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In this episode of the Pluralist Points podcast, Ben Klutsey, the executive director of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, speaks with Jeffrey Rosen, the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, about the Founders’ understanding of the pursuit of happiness and how it relates to virtue. They discuss the notion of bounded liberty, the importance of deep reading, literature that contains ancient wisdom and much more.
BENJAMIN KLUTSEY: Thanks for joining “Pluralist Points.” Today I’m speaking with Jeff Rosen. Jeff is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center [ [link removed] ] in Philadelphia. He’s also a professor of law [ [link removed] ] at George Washington University Law School. He has written nine books, most recently “The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of Founders and Defined America [ [link removed] ].” Jeff, thanks for joining “Pluralist Points.”
JEFFREY ROSEN: Great to be with you.
‘Tusculan Disputations’
KLUTSEY: Let’s just get started on the “Tusculan Disputations [ [link removed] ].” This book comes up in the reading lists of Founders like Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. What made that book so inspiring to these Founders? I think you took some time during the lockdown, the pandemic, when folks were doomscrolling and binge-watching all their favorite shows, you were reading the “Tusculan Disputations.” What made that book so inspiring to these Founders? What do you think?
ROSEN: The “Tusculan Disputations” was Cicero’s alternative to doomscrolling because he wrote it when his daughter died, his beloved daughter, Julia, and he was writing to console himself. Amazingly, it’s a manual on grief. It’s so interesting that the Founders’ main source for the pursuit of happiness was a book about how to overcome great sorrow. I came across this because I noticed right before COVID that both Ben Franklin [ [link removed] ] and Thomas Jefferson had chosen the “Tusculan Disputations” as their motto for related projects for achieving virtue that both of them worked on.
Franklin, in his autobiography, famously set out to become morally perfect by enumerating 13 virtues that he tried to practice every day. During COVID, I saw that his motto was from Cicero: “Without virtue, happiness cannot be.” Then when I noticed that Jefferson had drafted a similar list of virtues for his daughters, and also, when anyone asked him the meaning of happiness, would send out a longer passage from the “Tusculan Disputations,” I figured I’ve got to read this book. That was what then led me to Jefferson’s longer reading list of moral philosophy that inspired his understanding of happiness, and I was off and running.
Virtues, Happiness and Self-Mastery
KLUTSEY: Fantastic. Now, as I was reading the book, I kept thinking about how many virtues I should master. Are there four? Is it prudence, justice, temperance and courage? Or Franklin’s 12, and then I think he eventually added a 13th one? How many are we talking about here, and why are they different depending on who you read or who you talk to?
ROSEN: They’re all variations on the four classical virtues: temperance, prudence, courage and justice. Franklin came up with 13 because he was trying to be practical and was looking at popular magazines for self-help advice, basically, about how to achieve emotional tranquility, self-mastery, self-reliance, character improvement and so forth. Jefferson came up with a similar but not identical list. It’s interesting that they do tend to be the classical rather than the cardinal or theological virtues. They’re not focusing on faith, hope and charity, but more on character improvement and emotional self-mastery. Those are the virtues that they came up with.
KLUTSEY: I think you touched on the definition a little bit. Different thinkers from Cicero to the Founders have connected virtue to happiness, but in different ways. How should we think about this relationship? Is happiness simply the result of virtue or something deeper?
ROSEN: Great question. For the Founders, happiness meant not feeling good but being good, not the pursuit of immediate pleasure but the pursuit of long-term virtue. By virtue, they mean the quest for character improvement, self-improvement, self-mastery. That’s why the word “pursuit” is so important. It’s not in the obtaining but in the pursuit of being a more perfect person that we achieve happiness. It’s never a final destination. That is why thinking about happiness as a pursuit for lifelong learning is another good way of summing up the classical definition.
KLUTSEY: What does self-mastery look like? Who would you say is a model that exemplifies self-mastery? I mean, I think in the book you walk through how Ben Franklin went through the Pythagorean method of grading himself and how he did. I think I’ve heard you talk about trying that as well. Did you see yourself gain self-mastery as a result? Who would you say is a model of this?
ROSEN: I did not come anywhere close to gaining self-mastery. I tried this with a friend about 10 years ago. Our local rabbi recommended the system. We didn’t know it had come from Franklin. A Hasidic rabbi translated the Franklin system into Hebrew in the 18th century, and it’s practiced today in a system called Mussar, or character improvement.
