According to Institution President Michael E. Hill, Jeffrey Rosen is “one of the foremost critical thinkers on the U.S. Constitution and how that interacts with societal issues.” Rosen will speak at 10:45 a.m. today in the Amphitheater, discussing his latest book, The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America, as part of the Week Nine Chautauqua Lecture Series.
As president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to educating the public on the U.S. Constitution, Rosen hosts the podcast “We The People,” which aims to present the best arguments on all sides of the Constitutional issues at the center of American life.
Rosen has spoken from the Amp stage in 2017, and virtually via CHQ Assembly in 2020. Since first being introduced to Chautauqua, he has published another three books, adding to his eight total. He currently teaches as a professor of law at George Washington University Law School and is a contributing editor for The Atlantic. Rosen was recently named Chevalier to the prestigious l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France, which recognizes significant contributions to the arts, literature or culture.
In The Pursuit of Happiness, Rosen examines the framers’ perspectives and intent through which they designed our country; his understanding of the pursuit of happiness originates as a quest for being good, not feeling good — which is something that resonated with Hill. Happiness doesn’t mean a personal contentment at the expense of another, Hill found. It means “an obligation to do virtuous works and deeds that would make society overall a place we might all be happy.”
“As we looked at ways that Chautauqua might think about the coming decades in the U.S., having that foundational understanding of why we were established this way is really important,” Hill said.
Profiling six of the most influential founders in his book, Rosen found that “it’s so easy to excuse ourselves for our own virtue today, not recognizing that we, in similar situations, might have been just as fallen,” he told Jeffrey Goldberg in a conversation for the National Constitution Center.
The Constitution remains the playbook, Hill said, “by which we do everything — from passing major laws to how our regulations exist to what we’re able to do when we want to change or preserve parts of our society.” Understanding what was intended helps inform our future, he said.
“All of the conversations we have about how to create a better world are stuck unless we understand the system in which we’re operating — sadly, civics education has been taken out of many of the schools,” Hill said. “I think a lot of frustrations that newer generations experience partially stem from a lack of understanding about how to change the system; it is very difficult to change the system if you don’t understand it. Understanding the Constitution — why it was created and where it has already evolved — is critical to how we all work together to frame the society we want for the future.”
Hill predicts the audience will be surprised by the foundational thinking that informed the creation of the U.S. Constitution; in the 21st century, “we have cherry-picked many of the phrases,” assigning meaning that was never intended.
“Jeff has done a brilliant job of not only unpacking what the original thinking was, but to talk about virtue — not in the sense of a moralistic code — but about what does it mean to do right and to do good for the collective versus the individual? Much of our society today is an individual definition of where we think society should go,” Hill said. “Jeff calls to us by looking at this historic framing to remember that we rise or fall together.”
