storms out and says this defeats the purpose of my coming here and resolves never to come again, once or twice on the battlefield, but generally it's in the moments of self-mastery that he's greatest and the famous example is a Newberg, the soldiers are gonna rebel and Washington mounts the temple of virtue which is a specially constructed wooden stage that he's had and he reads to them from his favorite play, Cato's play about the fall of Rome which exhorts the consoling virtues of mild philosophy and then Washington reads from a speech calling for patience and prudence and he wants to say to the soldiers, live the virtues and you'll get paid eventually, just wait a little longer and he takes out the speech and he's gonna give it and then famously of course he takes out his reading glasses and says, gentlemen I've grown old in your service and now I've grown almost blind and the soldiers weep, they've never seen the great Washington confess to any weakness before but it's that moment of self-possessed self-mastery that he seems greatest and everyone, all the founders, even his political rivals, Jefferson says he wasn't always right on the policy but he always was thoughtful and self-mastered and that was the source of his greatness. Right, John Adams, Adams struggles with some pride with humility but it was interesting, you told some stories in your book that I wasn't really aware of in which in some cases he, by trying to conquer some of these inclinations that he has, being prideful, actually helps him repair some relationships that were broken in his life. It's so moving, he's maybe the most famously vain of all the founders, we know from the 1776 musical on obnoxious and dislike that cannot be denied but he knows it and he struggles to overcome it and in the end he succeeds. He's such a self-improver, there's that moment, he's courting Abigail, what did they decide to do? Make a list of each other's faults which is a really dangerous dating strategy and it almost goes south when Abigail is kind of flattering and says well your fault is that you're so brilliant that people may find you intimidating and he says well you're not practicing the piano or doing your reading enough plus your pigeon toad he says and she said well I'll try to practice the piano more but a gentleman should never comment on a lady's posture, she's very self-possessed but he does indeed have these famous blowouts with two of his closest associates Mercy Otis Warren and Thomas Jefferson and yet with both of them he reconciles and Mercy Otis Warren is such an inspiring genius of the poetical genius of the revolution Adams calls her her classical education which she gets studying alongside her brother James Otis who denounced the rits of assistance and sparked the revolution, she becomes a brilliant classicist and Adams encourages her to write these satires on the revolution which are completely acclaimed but then they fall out when she becomes an anti-federalist and writes a kind of Jeffersonian history of the United States that in just five pages accuses Adams of being a monarchist and being vain so he vainly storms and says how dare you Adams is not a monarchist, Adams is not vain he talks of himself in the third person there's nothing vain about Adams but Adam should get the credit for the revolution and I wrote the declaration and no one's acknowledging it, he kind of acts out she says well even your friends know that you're vain and you know it wasn't that bad so they break up but then Abigail sends a lock of their hair to reconcile and in this beautiful moment they reconcile and then Mercy says I've just got one favor, you're the only guy who knows that I wrote the play, the Agilator that you said was the best play in the revolution but some guy has taken credit for it and put his name on it, can you certify that I wrote it? Adams says absolutely, you're the only genius who could have done that, rides into Boston into the Athenaeum and writes on the title page this was written by Mercy and his warrant so he, they reconcile and then if I may just express admiration for the reconciliation with Thomas Jefferson, what an amazing story they write the declaration, they fall out over the greatest partisanship, the first partisan election ever in America in 1800 which almost brings down the republic but then they reconcile and in these beautiful letters what do they want to talk about, the pursuit of happiness and spirituality and the similarities among the eastern and western wisdom traditions and Adams is so excited when he learns that Pythagoras may have traveled in the east and read the Bhagavad Gita but he's not sure that the new translation of the Bhagavad Gita has gotten through or whether Joseph Priestly has lived long enough to do his book on the Bhagavad Gita and Jefferson says good news, Priestly lived, the book exists, I've got it, I'll send it to you from Paris and Adams says well this will show the deep connection that I thought was destroyed in the library of Alexandria, I just wanna say here in the National Archives in this great temple of learning and light, think of how Adams and Jefferson are struggling just to get access to books and until the end of their lives keeping up this deep reading and just so eager to keep learning and growing and if they can do it, so can we? Right, we have the abundance, we have the opposite problem I mean the fact that we have instantaneous knowledge at our fingertips at any moment of time. I really have to say my biggest takeaway from this project if I can have one because I do is that well the radical transformative power of the habits of deep reading and it just blows my mind that I was able to write this entire book basically lying on my couch because all the books are online and Adams and Jefferson, eager, desperate did this book, was it actually translated? They're just all here and when I was a kid this is one, I