#PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS MOVIE RIGHTS MOVIE#
In the 1980s it was the name of a Canadian rock group whose first big hit was the single, “I’m an Adult Now.” In 1993 the phrase served as the title of a self-help book whose subtitle was “Discovering the Pathway to Fulfillment, Well-Being, and Enduring Personal Joy.” The phrase, coyly misspelled, was appropriated for the title of a 2006 Will Smith movie about upward mobility, the acquisition of wealth, and the triumph of talent over adversity. That comedy became a musical of the same title in the 1940s. It provided the title for a 1933-34 Broadway comedy written by Lawrence Langner and Armina Marshall. The “pursuit of happiness” has led its own life in popular culture. Even more sadly, Jefferson’s own “property” included about two hundred human beings whom he did not permit to pursue their own happiness. To them the pursuit of happiness means no more than the pursuit of wealth and status as embodied in a McMansion, a Lexus, and membership in a country club. And sadly, for many Americans, Jefferson might just as well have left “property” in place. To cross-racial or gay couples bringing lawsuits in court, it has meant, or included, the right to marry. To Europeans it has suggested the core claim-or delusion-of American exceptionalism. The phrase has meant different things to different people. Nor is that concept “distinctly American.” It is an import, and Jefferson borrowed it. Jefferson did not substitute his “own” phrase. John Locke lived from 1634 to 1704, making him a man of the seventeenth century, not the eighteenth. When he penned the Declaration of Independence, ratified on the Fourth of July, he edited out Locke's right to ‘property’ and substituted his own more broad-minded, distinctly American concept: the right to ‘the pursuit of happiness.’ "įamiliar as all this sounds, Brook is wrong on three points. In an article entitled “The Pursuit of Happiness,” posted at the Huffington Post July 4, 2007, Daniel Brook summed up what most of us learned in school: “The eighteenth-century British political philosopher John Locke wrote that governments are instituted to secure people's rights to ‘life, liberty, and property.’ And in 1776, Thomas Jefferson begged to differ. Yet the true history and philosophical meaning of the famous phrase are apparently unknown. Conventional history and popular wisdom attribute the phrase to the genius of Thomas Jefferson when in an imaginative leap, he replaced the third term of John Locke’s trinity, “life, liberty, and property.” It was a felicitous, even thrilling, substitution. “The pursuit of happiness” is the most famous phrase in the Declaration of Independence.
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