Frank Foer and I did the Franklin system every night. We would put an X mark next to the virtues where we fell short. Like Franklin, we found it’s incredibly depressing because there’s so many X marks every day. At that point also, I was going through a tough time. It’s very hard to maintain your temper and your equanimity and your moderation when you’re under serious stress.
The Founder who best exemplifies it is George Washington. He’s just the self-composed, self-mastered man of his age. That moment at Newburgh [ [link removed] ], when the soldiers are going to rebel and they want him to be a military dictator. He appeals for prudence and temperance, and he mounts the temple of virtue, as he calls it, this wooden stage, and says if they can just wait a little bit to be paid by Congress, then he’ll ensure that they’re made whole.
That’s where he’s greatest, where he’s most restrained, most humble, most human. He takes out his reading glasses and apologizes and says, “I’ve grown old in your service, and now I’ve grown almost blind.” It’s just this dazzling performance of exemplifying strength through self-restraint, and that’s George Washington.
KLUTSEY: That’s amazing. Is it possible to go through this process and come out worse because you realize that it’s impossible to meet any of these criteria?
ROSEN: I mean, you certainly could be incredibly hard on yourself, and you do see people like John Quincy Adams constantly beating themselves up for falling short and not achieving their ideals. He has that amazing line where he says, “If only I were more self-disciplined, I could have ended war and slavery.” I mean, he’s setting an extremely high bar for himself, and you make yourself extremely anxious.
Broadly, the quest is one more of feeling than thinking. When you feel that calm focus and mindful self-mastery that allows you to really achieve your task, to be your best self, use every moment productively, it’s a feeling of alignment that is bound to make you a little more perfect. That’s why, for me, instead of enumerating individual virtues and making a checklist every day, more just, I found myself transformed just by looking at examples.
People who actually pulled it off, imperfectly of course, but inspiringly—like Washington, like Franklin, like Adams and Jefferson, like all of them in their industry. I just find it so inspiring that these guys continued to learn and read and grow until the end. They fell short on so many levels, but they were so industrious that that’s really what inspires me. Every time I find myself browsing or surfing or doomscrolling instead of reading books, I think of them and I get back to work.
Bounded vs. Boundless Liberty
KLUTSEY: Fantastic. Now, in the book, you note that the Founders cared about bounded liberty and not boundless liberty. Can you unpack this for our listeners? Because I think that liberty is something that we think of a lot in the context of the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution and something that was really important to the founding of America. There’s this interesting distinction of bounded versus boundless which helps to cultivate these virtues as well. I was wondering if you could talk about that.
ROSEN: Absolutely. The Founders distinguish between liberty and license, and they thought that freedom, properly understood, required self-limitation, self-mastery. Only by mastering or limiting our unreasonable passions and emotions could we achieve the true liberty that would allow us to achieve our potential, to be truly free, because we’re becoming ever more perfect.
I have behind me a print of one of my heroes, Louis Brandeis, and one of his favorite poems was by Goethe, who said, “The master is disclosed in limitations.” Only by limiting ourselves can we really achieve that self-mastery that will make freedom possible. It’s central for great libertarian philosophers, and it really is important for libertarians to remember that bounded liberty doesn’t mean licentiousness or gratifying your immediate pleasures or letting it all hang out or doing whatever feels good in the moment. It’s more impulse control so you can achieve the true freedom that will result in true happiness.
Virtue as the Golden Mean
KLUTSEY: The Founders, they emphasized a range of virtues: prudence, courage, justice, moderation. Are there tradeoffs? Can an excess of one virtue become a vice or come at the expense of another?
ROSEN: An excess of any emotion or passion or virtue can absolutely come at the expense of others. That’s why Aristotle’s chart in the “Nicomachean Ethics [ [link removed] ]” of the golden mean is so helpful. For each passion or emotion, there’s an excess and a deficiency. We want to be not exuberant or despondent, but moderate, and so forth. An excessive zeal—to pick your virtue—for courage could lead to rashness instead of sensibility and so forth. For everything, it’s a balance and an equanimity that we’re trying to achieve.
KLUTSEY: The Founders also saw virtue as essential to sustaining a republic, but today, we often see public debates where virtues seem to clash: justice versus order, free speech versus civility. Do you think we’ve lost a sense of how to balance virtues in public life? How might we recover it? Some might argue that perhaps we never had it in the first place.
