Question

The Declaration of Independence is often presented as including radical new ideas about equality. Jefferson's notion of equality did not extend to all, including enslaved and poor white. As Jefferson wrote he picked up the phrase used by John Locke referring to life, liberty and property. The switch from property to pursuit of happiness may not be as radical a change as we might like to believe. The best historians I have read on this tend to think the wording from one-and-the-same John Locke who used the term. For Locke, pursuit of happiness was a goal, it was an end result of a respectable life, pursued via civic virtue . Pursuit of happiness and property may not be all that different. Given his understanding of "all men" this limited sense of the phrase does not seem all that surprising. Was the document more conservative than we might assume?

Answer 1

Thomas Jefferson replaced the third term of John Locke’s trinity, “life, liberty, and property” by a more broad-minded, distinctly American concept: the right to ‘the pursuit of happiness’ “in an imaginative leap; as the happiness means more than just the pursuit of; wealth and status. John Locke was a seventeenth-century man while Thomas Jefferson was a man of the later more developed times the eighteenth century. True freedom leads to happiness which is not connected with one’s financial status.

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