here is an odd reality about the blurbs on the back of books. They are meant for advertisement and not accuracy. On the back of Carli N. Conklin’s The Pursuit of Happiness in the Founding Era (2019) we find one source praising her treatment of a “perennial question in the scholarly literature,” and another proclaiming it to be “the first full scale effort to understand the founding-era meaning of the phrase ‘pursuit of happiness.’” Did anyone notice the tension between these two statements? Her editors should have.
Luckily, Professor Conklin’s efforts stand on their own. It is unfortunate though that the promotions will be among the first things readers will see, because they will be misled and then disappointed, at least in the final and perhaps most alluring claim. And that would be a shame.
The book is decidedly not the only full scale treatment of the meaning of the phrase. Of this fact, Garrett Sheldon is certainly correct: The subject is perennial and has been dealt with extensively as a subsection of many very extensive histories of other broader topics like that of the Declaration, or of Jefferson, or of the Revolution. That is why it is perennial.
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