“Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” is Thomas Jefferson’s triad he took from Natural Rights and from Natural Law.
The Natural Rights of life
and liberty he appropriated from John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government, leaving out Locke’s third element of “property.” Looking to the Natural Law aspect of
political philosophy, he inserted “The Pursuit of Happiness.” There are two
sources for this short and misunderstood phrase; one source is that of the Swiss
jurist Emerich de Vattel and his work The
Law of Nations and the other is that of John Locke’s Concerning Human Understanding.
As to the notion of Natural Law, Jefferson
noted de Vattel’s work The Law of Nations
and was familiar with the idea that happiness was promoted as the people were
active in forming a good government.
That is, a pursuit of happiness was a work towards the civic good. See The
Laws of Nations in chapter 1.3.28 – 29, it’s worth reading. It’s online too at http://www.lonang.com/exlibris/vattel/vatt-103.htm. De
Vattel taught that a good constitution is the foundation of a nation’s “preservation,
safety, perfection, and happiness.”
From Locke he
knew of the passage in Concerning Human
Understanding 21.52, another section worth reading at http://enlightenment.supersaturated.com/johnlocke/BOOKIIChapterXXI.html.
Locke tried
to show how “true happiness” is the foundation of liberty, provided one is able
to “suspend the satisfaction of … desires in particular cases.” That is, as he noted in a later section, the
need of the governance of one’s passions.
Much has been
written about this wonderful blend of Natural Rights and Natural Law, and for
that you might want to begin here, http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/46460,
and see where the reading takes you.
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