Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Virtue

The second line of the Declaration of Independence has been called the “greatest sentence ever written.” While it certainly has had history-hinging effects, its supreme status is surely in doubt since few today grasp what it was meant to mean. That line proclaims it self-evident that all humans are “created equal ... with certain unalienable Rights… [including] Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Since its role in rousing the American Revolution 250 years ago, we’ve become clearer about the equality clause (if sinfully slowly). But the opposite is true of the last two era-defining nouns. The problem is that for the Founders liberty and happiness both depended on a moral logic which is now largely locked out of our politics. That loss should scare the political pants off liberty lovers, since it renders the very foundations of their freedom fragile. Absent its revival America’s great experiment cannot long endure.   

In this essay I argue that the recovery and recentering of that moral logic is vital to any viable form of practical liberty. Liberals today can no longer ignore that unlimited economic accumulation is an ever-present threat to political freedom. America’s Founders knew that, but it is now useful to trace how the political wisdom expressed for example by John Adams, who wrote that liberty can not “exist without virtue,” has disappeared. By virtue he especially meant self-restraint (the antonym of unbridled passions like greed). Liberalism’s most pressing problems today (like democratic corruption and civic collapse) arise from its failure to constrain economic power and oligarchy. Absent adequate constraints, markets now present new threats to liberty. Those reaching for once-persuasive pro-free-market pieties risk bringing philosophical flintlocks to an AI-drone-swarm fight. To tweak Justice Louis Brandeis’s famous line: We may have liberty, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.  

In drafting the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson modified John Locke’s phrase “life, liberty, and property,” replacing the last term with “the pursuit of happiness.” That’s hardly surprising, since other than “the Bible, no writings were more widely read or cited in the revolutionary period than Locke’s,” according to historian Joseph Loconte. But what is surprising is that few now seem to know Locke himself used the phrase "the pursuit of happiness” with a very particular meaning that is now unfashionable. In The Greatest Sentence Ever Written, Walter Isaacson ignores Locke’s uses of that foundational phrase. Garry Wills brings them up on only three out of the 379 pages of his Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, but not to address what I highlight here. Wills toils to topple the typical view of Locke’s influence on Jefferson, which was more moral and psychological than political: the founding generation generally saw Locke as “the Newton of the mind, not of the state.” Wills parades copious proof that Jefferson’s worldview was shaped by the Scottish “moral sense” school, which was deeply at odds with key Lockean views. David Hume, for instance, disliked Locke’s “selfish system of morals” (declaring “I hate or despise” those who seek “nothing beyond [their] own gratification).” 

Leaving aside for the moment whether Hume unfairly maligns Locke, Jefferson, in lockstep with moral-sensers, wrote that “self-interest … or self-love, or egoism” can be “no part of morality”—they’re its opposite. This pinpoints the philosophical fault line under recent foundation-shaking political shocks. Are we autonomous, solitary souls in what liberalism’s founding philosophers call a “state of nature,” who reluctantly succumb to societal contracts? Or are we unalienably social creatures deep in our DNA, unable to survive or flourish alone? Put another way, are humans primarily self-interested? Or are we also animated by other-oriented interests and therefore driven by moral and political values above personal gain? Moral-sensers hold that we begin in society which logically entails loyalties beyond narrow self-interest (society is our state of nature, both in reality and in philosophical relevance). That differs diametrically from so-called Lockean liberals who hold that self-interest should rule all.  

The phrase “Lockean liberal” gained currency only in the mid-20^th century, and it illustrates the dangers of an author becoming an adjective. For instance, political philosopher Leo Strauss "produced a reading of [Locke] dramatically different from those dominant in 1953." That’s according to the editor of the published version of Strauss’s course on Locke’s political philosophy (available online here). This new "revolutionary" interpretation recast him as an advocate of individualistic acquisition. He claimed that Locke offered the “original form of capitalist theory,” opening the door to a world in which unlimited acquisition was seen as morally permissible and desirable. Promoters of Locke as a proto-capitalist typically refer to these remarks that while "God gave the world to men in common," he meant it mainly for "the use of the industrious and rational.” And "a man may fairly possess more land than he himself can use the product of, by receiving in exchange for the surplus gold and silver, which may be hoarded up without injury to anyone." But Strauss’s story of life as an uninjurious gold-loving pursuit mischaracterizes essential traits of Locke’s work. As Loconte complains Strauss has created a “crude caricature of Locke as a secular hedonist.” This disputable distillation of Locke is now “parroted … by numerous voices on the new right” (Loconte names Patrick Deneen, R. R. Reno, and Yoram Hazony as the primary parroting culprits). Oddly, this capitalist take was also echoed at the other end of the classic political spectrum, by Marxist political scientist C. B. Macpherson in The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. 

