“The Pursuit of Happiness”

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Thomas Jefferson. The Bridgeman Art Library.

“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”: The last of these three famous rights, too, was very much of its time. One can imagine the medieval barons who forced King John to accept the Magna Carta insisting on life and liberty, of a sort, but it would never have occurred to them to demand happiness as a self-evident right for all. Voltaire and Rousseau fought passionately for social justice so that people might live good lives according to their own convictions.

The eighteenth century was an age of good living, then, an age that valued intelligence, wit, and sensitivity. The age cultivated elegant conversation, the social arts, and hedonism. One of its inventions was the salon — half party, half seminar: a regular gathering in a fashionable lady’s home where notables would discuss books, music, art, and ideas. Another innovation of the time was the coffeehouse. Another was the public concert.

In political terms, the Enlightenment has special resonance for America, for it was also the occasion for our first great contribution to Western civilization. In colonial days, the austere Puritan spirit was hardly in step with the growing secularization of European society, but the Declaration of Independence and the Federalist Papers proved to be the finest flowers of Enlightenment idealism. The notion that a new state could be founded on rational principles, set down on a piece of paper, and agreed to by men of goodwill and intelligence — this could only have emerged under the influence of the political and philosophical writings of the eighteenth century.

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In the Classical era, lighter entertainments took over the stage, in place of the heavy drama characteristic of the Baroque. Compare this picture (a London ballet of 1791) with the opera seria shown on page 106. Even the attitudes and attentions of this audience seem more varied and playful than those of the Baroque audience. (The box to the far right is particularly instructive!) London Metropolitan Archives, City of London/ The Bridgeman Art Library.