Stoicism, the founders, and the original meaning of happiness

Executive overview

The American founders — Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, Franklin — were not passive Stoics but active ones, using ancient philosophy to build a new nation. Their concept of "the pursuit of happiness" meant virtue and self-mastery, not pleasure or comfort. That definition has been almost entirely reversed in modern culture.

Jeffrey Rosen's book traces how Cicero's Tusculan Disputations and other Stoic texts sat at the core of every major intellectual tradition the founders drew on — Christian rationalism, Whig republicanism, natural rights theory — all citing back to the ancients.

The founders' self-mastery was the prerequisite for political self-government, not separate from it.

Stoicism and the American founding

• The founders read Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius in Greek, Latin, and French — often from childhood.
• Cato was the Stoic hero above all others: the Republican ideal, immortalised in Joseph Addison's play that Washington had performed for troops at Valley Forge.
• The Federalist Papers were signed with classical pseudonyms every educated reader recognised — Stoic and Republican figures from antiquity.
• Jefferson's reading list for law students placed the Tusculan Disputations first, followed by Seneca, Aurelius, and Epictetus.
• These texts were also in the McGuffey Reader and the Columbian Orator — reaching Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln through popular education.
• Cicero was not just a politician but a synthesiser, doing for Rome what the founders did for America: applying ancient moral philosophy to present political crises.

What "pursuit of happiness" actually meant

• Every Enlightenment source the founders used — Christian, Whig, Republican, Lockean — cites back to the Stoics when invoking "the pursuit of happiness."
• The classical definition: happiness is being good, not feeling good. Virtue, not pleasure.
• Adam Smith translates Stoic temperance as "tranquility of soul" — the active, effortful state of self-mastery.
• Happiness as a pursuit: a journey and a quest, not a destination or a right to comfort.
• Sometime around the 1950s–60s, the American definition inverted: immediate gratification replaced delayed gratification; passion became a virtue rather than a danger.
• The founders would have seen "follow your passion" as almost synonymous with a path to moral failure.

Self-mastery as the key to greatness

• Washington's greatness derived from commanding himself first — his fiery temper was visible beneath the surface, but he mastered it.
• His greatest acts of self-mastery were giving power away: resigning his military commission, retiring after two terms.
• Adams is the most consistently Stoic founder: frugal, living within his means, free from the debt and lifestyle contradictions that plagued Jefferson and others.
• The founders' model was the Choice of Hercules (from Xenophon) — virtue's rugged mountain versus sloth's flowery path. This is also the founding story of Stoicism: Zeno heard it in an Athenian bookshop after losing everything.
• Adams proposed it as the Great Seal of the United States.

The contradiction of slavery

• All the enslaving founders acknowledged slavery violated natural rights — they named avarice as the reason they couldn't give it up (Patrick Henry's own words).
• Jefferson used the classics to begin justifying racism — noting that great enslaved Roman poets like Terence were white, then using this to dismiss Phillis Wheatley.
• Seneca questioned slavery; Marcus Aurelius, who admired Epictetus, did nothing about it as emperor.
• Adams and Franklin are partial exceptions: Adams never owned slaves and lived within his means; Franklin became an abolitionist.
• George Wythe, Jefferson's law tutor, is the only Virginia enslaver who freed his slaves in his lifetime and fully lived his principles.

The republic, demagogues, and Stoic vigilance

• The founders designed the entire constitutional system around preventing Caesars and Catilines — demagogues who lose elections and try to hold power by force.
• Hamilton, writing to Washington in 1792: a man "unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper" who "mounts the hobby horse of popularity" aims to "ride the storm and direct the whirlwind."
• Jefferson warned Madison that a future losing candidate might "pretend false votes, foul play" and refuse to leave office.
• January 6th is, in Rosen's view, exactly the founders' nightmare scenario.
• Stoicism was never passive: Socrates lived under the Thirty Tyrants, Cato watched the Republic fall, Seneca served Nero, Marcus Aurelius wrote during the Antonine Plague. The philosophy was designed for bad circumstances, not good ones.

Plutarch and the power of biographical history

• Plutarch's Lives was as central to the founding as any philosophical text — Hamilton carried it to the battlefield.
• Its method: short biographical essays as moral narratives, not exhaustive scholarly biographies.
• Truman read Plutarch throughout his presidency; "every time I've had a political problem, I've gone back to Plutarch and nine times out of ten the solution was there."
• The history profession has since rejected this approach as unfashionable — but readers still respond to biography as moral instruction.
• The Dryden translation is available digitally for under $2; the barrier is patience, not access.

Reading the primary texts

• Ancient Stoic texts are now free and online — the barrier is self-discipline, not availability.
• The founders weren't babied: Washington encountered Stoic epigrams at 16, Hamilton copied Plutarch on campaign, Jefferson transcribed relevant passages into commonplace books.
• Phyllis Wheatley was given a classical education as an enslaved child and became the greatest poet of her age — evidence that the primary texts require no dilution to transform lives.
• Rosen's own encounter came during COVID, through Jefferson's reading list — a gap he traces to these texts falling out of university and high school curricula around the 1950s.
• There are arguably more practicing Stoics alive today than at any point in history, including the ancient world.