The same sketchy cartoon animates Francis Fukuyama’s view that what sits “at the heart of Lockean liberalism is the open-ended pursuit of wealth.” He  writes that “Lockean man did not need to be public-spirited, patriotic, or concerned for the welfare of those around him”; their only interest in their community, Fukuyama says, is as a means to their own private good. These claims may fit a certain sordid sort of hyper-selfish liberal, but as I’ll show they can’t rightly be called Lockean. Still to his credit, Fukuyama sees such cold political solipsism as the direst defect in liberal democracies today. He recognizes that portraying us as Homo economicus (as avowed avatars of avarice) who naturally selfishly seek unlimited wealth, is a poor and empirically false model on which to found our philosophy and our politics. Fukuyama writes that even a cursory glance at empirical humans, or the findings of anthropology, psychology, and biology, shows that the evidence supports the moral-sensers: “there was never a period … in which humans existed as isolated individuals.” Humans are biologically obligate cooperators, so autonomous individual pre-political humans are a fantasy (a philosophically and politically potent myth that misleads many still).  

Those who don’t cherry pick the Locke corpus, studying it in toto, typically oppose the proto-capitalist view. To claim that Locke justified unlimited acquisition is “ludicrous, as his theory condemns it as immoral,” writes one scholar. Another denies that Locke condoned "a ‘right of unlimited private property,’ either natural or societal." Likewise, the ultimate umpire of such scholarly uproars, Stanford’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy, declares the idea that Locke favored unbridled self-interest to be simply incorrect. And however abstractly plausible his hoarding of land facilitated by gold “without injury to anyone” might seem, the practice was very different. Enclosures of English common land in Locke’s lifetime were onerous and far from uninjurious. They were “a revolution of the rich against the poor,” in which the rural population was “pauperized,” as Karl Polanyi wrote. 

Whatever else Locke was up to he was certainly in the business of promoting Christian virtue and self-restraint as vital. He did this in at least three ways. First, for Locke liberty itself depended utterly on virtue. Liberty requires "Government of our Passions.” If you are at the mercy of your at times tumultuous emotions, you are not free—to use a fabulous phrase by Shakespeare, you are in fact “passion’s slave.” Conversely, the only way to secure your liberty is to be passion’s master. The same moral mechanics is made explicit in George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights: “no free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue" (Jefferson deemed Mason “the wisest man of his generation”). Self-restraint was so vital a virtue it warranted three near synonyms.

Second, Locke held that happiness was impossible without virtue (both personally and publicly). Locke laid out this inviolable link to virtue in his four uses of the phrase “pursuit of happiness” in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. In the “constant pursuit of true and solid happiness,” we are “obliged to suspend the satisfaction of our desires.” To pursue true happiness, you must have virtue enough to resist lesser pleasures and evils alike (driven only by reason-governed passions). Jefferson and the Founders also generally "understood the pursuit of happiness as a quest for being good, not feeling good." So writes Jeffery Rosen in The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America (Rosen leads the National Constitution Center). Obviously, that original, virtue-dependent definition isn’t faring well. Few now affirm it. In Rosen’s telling, the meaning of happiness began its slow shift from the pursuit of virtue to the pursuit of pleasure in the 19^th-century Romantic era. By the late 20^th century, happiness mainly meant immediate gratification. However much fun that may be, it poses pressing political problems. In Locke’s own words: "God . . .  by an inseparable connexion, joined virtue and public happiness together, and made the practice thereof necessary to the preservation of society.” 

Third, Locke saw property itself as the fruit of virtue, more specifically of virtuous labor with a now typically neglected twist (the “industrious and rational” clause; here I’m indebted to an insightful remark by Elena Kagan—the Virginia prosecutor, not the SCOTUS justice). Contra his current capitalist appropriators, Locke advocated rational and moral limits on private property. For instance his proviso that we can accumulate property only to the extent that there is “enough, and as good, left in common for others.” More generally, he adhered to the classic Christian view of avarice as the very foundation of vice: “Covetousness and the desire to having in our possession … more than we have need of, being the root of all evil, should be early and carefully weeded out." Let’s not forget that the Founders also feared avarice. Every viable commonwealth needs citizens and leaders with the “most virtue to pursue the common good,” proclaim the Federalist Papers, since an “avaricious man might be tempted to betray the interests of the state.” In Locke’s devoutly Puritan worldview all rational choices were weighed in the light of Christian virtues, wherein “infinite happiness is put into one scale, against infinite misery in the other." As political scientists Joshua Foa Dienstag has written, for Locke "individualism, virtue, and ascetic Christianity were ... deeply connected” (a far cry from Strauss’s picture of secular hedonism). Contemporary capitalists might chafe, but Locke’s “industrious and rational” accumulation was subject to the constraints of Christianity and the moral logic of the common good. Jefferson, for less God-derived reasons, would also see breaching health-of-the-commonwealth limits as immoral (“self-interest … can be no part of morality”). 

