Moore, Peter. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: Britain and the American Dream. First American. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.

Book Review

Historians generally cite Virginia planter George Mason’s writings as critical inspiration for Thomas Jefferson’s famous Declaration of Independence assertion of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” In his similarly titled new book, Peter Moore contends that Jefferson’s brilliance originated from a primarily British coterie of mid-eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers. He believes that pre-Revolution Britain produced liberal republican thinkers who challenged orthodoxy and produced political works that influenced Jefferson to pen the ear-pleasing, aspirational literary triplet.

A University of Oxford lecturer, Moore argues his thesis based on the lives of six influential political thinkers and publishers. He claims that these seminal political thinkers had as much influence on the famous phrase, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as Thomas Jefferson. Two printers headline the group – Benjamin Franklin and London publisher William Strahan. Moore believes that Franklin exemplifies an intellectually productive and prosperous life that Jefferson asserted an “unalienable right” to pursue. His friend and active correspondent, Strahan, built a highly profitable publishing and printing business that produced Britain’s most famous works, such as Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The extraordinary friendship between these two highly successful printers provides the book’s backbone. The other four individuals who heavily impacted pre-war British politics are interwoven in the two printers’ lives.

First is John Wilkes, an impetuous British politician and member of parliament who published anti-government articles for which he became an outlaw and lost his House of Commons seat. Later, he made an unprecedented comeback, and the citizens of London elected him sheriff and mayor. Initially, American colonists were alarmed that what happened to Wilkes could happen to them. Later, after Wilkes’s astonishing political return, the Americans perceived that taking risks and standing up to authority, as did Wilkes, could bring great rewards. Wilkes’s call for additional British liberties resonated with the American public as the armed conflict commenced.

The second individual is Catharine Macaulay, a republican historian who wrote the highly regarded History of England and hosted numerous salon-type discussions of critical political issues of the day. The high-profile Macaulay politically favored both Wilkes and the American cause. Her unequivocal support of personal liberty for all people was well-known on both sides of the Atlantic and certainly by Jefferson.

Third is Samuel Johnson, the formidable man of letters who prepared the famous English dictionary funded and published by Strahan. Also, Strahan printed Johnson’s highly influential anti-Whig pamphlet, The Rambler, during the period 1750-2, which backed the British Tory government. While not supporting American Independence, Johnson penned a novella, Rasselas, which described the eighteenth-century notion of happiness as a prolonged, settled state, not a momentary emotion as is everyday use today. Johnson’s notion of happiness underlies Jefferson’s use of the phrase in the Declaration of Independence.

Lastly, Moore characterizes Thomas Paine as a ruthless polemicist. As a recent immigrant in 1776, Paine wrote Common Sense which summarized the republican arguments against the British monarchial government and inspired many Americans to support the Revolution. Moore asserts that Franklin had a hand in Common Sense’s drafting and editing. The historical record is more apparent that Franklin helped to disseminate Paine’s pamphlet to influential Rebel leaders.

Professor Moore argues that the lives of these six people reveal much about the Revolutionary era political debate and that Jefferson owes a considerable intellectual debt to the sextet’s political philosophy. Therefore, readers of the Declaration of Independence should recognize that Jefferson did not divine out of clear air the words of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; the phrase is not uniquely American. This iconic phrase had discernable roots in the pre-Revolution British political discourse, greatly influencing American political development. Moore’s argument makes sense as pre-war colonialists regarded themselves as British and looked across the Atlantic for political and intellectual connections.

Moore’s focus on six individuals and their contributions is a clever method to support his thesis. Of course, some readers will ask questions such as which writers beyond these six exerted influence on the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence and what in Jefferson’s background specifically supports that he borrowed their thoughts. While it is easy to say that he had to be influenced by others, Moore does an admiral job in making the case that these six writers were highly influential without going through the arguments why he did not include others in his monograph.

I highly recommend Moore’s Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness for its unique approach to Revolutionary Era political history. Readers will learn why the sixsome became intellectually prominent in America and contributed to a new republican philosophy outlined in the Declaration of Independence. Additionally, Moore places British politics at the story’s center providing balance for the many American-centric accounts of the Declaration’s composition. Lastly, readers learn that Thomas Paine was the first to suggest that the new nation be called the United States of America! It is ironic that a Britisher named the new nation, but not surprising that America owes an intellectual and political heritage to trans-Atlantic theorists and politicians.