"Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" is a well-known phrase from the United States Declaration of Independence. The phrase gives three examples of the unalienable rights which the Declaration says have been given to all humans by their Creator, and which governments are created to protect. Like the other principles in the Declaration of Independence, this phrase is not legally binding, but has been widely referenced and seen as an inspiration for the basis of government.
Origin and phrasing
The United States Declaration of Independence was drafted by Thomas Jefferson, and then edited by the Committee of Five, which consisted of Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston. It was then further edited and adopted by the Committee of the Whole of the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776. The second paragraph of the first article in the Declaration of Independence contains the phrase "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness".
Jefferson's "original Rough draught" is on exhibit in the Library of Congress. This version was used by Julian Boyd to create a transcript of Jefferson's draft, which reads:
The Committee of Five edited Jefferson's draft. Their version survived further edits by the whole Congress intact, and reads:
A number of possible sources of inspiration for Jefferson's use of the phrase in the Declaration of Independence have been identified, although scholars debate the extent to which any one of them actually influenced Jefferson. The greatest disagreement comes between those who suggest the phrase was drawn from John Locke and those who more strongly attribute to Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Lockean roots hypothesis
In 1689, Locke argued in Two Treatises of Government that political society existed for the sake of protecting "property", which he defined as a person's "life, liberty, and estate". In A Letter Concerning Toleration, he wrote that the magistrate's power was limited to preserving a person's "civil interest", which he described as "life, liberty, health, and indolency of body; and the possession of outward things". He declared in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding that "the highest perfection of intellectual nature lies in a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness". According to those scholars who saw the root of Jefferson's thought in Locke's doctrine, Jefferson replaced "estate" with "the pursuit of happiness", although this does not mean that Jefferson meant the "pursuit of happiness" to refer primarily or exclusively to property. Under such an assumption, the Declaration of Independence would declare that government existed primarily for the reasons Locke gave, and some have extended that line of thinking to support a conception of limited government. The Boston Pamphlet (1772), the Declaration and Resolves of the First Continental Congress (1774), and the Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776) also declare the right to life, liberty and property.
Virginia Declaration of Rights
The first and second article of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, written by George Mason and adopted unanimously by the Virginia Convention of Delegates on June 12, 1776, speaks of happiness in the context of recognizably Lockean rights and is paradigmatic of the way in which "the fundamental natural rights of mankind" were expressed at the time: "That all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety."
Benjamin Franklin was in agreement with Thomas Jefferson in playing down the protection of "property" as a goal of government. It is noted that Franklin found the property to be a "creature of society" and thus, he believed that it should be taxed as a way to finance civil society.
Alternative hypotheses
In 1628, Sir Edward Coke wrote in The First Part of the Institutes of the Lawes of England, his commentary on Thomas de Littleton, that "It is commonly said that three things be favoured in Law, Life, Liberty, Dower." At common law, dower was closely guarded as a means by which the widow and orphan of a deceased landowner could keep their real property.