In contemporary America, “happiness” is what you get when you activate your “liberty” to express your “individuality.” “Happiness” today is often defined as personal satisfaction that stops with the individual, and even personal pleasure and joy.

But to Jefferson and his Enlightenment contemporaries, the “individual” and “happiness” had different meanings than what we assume they do today. To Jefferson, “happiness” would not have been the opposite of the eighteenth-century term “melancholy,” which today we would call sadness or depression. Rather, to many of the founders, “happiness” was a fortunate state of enfranchisement in the context of an open, just society. This sense of the word descended to the revolutionary generation from Greek literature: to the founders, “happiness” meant the development of one’s full power as an individual, and one’s respecting of the “sacred rights” and consciences of others in a condition of freedom.

[…T]he right to “the Pursuit of Happiness” we inherit is not a pleasure pursuit such as catalog shopping or an indulgence in a personal lifestyle choice, whether a doll collector’s convention or an S&M gala.