think this is the most inspiring temple of learning in Washington along with the Jefferson building and the Library of Congress. I remember when I was a really young kid I went to the library with my mom and just standing in that great hall was so filled with wonder at the thought that all the books in the world are in that one place and now they're just on my phone but the thing is every morning when I wake up I face a choice, am I going to do it on my immediate impulses to do which is to browse which the newspapers or check email or will I read and when I took out of the COVID project I kind of rediscovered, I got out of the habit of actually reading books outside of my deadlines or my work and now in the morning I'm just I have a rule that I have to read for an hour or ideally more before I'm allowed to browse or check email or do anything else and just think of it, I mean all the books are here and all I need is the self-discipline to swipe left rather than right or whatever onto Kindle rather than onto the ridiculous stuff that I waste time on for most of the day and then I do think I have to share this, not only of Adams and Jefferson trading ideas about books but think about Frederick Douglass. Frederick Douglass feels crushed when his wicked master says he can't learn how to read because then he might want freedom. So what does he do, he goes onto the streets of Baltimore and he buys reading lessons from boys with bread and then he pays with bread for this golden book the Columbian orator which collects excerpts from all the classical moral philosophy that inspired the founders along with dialogues on slavery that inspired him to become the greatest abolitionist of his time and just having bought with bread this one book he becomes the greatest freedom fighter of his age and you just think of the sacrifices that previous readers have made both to have access to books and also just taking the time to improve themselves and educate themselves and stretch themselves it takes so little for me to just turn off the damn browsing that I really, I've become an evangelist for the transformative power of deep reading. Right, so you did include Phyllis Wheatley so African-American poet that was an interesting inclusion in the book so I wanted to ask you why you included her and talk a little bit about how she deals with and characterizes happiness in her poems, in her poetry. I had to include her because she shows the poetical genius of a woman who read the same classical sources that inspired her white enslavers but had to do it at their grace by some dispensation. Her mistress decided that she could be educated along with her kids and she's just come over enslaved and she studies the classics along with the kids for a year or two and proves to be this poetical genius who writes poems of virtue which sound very much like those of Mercy Otis Warren and John Quincy Adams and everyone who's read this literature and she both uses it to call for liberty in the revolution and also to call for freedom from enslavement. It's striking both that her classical education inspires her genius and then the reaction is also really striking. So first, the city of Boston is skeptical that she could have written her own poems and in this jarring act, they convene a body of examiners to ask whether she wrote her own poems and it's presided over by John Hancock, the guy who signed the revolution and Cotton Mather and they all gather and in what Professor Henry Louis Gates is called the Trials of Phyllis Wheatley, they somehow ask her questions like who is Apollo and named them classical muses? She passes obviously with flying colors, they attest that she wrote her own poems and then she becomes an international celebrity, the Oprah Winfrey of her day, Professor Gates calls her and she goes to London and she meets royalty and she's given the keys to the city and George Washington acclaims her genius and is very respectful of her but then what's so striking is the reaction of Thomas Jefferson and it's just some of the founders come off better on close examination like perhaps Washington and John Adams, Jefferson comes off far worse and in his notes on the state of Virginia he has this totally gratuitous passage saying the poetry of Phyllis Wheatley or he's misspelled her name Wattley is beneath contempt basically because he says she's black and black people can't write good poetry because they're intellectually inferior and he goes on this horrific excursion about in Rome the poets were white and even when they were enslaved their poetry could be good but Wheatley's poetry is no good and Washington, Franklin, the other founders don't show this degree of racism and it's just a sign of the fact that in addition to betraying his own ideals about slavery constantly insisting that always that it violated natural law but always calling for its abolition at some point in the distant future Jefferson was also a virulent racist. So let's continue with Jefferson because you write about Jefferson and you write about George Mason in particular because Jefferson, let's face it, he borrows a lot of the ideas that could end up in the declaration from George Mason. As we said before, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness amongst these life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are unalienable rights according to Jefferson and the authors of the declaration. That means that they're intrinsic, unalienable and they can't be taken away. So how do you deal with in your book with Jefferson and Mason, the main proprietors of this rhetoric, of this defense of the existence of the United States? How does happiness then exist? If we know that's an unalienable right how does that exist alongside the enslavement of human beings? How are you able to deal with the existence of both of those? The short answer is you can't and they didn't and it was very striking