05-27-2025
Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center and author of the forthcoming The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America, calls himself “an evangelist for the transformative value of using the Founders’ life stories” to teach character and leadership skills. Speaking at Purdue’s 2025 Cornerstone for Business Conference, Rosen revealed how the Founding Fathers’ pursuit of virtue over fleeting pleasure offers an enduring blueprint for ethical leadership and civic responsibility.
By studying Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams, Rosen highlighted a radical contrast between their classical understandings of happiness as self-mastery. “Classical understanding of happiness was self-improvement; character improvement was being your best self. Today we’d call it emotional intelligence,” says Rosen. Their practices provide actionable lessons for modern professionals striving to lead with composure and purpose.
For Franklin and Jefferson, Rosen learned, happiness meant tranquility of soul — a state achieved through disciplined self-examination, not momentary gratification. Both drafted lists of virtues inspired by Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, a Stoic text Jefferson called the “manual for happiness.”
Franklin’s 13 virtues, including humility — like imitating Jesus and Socrates — and temperance, were tracked daily on a chart where he marked failures. Though he abandoned the system after weeks of “depressing” self-scrutiny, he credited it with shaping his conciliatory leadership style, evident at the Constitutional Convention when he urged delegates to doubt their “own infallibility.”
Jefferson embraced Cicero’s ideal of rational moderation, advising his daughters to “count to 10 when angry” and prescribing a rigorous reading schedule: two hours of moral philosophy at dawn, followed by history, science and “light poetry” for amusement. His version of Epicureanism rejected hedonism, instead advocating the “rational contraction of desire” to align short-term impulses with long-term flourishing.
The Founders’ virtues drew directly from Greco-Roman thinkers who framed happiness as emotional self-governance. Pythagoras divided the soul into reason (head), passion (heart), and desire (stomach), urging individuals to tame unruly emotions through reflection. Aristotle’s “golden mean” emphasized tempering extremes (e.g., courage as the midpoint between recklessness and cowardice). Seneca, from whom George Washington learned to treat time as a non-renewable resource, inspired his clockwork daily routine.
Rosen likened these principles to the Stanford marshmallow experiment, where children who delayed gratification succeeded later in life. For the Founders, impulse control wasn’t just personal; it was civic. James Madison warned that factions arise when “passion wrests the scepter from reason,” a danger magnified in today’s social media landscape, where anger spreads faster than deliberation.
In his talk, Rosen urged business educators and leaders to reflect upon the Founders’ daily rituals of self-accountability, including Franklin’s Humility Framework. Franklin tracked behaviors such as “acknowledging mistakes” and “prioritizing the common good over personal success.” At the Constitutional Convention, Franklin’s refusal to dominate debates modeled collaborative leadership.
Washington prized composure. Despite a fiery temper, he projected calm, most notably at the Newburgh Crisis, where he defused a military coup by donning reading glasses and admitting, “I have grown gray in service to my country.” His discipline stemmed from Senecan time management, dining and working at fixed hours.
Self-improvement was John and Abigail Adams’ unifying purpose. Early in their relationship, they adopted a practice — rooted in the teachings of Pythagoras — of candidly listing each other’s faults, a bold exercise in mutual accountability that might have failed. John was "famously vain and arrogant, insisting that he wasn’t receiving enough credit for the American Revolution or respect." Abigail’s diplomatic response was something like, “You’re so brilliant some people might possibly think you’re intellectually intimidating.” She handled his list of her faults — that she should practice the piano and read more, plus she had pigeon-toes — with, “Gentlemen should not comment on ladies’ postures.” Their marriage was a “great romantic, intellectual, political friendship.” Their shared dedication to virtue, not as a quest for moral perfection — which they knew was impossible — but as a daily discipline of self-mastery and emotional regulation, was in line with the classical ideal that happiness is found not in feeling good, but in being good.
This ethos of self-improvement extended to their parenting, as they urged their son, John Quincy Adams, to use his time wisely and strive for excellence, instilling in him the habits of self-discipline and self-examination that would shape his own remarkable career.
Learning from his parents, John Quincy Adams resolved upon composure. After his presidential defeat and his son’s suicide, John Quincy Adams reread Cicero daily, concluding slavery violated natural law. His final words — “I am composed” — epitomized Stoic tranquility amid tragedy.
The Founders’ greatest legacy, Rosen argued, is their view of education as character-building. Jefferson’s reading lists blended moral philosophy with literature and science, while Franklin’s Junto Society fostered peer accountability. Today, Rosen advocates “reading before scrolling,” a habit he adopted post-COVID to counter digital distraction. For Madison, civic survival depended on citizens’ ability to engage deeply with complex ideas, a stark contrast to today’s tweet-driven discourse.
The Founders’ happiness was a verb, not a noun, a daily practice of aligning actions with virtue. Their struggles (Franklin’s pride, Adams’ self-doubt) humanize their journey, proving self-mastery is a lifelong project. As Rosen concluded, redefining success as calm resilience over reactive urgency could transform workplaces and public life, one composed response at a time.