ROSEN: Absolutely. The Founders think that personal self-government is necessary for political self-government. Unless we can find that order, courage, temperance and prudence in the constitution of our own souls, we won’t find it in the constitution of the state. That doesn’t mean that we are supposed to agree about policy matters. As you say, our politics have been essentially contested since the beginning.
My next book is about how the battle between Hamilton and Jefferson has defined all of American history. Their initial battle between national power and states’ rights, or executive power and congressional power, or liberal versus strict construction of a constitution, has been pervasive throughout American history.
Although they didn’t agree about policy, they did agree about the importance of civil discourse and dialogue. The fact that the liberal idea, as embodied in the Constitution, creates a framework for listening to different points of view, for disagreeing without being disagreeable, that basic principle of civility and civil discourse has been what’s prevented American politics from descending into violence for most of American history. That’s why, although there’s a tradeoff and a balance, we need to have a joint shared commitment to the principles of the Declaration and the Constitution and the principles of civil dialogue for this system to work.
Americans and Virtues
KLUTSEY: Yes. I can’t wait to read your forthcoming book. I have to say, it sounds super interesting.
Since you’ve been going around the country talking about the pursuit of happiness and virtues and things like that, where do you think Americans are in terms of the kinds of virtues—how we’re cultivating virtues in the ways that perhaps the Founders would have hoped for? You think that we are up there, getting there or we have declined or in decline? Where would you put it?
ROSEN: I have the extraordinary privilege of traveling around and talking to people of different perspectives about the Constitution and the Declaration and founding principles. It’s incredibly inspiring to experience this: In red and blue America, in rural and urban places, there is a shared devotion to founding principles, hunger to learn more about them and commitment to dialogue about them.
I just had this incredible experience going out to Brigham Young University and talked to 5,000 students. And the dean asked them to stand and recite the virtues that they recite as part of their mission oath, and in 20 languages, they all recited it by memory. It was incredibly moving. Just a very tangible expression of the commitment to these principles that Americans have, and I see that in all states in the union of all politics.
For me, it’s crucially important that we can’t talk about politics in these situations. I don’t think that it’s possible to have productive discussions about the policy issues that are completely dividing America right now. Obviously, we’re more polarized than at any time since the Civil War, and there are grave and serious questions about the future of the republic. My sense is, as long as we move past those important but immediate political disagreements and have discussions about first principles, I’m incredibly inspired by the commitment and opportunities for civil dialogue moving forward.
KLUTSEY: I’m curious about your own journey with this book. How did you embark on this journey in the first place? What got you interested in writing this book on virtues?
ROSEN: It was the synchronicities of coming across the Cicero book and then coming across this amazing reading list by Jefferson, which had Cicero and the other moral philosophers. Then just feeling this was a huge gap in my education; I was so struck that I hadn’t read any of them despite the amazing liberal arts education that I had been privileged to have. That was what set me down this particular reading project.
It certainly was part of a long spiritual quest of reading in the wisdom literature that included, around this time, rereading the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, the Bhagavad Gita, the Dhammapada, the Upanishads, as well as the classical moral philosophy, and being so struck by the fact that all of them have a version of the same wisdom, which is that we are what we think. Life is shaped by the mind, as the Dhammapada puts it. As we imagine ourselves to be, so shall we be, and we are what we imagine, as the 16th-century mystic Paracelsus put it.
It’s so striking that John Adams saw the connections between the Bhagavad Gita, which says, “Renounce and enjoy. Renounce attachment to external events and enjoy eternal bliss,” and the Stoic dichotomy of control, which says, “Don’t try to control the thoughts or actions of others. Focus on the only thing you can control, which is your own thoughts, actions and emotions.” It was just a very powerful and meaningful culmination for me of, not just noting, but feeling, experiencing the incredible, powerful, deep truth of this most ancient of all wisdom. That’s what led to the book.
KLUTSEY: Would the Founders have been surprised that you went through a liberal arts education and didn’t come across any of this stuff? They were very much involved in building things like the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Virginia and all these amazing universities. Would they have been surprised?
ROSEN: They would have been shocked. This was the core curriculum of all the universities that they founded, including Penn, where Ben Franklin commissioned Samuel Johnson [ [link removed] ] to write the moral textbook of the American Revolution, which uses the phrase “the pursuit of happiness” lots and lots of times. This is the dad of another Johnson who serves at the Constitutional Convention. At UVA, it’s the centerpiece of the curriculum.