that all of the enslavers from Virginia in this generation, the founding generation, Jefferson, Mason, Madison and Patrick Henry and Washington all said that slavery was immoral and violated the natural rights of the declaration and when Jefferson said all human beings are created equal he included enslaved people in that and he always insisted that slavery should end at some point in the distant future. Now what was really striking for me to learn is that far from denying their hypocrisy they acknowledged it and there's this really striking quotation from Patrick Henry where he is just given the give me liberty or give me death speech a quotation from the Cato play that Washington liked so much and then Henry says it is not amazing that I myself who think that slavery violates natural law myself own slaves I will not justify it I won't attempt to it's simple avarice or greed I can't do with the inconvenience of living without it and that kind of moment of self-awareness it's wrong it's immoral but I like the lifestyle and I don't want to give it up is really what led them to be such hypocrites and Jefferson in this regard is the most hypocritical because he both preaches the virtues of industry and frugality but he lives this avaricious lifestyle in Monticello where he's addicted to a kind of Roman luxury and is constantly going to Paris and buying all of this fancy furniture and then his lifestyle is made possible only by an enslaved population in particular in the house of Monticello itself he's served by his own children and it's really the cognitive dissonance that it took for him to be surrounded by his children by Sally Hemings on his death to keep his promise to her that he free his children by Sally Hemings on his death and he did keep that promise freeing two of them in his will and having previously allowed two to escape but freeing no one else and all under the claim that he wanted to have freedom but he just couldn't afford it and then he was so in debt that in the end all of his enslaved population had to be sold to pay his debts and parents are separated from children and it's just a brutal realization of what he claimed to be trying to avoid. Head spinning in its hypocrisy however it is important that for the founding generation Jefferson was considered a prophet of freedom and he'd initially sponsored bills to allow Congress to ban slavery in the Northwest Territory he always wanted to end the international slave trade before Georgia and South Carolina did he trembled for his country when he saw that God was just it's striking that the turn against the declaration and the claim that slavery far from being immoral was a positive good didn't come until the next generation that was John Calhoun and the Southern secessionists who basically said Jefferson was wrong to say that all men are created equal and that and to defend inferiority that didn't happen in the founding generation it's a small but important fact that although the founders were hypocrites on slavery they acknowledged it. One of my favorite lines in your book is and I've always I've thought this actually for a little while and then you but you wrote it so you get credit for it is that we're living in a Madisonian nightmare and I mean living in it like living in it right now so tell us what the Madisonian nightmare is. Well first what was his dream? It was so poignant to learn that Madison's dream you know he's really worried about factions and mobs that's the central concern of the Constitution in all large assembly of any character composed passion never fails to rest the scepter from reason even if every Athenian had been Socrates Athens would still have been a mob he says in Federalist 55 what's gonna save America from mobs? A new media technology the broadside press and a new enlightened class of journalists like a group of I don't know Atlantic columnists who are supposed to use this new technology slowly to diffuse reason throughout the land that people will write essays like the Federalist papers and citizens will read them and they'll discuss them in their coffee houses and they'll take these complicated arguments on board and slowly the public mind will be enlightened to embrace universal reason. He's inspired by Condorcet and the French physiocrats. Well it looks a little different than the world of TikTok or Instagram and X or whatever it's called and the idea of media technology slowly diffusing reason is obviously the antithesis of our world where posts based on passion travel further and faster and then rage to engage and you're rewarded for expressing all the perturbations of the mind that Madison is trying to avoid. And if his entire hope for the experiment is that media will diffuse partisan passions and citizens can devote themselves to the public good. We're in trouble both because of the political polarization which is greater than at any time since the Civil War and because these media technologies are fanning passions rather than cooling them. And also that the Republic would be so large, right? The solution in some ways is the size of the Republic. We don't have to deal with these small Venetian Republics or the Swiss Cantons or anything like that. The Republic is so large that even if you have some poor interpretations or some crazy ideas in one part of the country they'll never, they'll be so separated from anybody else's opinion from other parts of the country that the risks of faction will be dispersed, right? And that's not the case today. That's not an effectual argument anymore. It's such a crucial point. That was Madison's big innovation. Montesquieu had said you can only have republics in small territories where people know each other and can deliberate face to face. Madison said no, size is an advantage both because a system of representation will ensure that you don't have to have people deliberating face to face. And as you said, the