by Darrin McMahon

Reviewing new biographies of Dale Carnegie and Andrew Mellon in The New York Times Book Review this past weekend, Harvard Professor Richard Parker repeats a canard that educated readers (and educated editors) should keep from quacking. "In the Declaration of Independence," Parker writes, "Jefferson subtly anticipated our complex feelings by substituting 'the pursuit of happiness' at the end of Locke's familiar statement that all men had an inalienable right to 'life, liberty and property.'" As I've argued before (see here), there is no evidence that Jefferson ever substituted the phrase the "pursuit of happiness" for "property." Nor did Locke employ the apparently familiar statement attributed to him here. True, Locke gets close, writing of "lives, liberties, and possessions" and "life, liberty, and estate" in his Second Treatise on Government, a text Jefferson knew well. But he doesn't utter the magic words "life, liberty, and property." To trace the provenance of that phrase, you have to go elsewhere--to James Otis's 1764 "Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved" or "The Declaration of Colonial Right and Grievances," endorsed by the First Continental Congress in 1774. My point is not that Jefferson or Locke were any less defenders of the rights of property for that. But they didn't consider property and happiness strictly synonymous. In short, the "pursuit of happiness" in the Declaration of Independence is not a veil hiding the crass material interests of the Founders, as Marxist historians were once fond of arguing. It is simply a well turned phrase with a long history of its own. If you want to know more about that history, see here.