It’s also the centerpiece of the curriculum of the universities that the Founders graduated from. Madison learns it from President Witherspoon at Princeton. It’s at the center of the Harvard curriculum well into the 20th century; not only the undergrad but also the law school curriculum assigns all these classical moral philosophers. Then it just fell out of the curriculum sometime in the second half of the 20th century, in the ’60s or ’70s.
I felt it was such a gap. When I was going to college, I was yearning for this kind of guidance. It’s just remarkable that this wisdom, which is the center of all Americans’ education—middle school, high school, college and law school—for so long, just fell out of the curriculum.
KLUTSEY: Do you know why it fell out of the curriculum?
ROSEN: I tried to figure it out. I don’t have a simple answer. Obviously, in the ’60s, the pop culture began celebrating happiness as seeking pleasure rather than self-mastery, and the “me” decade [ [link removed] ] took over. The whole understanding of happiness essentially is hedonism rather than virtue became ascendant.
Why that happened, David Brooks blames post-structuralism. George Will blames the Romantic movement, but of course, that was a 19th-century phenomenon exalting autonomy rather than self-mastery. A central part of the story is clearly the changing role of religion, once organized religion began to lose its authority. And that starts in the 19th century, but really, it gets up and running in the second half of the 20th.
Also, once the Supreme Court properly holds that you can’t openly teach religion, I think schools became skittish about even including texts with religious connotations, which had been standard before. The question about whether it’s possible to learn these virtues outside of a religious tradition or in an age where religious affiliation is dramatically declining—especially in the past 20 years, as Jon Rauch points out in his great new book [ [link removed] ]—is a really serious question.
Virtue of Reading
KLUTSEY: Yes. I saw a piece, I think in The New York Times, recently about how we’re seeing a slight uptick amongst Gen Zs embracing religion again [ [link removed] ]. Maybe it’s a blip, but we’ll see. It’s very, very interesting. Now, Ben Franklin’s Junto was a space for rigorous debate and moral self-improvement. What can we learn from Franklin’s model about the role of community in shaping virtue?
ROSEN: The virtue of book clubs, the Junto discussion group. He gets it from John Locke. In his essay on education, Locke recommends that people start book clubs devoted to the promotion of virtue. Franklin takes his discussion questions from Locke, and we’re seeing that all over the country now. Zoom has really empowered this both virtually and in person. People are meeting, reading, learning and discussing.
That idea of nonsectarian, nonpartisan learning for adults is so empowering. There’s nothing better than lifelong learning for adults before and after retirement. Franklin is so keen on this that he wants to start a united party of virtue that would unite people devoted to this self-improvement and lifelong learning around the world in a kind of enlightened community of lifelong learners.
KLUTSEY: That’s really amazing. Now, Frederick Douglass credited “The Columbian Orator [ [link removed] ]” with shaping his moral and rhetorical development. It seems to have influenced Abraham Lincoln as well. What does that tell us about the role of great texts in cultivating virtue?
ROSEN: Is there any more inspiring and powerful example in all of American history than Douglass in “The Columbian Orator”? His wicked master forbids him from learning how to read. He goes onto the streets of Baltimore and pays boys to teach him to read with bread. Then he finds this book, and he buys it with bread and it changes his life. I’ve seen the book. David Blight, the great Douglass biographer, both brought out a first edition of it, which is like a sacred artifact, and also has republished it so anyone can find it online. It’s so small. It just has selections from Franklin, from Cicero, from the Stoics, a dialogue on slavery that inspired Douglass to become the greatest freedom fighter of his age.
Astonishing is the only word for it. What such a sparse text with such small excerpts from these great philosophers could do to completely transform someone’s life. Just every time I both find myself browsing rather than reading, and also lamenting the state of affairs, I think how blessed we are to live in a world where all of these texts are free and online. You think of what Douglass and others had to do to just get access to these small primers. All we need to do is the self-discipline to just click on the link and read them. You realize how incredibly fortunate we are.
KLUTSEY: Yes. It seems to me that the ability to read in of itself is so foundational to formation of virtues, because that’s where you begin to really delve deep into these ideas and concepts.