country's so big by the time mobs are coming to mob the courthouses they'll get tired and they'll go home. They won't be able to find each other and organize each other. And now we've got flash mobs and all of the advantage of size and cooling passion is obviously totally undermined by social media. So what do we do to get out of the Madisonian nightmare? Is there a solution? Well, we have two years together to figure this out at the National Constitution Center in America's 250. We're gonna solve this problem by the, you know, the founder's solution was civic education and Washington and the farewell address warns. First, his recipe for success is a national university where people will convene from across the country setting aside their sectional differences and biases and by together studying the principles of liberty will learn the habits of deliberation and also the substantive principles that will allow people to defend liberty. And then, you know, his warning to the country is in favor of union against faction and in favor of civic education and says, citizens, you've got to find this virtuous self mastery in yourself by learning the principles of freedom or the union will divide. And I just found this amazing quotation from John Quincy Adams. It's the Jubilee of the Constitution in 1839 and he's quoting Deuteronomy and says, unless citizens learn the principles of the Declaration of the Constitution, then we will be damned and if we learn them, we'll be saved. And then he says something like, make these principles as frontlets between your eyes, whisper them to your children before you go to bed, breathe them and speak of them in the morning and the night, cleave to them as is necessary for your eternal salvation. It's really intense and that's his belief that citizens must be inspired to learn these principles or the Republic will collapse. So that's what we can do with the National Constitution Center and the National Archives, just inspire people to learn about history. And I know you're doing that with this great discussion series and you're gonna have great exhibits and I think together we're gonna have dialogues like this around the country to inspire people to learn about the principles of the Constitution and the Declaration. So I'm gonna open it up to questions after my last question here. But to end the book, so if you have questions in the audience, we'll be happy to take them. At the end of the book, you do, it's in this vein, but you talk about the fact that there is a concern because previously there would be in high schools and certainly in colleges, there would be an emphasis upon teaching, learning and deep reading for things like Aristotle, Plato, Xenophon, Cicero, and even the more moderns that are important to understanding the formation and the basics for liberal democracy or rights-based democracy, Locke, Youm, Montesquieu. But we're seeing less and less of an emphasis on that type of education and opportunities. Deep reading needs, you need to be taught to be able to engage in deep reading. It's not something necessarily you just can pick up. It's good to have instruction when you're doing deep reading so that you're reading a text alongside someone and you can have discussions about what you're reading and what you understand and what you don't understand or various interpretations of what you're reading. So what can we do about that? Is that a real problem we think about, as you said, the democratic education of our citizenry if we're not teaching some of these texts either at the high school level, like they previously were, and certainly even less so at the college or university level, then what can we do to reinvigorate that? And what can we do also to encourage this thoughtful mindset that we need in a democracy to have good results when we ask people to go and perform their duties as citizen? Well, it's a crucial challenge and there are several things that we have to do together. First, there's encouraging the habits of deep reading and as you said, it's a question of habit and it has to start early and I just described my own effort to develop better habits, which I really need because I, you know, with all the privileges and advantages in the world, still found myself just not deep reading and instead browsing and it's very troubling that teachers at our greatest universities report that their incredibly privileged students have gotten out of the habit of deep reading. So it's not just an access question, it's really cultivating those habits and which really mostly has to do with disciplining our social media use at all levels. In addition to teaching those habits, we would need to teach the basic principles of the American idea and it doesn't have to be a full list of Cicero and the classics, although they're really energizing but the basic principles of American democracy. Here again, the internet is our friend and I gotta share my incredible enthusiasm for the National Constitution Center's interactive constitution, it's all free and online and it offers a Constitution 101 class of the basic principles of the American idea and it includes videos and links to primary sources and questions for teachers. We're doing a version of it with Khan Academy in the fall that will go to an awful lot of kids and creating a civic toolkit for America's 250 which is going to be coordinated with Ken Burns' American Revolution film so that in one place, hopefully in a really accessible and engaging and fun way, people can find the initial basic principles, democracy, liberty, equality, separation of powers, federalism, the Bill of Rights and then hopefully be encouraged to dig deeper and deeper and then if you just, in a few clicks, you can click on any clause in the Constitution and find the greatest scholars in America, liberal and conservative, with a thousand words about what they agree the provision means and