Responsable : Audra Bullard

Description :

Princeton Professor Robert P. George contends that the idea of “liberty” articulated at the Founding included positive as well as negative liberty – not just freedom from coercion, but the freedom to pursue self-mastery and to lead a virtuous life. The Founders considered the liberty to pursue happiness – by which they meant human flourishing – to be an unalienable right and they distinguished between liberty and license, or the “abuse of freedom”. National
Constitution Center CEO Jeffrey Rosen agrees that for the Founders, the pursuit of happiness meant being good, not feeling good--the pursuit of virtue, character improvement, and lifelong learning, not immediate gratification. Following classical and Enlightenment philosophers, the Founders believed that personal self-government was necessary for political self-government. He also emphasizes that although Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson agreed about the need to balance individual liberty and government power, they disagreed about how to strike that balance. In this wide-ranging conversation, George and Rosen discuss the Founders’ debates about the Pursuit of Happiness and the Pursuit of Liberty and what they can teach us today.

 

Jeffrey Rosen is the President and CEO Emeritus of the National Constitution Center, where he hosts “We the People,” a weekly podcast of constitutional debate. He is also a professor of law at the George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic. He was previously the legal affairs editor of The New Republic and a staff writer for the New Yorker. Rosen’s newest book is “Pursuit of Liberty: How Hamilton vs. Jefferson Ignited the Lasting Battle over Power in America.” His other books include New York Times bestsellers “The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America” and “Conversations with RBG: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law,” as well as biographies of Louis Brandeis and William Howard Taft. Rosen is a graduate of Harvard College; Oxford University, where he was a Marshall Scholar; and Yale Law School. He is an elected member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Law Institute. In 2024, the French government recognized him as a Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He has served as Chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the President’s Council on Bioethics. He has also served as the U.S. member of UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Swarthmore, he holds the degrees of JD and MTS from Harvard University and the degrees of DPhil., BCL, DCL., and DLitt. from Oxford University. He is a recipient of the Canterbury Medal of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, and Princeton University’s President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching.

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