ROSEN: My experience really is that it’s the deep reading itself that is the habit of virtue. That is the takeaway for me from the project. I now have a rule. I’m not waking up hours before sunrise every morning and reading moral philosophy anymore, but I do have a rule that when I wake up, I can’t browse or surf until I’ve read. Reading for a half hour or an hour in the morning is completely life-changing. You learn so much. I was able to write this other book.
Mostly, you just can’t wait to get up and learn something. Making it a habit, a kind of daily practice, was Franklin’s crucial insight. The big vice now is the temptations of these screens that we’re all addicted to. Just having habits that will free us from that addiction and take us into productive learning is so crucial.
KLUTSEY: It’s critical. It’s critical. Now, Frederick Douglass, it’s an amazing story that he has. His intellectual journey does offer us today some interesting lessons, especially in an age of polarization. I’d like you to maybe take a moment to just talk about that journey a little bit and how his journey can perhaps inform how we think about bridging some of the divides that we see.
ROSEN: Well, it’s so crucial that what he most rebelled, again, was not the attempt to shackle his body, but his mind. He was so appalled, so fiercely indignant at that effort that he resolved to learn how to read and then to become this great intellectual and freedom fighter and to insist on the complete freedom of conscience to think as we will and speak as we think. It was that that led him to denounce slavery as a violation of the natural-law principles of the Declaration of Independence. He became a deep historian.
Based on his own close readings of Madison’s notes of the Constitutional Convention, which had just been released in 1840, he concluded, having previously agreed with Garrison [ [link removed] ] that the Constitution was a compromise with slavery and the devil, that was a libel on the Founders and that it was a glorious liberty document because it didn’t explicitly endorse slavery. Then, of course, he held America to live up to its ideals. Then after the war, in fighting for the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, in particular the 15th, which gave the right to vote and he thought was a king’s cure for the wickedness of slavery, he insisted on self-reliance.
That was his central message: self-reliance, self-determination. He was channeling the ancient wisdom about the pursuit of happiness through self-mastery and said that that’s why he insisted that it was access to education that was so crucial for all people, regardless of skin color. He became an evangelist for the transformative power of education.
America’s Founding and Christian Ethics
KLUTSEY: Yes. Now, oftentimes we talk about, or we discuss, the idea that America’s founding had some Christian influence. To what extent does Christian ethics inform the Founders’ understanding of virtue?
ROSEN: It deeply informs it. Many of the founders came to this wisdom through the Christian tradition. There were differences in the degree of their level of observance or their identification with organized religion, from more conventional and devout practicing Christians, like Washington, in his way; Adams, not till the end of his life; Hamilton and Madison, to some degree. The Quakers influenced Franklin. Quakerism was so central to so many Founders, including John Dickinson and George Wythe, whose grandfather was Quaker. Their abolitionism was closely tied to their Quakerism. To Jefferson, famously a deist, by no means an atheist, and believed both in the afterlife and in the necessity of aligning with a creating God.
It’s also very important to remember that the classical tradition was a religious tradition. Stoicism is a religion which insists on the divine duty as well as right of aligning with the divine. That’s why Cicero was so important to Augustine and to the church fathers who cited him, and Aristotle, centrally. The consonances between the classical and Christian traditions are far more important than any theological differences. The similarities between Christianity and the other in the Eastern traditions are also central, which is why Adams summed up all of their wisdom in his mature expression of spirituality: “Love God and all His creatures; rejoice in all things.”
There are many things to be said about the nature of the constitutional protection for religion, the boundaries between church and state, the nature of the free exercise clause. Legitimate debate about most of these questions, no easy answer, and wrong to ascribe a single will to the Founders, who disagreed about these questions. But it’s certainly the case that all were educated within this Christian tradition.
One thing that is important is that they were pluralists and did not claim that America was a Christian nation. That’s why we have an establishment clause in the Constitution. For them, liberalism was completely compatible with Christianity during the Enlightenment. To the degree that some tried to misuse our history to claim that the Constitution was designed to favor Christianity over other religions or to impose any dogma or the views of any sect, history does not support that claim.
Struggle in the Formation of Virtue
KLUTSEY: Yes. Now, can you talk a little bit about the role of obstacles in developing virtues? Does character formation require some struggle? It’s interesting. I was watching a conversation with Jensen Huang, the head of NVIDIA, and he was speaking to a group of people about how he got to where he is right now and the differences he sees with the next generation in his company and how they handle challenges and so on.