separate statements disagreeing. It's just such an inspiring exemplification of the Madisonian ideal, it's all free and online, the interactive constitution's getting some real traffic, 80 million hits since we launched but like the fact that all the books in the world are here free and online, so are these wonderful civic education resources from us and many other civic organizations and from the National Archives so a big part of our challenge and opportunity is just inspiring citizens around the country to go and check them out. Terrific, thank you. So if we have any questions from the audience, from Jeff about what he's talked about, about his book and about some of his activities at the Constitution Center, we're happy to take them. Yes. I have to be careful not to give a speech because I've worked on this subject so much but I'll ask you two questions. One is one thing that I've worked on, I'm a writer on early American history and Hamilton in particular and is the fact that people think and I've heard this from very, people supposedly very knowledgeable were based on life, liberty and property like Locke and I wonder what you would say about that. My second question is in your work on the influences on the founding fathers, have you looked into Emmerich Vettel who was known, he was a Swiss lawyer, philosopher who was part of the Enlightenment but a different kind of Enlightenment, much more classical in a Ciceroanian sense I believe whom various, who was extremely influential with all the founding fathers in terms of giving them the idea that liberty was not self gratification but was working for the general welfare. Two wonderful and important questions. On life, liberty and property, John Locke in his second treatise talks about life, liberty and property as natural rights but Jefferson is making a list of unalienable rights and property although natural is an alienable natural right obviously because when we form governments we surrender the power to regulate our property in order to make it more secure and you can also alienate property so that's why the phrase, the pursuit of happiness for Locke occurs not in the second treatise but in the essay concerning human understanding where he defines happiness as unalienable because it's based on our powers of reason and I can't alienate the power to you to control my reason because I can't entirely control my thoughts themselves they're the product of my reasoning mind and reason is inherent in who I am as a human being and that's why George Mason also talks about happiness as an unalienable right and Jefferson is just doing good technical natural law theory where he leaves out property and includes happiness because although all of them are natural rights only happiness, life and liberty are unalienable. On Vatel, absolutely and Hamilton stands up in the Constitutional Convention and cites Vatel as the main source for his devotion to the Union and for the need for a vigorous central government and so many of the other Swiss and continental natural law theorists like Jean-Jacques Berlemachy are hugely important. I focused on less in this book because I'm not talking about political but moral philosophy but you're absolutely right that Vatel is just another, it's another great example of how the political and the moral philosophers and the theologians and the legal commentators like Blackstone and the wig revolutionaries all of them buy into this same classical framework about the need for impulse control. Right there. Thanks. Can you hear me okay? Yes. One, I'm really inspired. I'm gonna say this in front of everybody. I'm gonna spend 15 minutes for the next few mornings reading before we start browsing. Great, bravo. I have like 40 witnesses to that. But I also don't have a question, I have a suggestion, I was gonna say a challenge. Perhaps the Constitutional Center and the Archives can add to all that information you're pushing out by something where people can say, here's what I read today, here's what I read today, here's what I read today. I'm sure there's some young person on your staff, one of your staffs, who can figure out a way to have that input coming in. What a great idea. First, you're kind of witnessing to your commitment to give 15 minutes. It really is like an AA meeting, you know, we have to kind of, and then the drug we've gotta get off are these damn screens. So, and then you can develop the habit. And my wife Lauren is here and we try to be accountable to each other too. And like, I promised I wasn't gonna browse today. And then we fast up. It's very much in the Franklin spirit of self-accounting every night. Pythagoras would be proud. But your idea of just encouraging other people to share their readings and is very Pythagorean and very Franklin-like. And let's do it, absolutely. Great idea. Jim? Yeah, this all sounds so wonderful when you stay in the realm of ideas. And you have not talked about institutions. And the distance between the institutions and the ideas in, I don't know, at least over a dozen states right now, teachers are not allowed to talk about the institutions as quote, pretty much quote. Anything other than deviations from the ideas. That's the term that they use. Which suggests that the ideas are perfect. And yet the ideas nourish the institutions. So my curiosity is one of the wonderful things about the 1830s and 40s is the debates between the Garrisonians and Douglas and others about whether the Constitution and the other documents in fact are anything other than deviations from the institutions and vice versa. So I'm curious as to whether the Constitution Center is engaging this challenge. That how do we help our teachers help students engage that crucial debate in those states where they're told it's illegal? Another great question. I haven't seen those laws so I can't comment on those but I can share that the Constitution Center is committed to teaching the habits of civil dialogue and debate by always bringing together diverse perspectives and encouraging citizens to make up their own minds. The Constitution is made for people of fundamentally differing points of view just as Holmes said. And on the Interactive Constitution we have the leading liberal and conservative scholars nominated by the conservative Federalist Society and the Liberal American Constitution Society for 80 clauses of the Constitution. And this is just as Jamie Coney Barrett and Neil Cattiel with a thousand words on the habeas corpus clause and then separate statements about what they disagree about. And we take that model of teaching the debate for all everything we do. So we encourage citizens to separate their political from their constitutional views asking not what the government should do but what the Constitution allows or forbids and then present the arguments on both sides like a majority opinion and a dissent and then have citizens make up their own mind. I'm writing now about how the debate between Hamilton and Jefferson has defined all of American history and it suggests as you say that for all of the great ideals of American history national power versus states rights, strict versus loose construction, democracy versus rule by elites, there's a debate about each of these ideals and teaching the history through the lens of the debate is a great way of teaching it honestly and not attempting to suggest there's one right answer but recognizing that the debate and discussion itself is the essence of the American idea. So I were committed to the principle that history and the Constitution taught in a non-partisan spirit will address all of the deepest and most contentious questions about the nature of the American idea including whether the Constitution was or was not a pro-slavery document which as you said Garrison and Frederick Douglass debated very powerfully but by teaching it through the lens of the debate itself we can inspire citizens to make up their own mind. The other thing I would say Jim is you know some of the what Jeff said is yes there are challenges when you eliminate when it comes to the ability of teachers to teach certain topics or topics within eras of American history and we're aware of what's going on in certain parts of the country it's a challenge at any time I agree but in some ways the phone and the internet allows you to bypass institutions. So institutions don't play, they're important I'm not saying that they're not important but institutions aren't the arbiters of knowledge anymore. So I think it's more important for Jeff his proponent talking about deep reading about the importance of reading an essay like reading a federalist paper and thinking about it takes maybe 15, 20 minutes to really read a federalist paper and digest the arguments that are in a federalist paper but that type of deep reading that Jeff uses you know if you're taught or you have the ability to learn how to engage in that activity if you have access to the internet hopefully at home or hopefully in your own possession but if not at a public library or your school library hopefully you are able to then unlock any questions that you may have even if you're not being taught particular texts or particular components in the classroom in which you're going to school so that wouldn't have been the case when I was in high school I mean it just didn't exist I could go to the public library and I could do those things and I did some of those things because that was the outlet but I was confined to what was provided to me in my own town or in my own locality but kids today, younger people today or any adults really not just even younger people have the ability and that's what I would encourage to be able to access these texts and access all kinds of information at the Constitution Center and read the document for yourself and read what various scholars say about different interpretations to inform yourself. I actually think that's the essence of the answer to the question because my hope is that the Competition Center would provide teachers with the resources to do this so that teachers can then say to those people who say which you should do this this comes from the American Constitution Center. If you can provide teachers in those states who have those walls with materials that allow them to teach this material that legitimates their teaching of this material. Absolutely and that's exactly what we're trying to do both with the Constitution 101 class and in the Khan Academy version because we're trusted to be non-partisan our chairs or justices Gorsuch and Breyer and because all of our materials highlight the thoughts of liberal and conservative scholars no one can ever get criticized for using the material and the challenge is adoption of course and the material is out there but both spreading the word about it and persuading teachers that it should be used and we've got a great teacher advisory council that brings in teachers from across the country and with the help of Khan we'll hope to really push it out there but here's another call to the great all of you and the friends of the archives in the National Constitution Center and it's a good challenge for us as we're thinking about America's 250 when I think about the Civic Toolkit which is essentially just a landing page that will make the resources easily available in the process of getting it out let's offer it up to teachers of course so that they can really use it to best advantage. Good question though. Yeah, to pick up on Colleen's observation that the number of distractions today is infinite. Yes, the right books are out there. Yes, the Constitution Center is doing good work. There's an occasional college like St. John's which teaches deep reading. Are you hopeful for the future of the American education system? You know, I do have an answer to