He says that he went through a lot of suffering as a kid growing up in this country, that that built him. He jokingly said that “I wish upon you some suffering.” He got a lot of laughs from the audience, but I think he was on to something there. There’s something about going through challenges and being able to overcome them as forming you and helping to cultivate certain virtues in you.
ROSEN: It’s excellent advice. He’s absolutely on to something. Character formation requires overcoming the ego, recognizing it’s not all about you, getting outside of your selfish, self-focused preoccupations and cultivating your faculties so that you can be your best self and serve others. For most of us, certainly it’s my experience, you’ve got to be hit over the head by life and really knocked on your feet to recognize that you’re not the center of the universe, that you need to get over your self-focused preoccupations and tune into others and tune into productive work rather than perseverating anxiously about the past or the future in a self-focused way.
That’s why Franklin picked humility as his last virtue because it was the hardest to achieve. Especially when we’re young and think the world revolves around us, it’s especially hard to achieve. Once you’ve really suffered some serious setbacks and had to overcome serious challenges, you begin in an imperfect way to realize it’s not all about you and to try to become a little more perfect.
The Role of Silence
KLUTSEY: Yes. Now, you end the book with a chapter on silence. That’s one thing I’ve been very curious to ask you about. Why? Why did you end on silence?
ROSEN: Well, my example was Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and she came chronologically at the end. Her conversation pattern was so unusual. You’d ask her a question, and there’d be a long pause, far longer than is comfortable in a normal conversation. You had to learn to sit in the silence because you knew she was about to say something incredible. Then she would just come up with some perfectly phrased answer. I asked her why she talked in this unusual way. She paused for a long time and said, “I like to think before I speak.”
I’ve come to experience that it’s incredible wisdom. It’s not an intuitive thing. Your instinct is to jump in and fill the silence or say something anxiously, but if you can think before you speak, that’s when you’re exercising that reason over passion. You’re not responding with your most immediate impulse but your sober second thoughts. So you’re both likely to say something a little wiser, hopefully, or truer than if you just blurt something out.
It’s also really powerful in ordinary conversation. Not responding to every provocation or even every question that will take you into an ego-based place is really empowering too. RBG would always give—it’s kind of famous—this advice. She said the best advice she ever got was on her wedding day when her mother-in-law said, “Sometimes it helps to be a little deaf.” It’s funny, but it means if your spouse is going to be nagging you or saying something that upsets you, you can pretend you didn’t hear it and just move on.
KLUTSEY: Let it slide, yes.
ROSEN: Then it’s great advice for everything, for friendships, for professional encounters. No one’s entitled to an immediate response from you. Often, the best way of maintaining your self-possession is just to be silent.
How To Pursue Happiness
KLUTSEY: Yes. Fascinating. Now, if you were to leave our listeners with one key takeaway on how to pursue happiness in the way that the Founders envisioned it, what would it be?
ROSEN: Deep reading, daily reading. That is my takeaway. I’d gotten out of the habit of reading outside of my deadlines and my immediate work. Just getting back into that daily morning habit of deep daily reading has totally been transformative.
KLUTSEY: Finally, are you optimistic that we can foster the sense of deep reading amongst our fellow citizens?
ROSEN: I am optimistic because I experience it every day. It’s really gratifying and mind-blowing, actually, how simply talking about the book and people who read it say they’ve been inspired by the Founders to resume their own deep reading. People share their morning rituals. Sometimes it’s deep reading, sometimes prayer, sometimes creative work like writing poems or songs or art. Just getting off the screens into that place of creativity and focus and learning is something that we all know we’re missing. It’s really exciting to see how people are inspired by those who’ve gone before us to try to resume these virtuous habits.
KLUTSEY: Speaking of writing, you wrote your own sonnets while you were writing the book, which is really wonderful to read as well.
ROSEN: I did. I have to share it—in the years since it was published, I started writing songs, and we’re going to debut some of them.
KLUTSEY: Wow.
ROSEN: We’re doing a podcast on “The Pursuit of Happiness” with Ken Burns, who I’ve just had the most extraordinary conversations with about his own morning practices, about spiritual self-mastery. We’re going to debut some of the songs for “The Pursuit of Happiness” on the podcast.
KLUTSEY: That is wonderful. Well, the book is “The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America.” Jeff Rosen, thank you so much for joining us.
ROSEN: Thank you.

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