that because of course I wonder it's a sort of central question but I have two things, my own experience and also that of the kids that I interact with so as for my own, I think Jefferson was right when he said I've given up I've given up newspapers for Tacitus and I feel much happier and I feel the same way. I just feel when I read as opposed to browsing that I've used the day better it's more fulfilling, like I'm not making a hash of things and it's something that I'm actually inspired to do more of because I know that in the end I'll feel better and I'm confident that as more people as you are committed to doing with your 15 minutes and the rest of you just rediscover the feeling that comes from deep reading and avoiding unproductive emotions that people can be inspired to embrace it voluntarily but as for the kids, I have the privilege of working with these brilliant young people recent college graduates and my, I'll just give them a shout out, my great assistant at the Constitution Center, Samson Mastashari, I asked him that question at a group dinner, what do you think about your generation? I know you're a deep reader and you're so committed to the light but what about your friends? And he said, yeah, we are too. And when I see just wonderful young people so full of light and focus like that, my sense is in every generation it's a challenge and in every generation there are just people who are moved to be devoted to this world and am I optimistic? You have to be optimistic by the fact that it's so widely accessible. And there is, I'll share this too, it's been really meaningful, I've been going around talking about the book and people are writing to me from around the country just saying I like the book or I read this on the reading list or I'm gonna share this experience of my 15 minutes and these are people from all backgrounds and all states and there really is a community of people it's a silent majority because they're not the extremes who are yelling who are just devoted to this path. So I guess what makes me optimistic is not to be distracted by the extremes and the noise and the Twitter and stuff like that and recognize that there are people, all of you who've come here tonight and are obviously devoted to reading and learning, you're not alone and I'm confident that we can, like Franklin, mobilize this republic of reason like the United Party for Virtue and it can include citizens from across the United States and we're gonna keep the future bright. I want to share your optimism and I hope your book reaches a very wide audience. Thank you, I do too, that would be good for Virtue. I don't think that necessarily, I mean education is changing, right? So the model that we have for education today, traditional high school, some people going to college and university, away to a school, that model might change in the next 20 or 30 years and we may move for 40 or 50 years, we may, there may still be some of that but there might be a much higher emphasis on self education on the ability to chart your own path and your own ability to inquire about subjects and knowledge and I do see that amongst younger people, they do, they understand intuitively this ability, a great example, it's not the same necessarily as a deep reading in a book but it's pretty close, the ability for people and you hear about this all the time, self teaching themselves languages, that was never possible before to be able to study a language self taught through your computer to be able to download modules, you can actually speak back and forth with a computer, it will measure your pronunciation to see if you're actually pronouncing the word correctly and so people are curious about going to other places and they're learning languages before they even travel there through self study. So those types of models, that's just one area, those types of models I think can be applied to other areas of inquiry. So we may not have the exact same system that we have today in the future but I think the technology right now is very young and we're in flux and I still think even social media is still in flux but at some point in the future, it may be wholly different from what we're seeing today. We're just at the cusp of this type of communication. So let's let it work itself out and the ability to have access, I still think the ability to have access to all this knowledge at your fingertips. When you see a good book, whenever I'm out in a bookstore now and I see a good book that I wanna read, I may buy the book or I might just go online and I can put it right on my wait list for my Kindle and I can download it immediately and I can have access to that book so I don't lose the ability to be able to read that book at any point in time or you can get it from the library for free now that you're able to do, borrow e-books from libraries. So imagine how different that was even when I was a young person and I was really restricted to what I had access to, like I said in my community, compared to what I have now. So I think that that transmission of knowledge is always a positive thing. So we'll see how it works out. I'm hopeful along with Jeff. Beautiful, beautiful. What's the alternative? We can't be pessimistic, right? I mean, there's no other alternative. You're facing me all the time. Other questions? Anything else? Well, thank you so much for coming this evening for a wonderful discussion. We will continue to have these discussions here at the National Archives. Some of them really focused on the principles of our government as we march towards the 250th anniversary of the United States and then of course on other topics that we have here at the National Archives related to our wide range of 13 billion records that we hold here in trust for the American people. But please join me in thanking Jeff Rosen. Thank you. That's so inspiring. That's exactly the right note. Yeah, thanks.