Antiquarian quarrels and quibbles aside, true liberty lovers today must urgently reconsider if unlimited accumulation is rightly rationally justifiable. Or should there be moral and rational restraints on allowable material inequality? These bounds need not be born of Christian inclinations; they can be derived from democratic liberalism’s own conceptual resources, its claims to adore benevolence and abhor cruelty and tyranny. Well, isn’t it self-evident that the uber-rich today exert excessive political sway? The think tanks they fund shape political discourse. Their lobbyists write our laws. One poll in late 2025 found that “84% of Americans ... say the rich have too much political power.” US election spending by billionaires reached $2.6 billion in 2024 (that’s more than 150 times larger than before Citizens United passed in 2010). Faith that “titans of industry would be guardrails for our democracy” looks laughably ill-founded. The world’s top titan, Elon Musk, has meddled directly in government (his wealth at one point was larger than the size of the economies of 170 countries). As David Wallace Welles put it Musk was “handed close to unilateral control of the machinery of government” (discovering that it is harder than rocket science). Another influential tech titan, Peter Thiel has openly declared that freedom and democracy are no longer incompatible. He blames "extension of the franchise to women" for eroding the "freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism."   

Market pressures drove engagement maximization in social media, and vast riches (and the political power they enable) have been amassed by corporations deploying addictive tech to assault the attention and cognitive autonomy of citizens. There can be little doubt that the most advanced AI will be used to worsen this erosion of liberties if we do not curb it. 

We've arrived at a pivotal test of proper liberal priorities. Liberalism was founded to constrain state power for fear of political tyranny. But now that private actors can wield state-like power shouldn't they, too, be more prudently constrained? Concerns about this economic despotism can be found on both sides of the traditional but fraying left-right spectrum. For instance, on the left Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk about It) by Elizabeth Anderson's or on the right Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty by Sohrab Amari. Historian Jill Lepore’s next book is on how certain oligarchs “came to reject the state. They believe their power is planetary.” She adds that “in 2016, Sam Altman from OpenAI said, ‘If I weren’t in charge, I’d be saying, ‘Why do these fuckers get to decide everything?’” Surely a question liberty lovers ignore at their peril.

Here perhaps we can transplant well-tested political thinking into the economic arena. Like guarding against tyranny by the separation of powers which might be extended from "legislative, executive, and judicial" to encompass economic actors. Our current methods (like anti-monopoly laws) aren’t working well enough and they tend to dodge the central dispersal-of-power issue. As Matt Zwolinski recently wrote for Liberalism.org, the enemy is power, in all its forms, and "when economic power concentrates, it threatens the dispersal on which freedom depends.” 

In policy design it’s common to imagine a proposed power in the hands of your worst enemy. Likewise, whatever we allow private actors to do in markets must be subject to the worst person test. It is foolish to imagine that even if some of the hyper-rich seem decent and well-intended that it’s safe to allow the accumulation of unbounded wealth. Of all people, surely classical philosophical liberals quintessentially concerned with constraining concentrations of power should know that.  If "absolute power corrupts absolutely" in politics, why wouldn't parallel pressures operate in economic affairs? 

We must be more mindful that today’s market forces are not always allies of decent and fair freedom. As leading liberal pundit Ezra Klein recently noted markets and corporations are "misaligned ... [from] human flourishing in all kinds of ways." Liberals ignore this reality about how markets work at the peril of their much-ballyhooed benevolent values. Can it be rational for liberals to rely on the rich to have virtue enough to place any loyalty above self-interest (including loyalty to liberty itself)? Or to expect profit-maxxing institutions will respect the common good or the interests of the state? Locke and Jefferson would surely say no. 

In wrapping up, I’ll note that virtues are best grasped in an Aristotelian sense. Aristotle famously wrote that each virtue is poised “between two vices,” one of deficiency, the other of excess. Virtues have a valid operative range, at either end of which they mutate by an inverted alchemy into vices. Aristotle’s classic case is courage, which in deficiency is cowardice and in excess rashness. Each virtue must be wisely fitted to the demands of the situation. Those who advocate the advantages of organized self-interest would be wise to see it as a virtue of this kind. Self-interest can be good only  when it avoids being both too weak (imprudent) and too strong (greedy). That’s the flaw in Bernard Mandeville’s 18th-century,  modernity-founding moral alchemy claim that private vices bring public benefits (a maxim beloved by the more naive economists whose avarice-advocating views serve the interests of concentrated overclass economic power). In reality self-interest and private vices might indeed benefit society but only within a valid range and only under certain conditions. It might shock today’s ardent adherents of unlimited greed that Plato, Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill join Jefferson and Locke in warning of the predictable political ills of excessive economic inequality. Plato called a greedy elite “the greatest of all plagues,” as philosopher David Lay Williams reminds in a book using that phrase as its title (to calibrate the potency of Plato’s phrase, a plague had recently killed 25% to 33% of Athenians). Plato and co. held that a drive for unlimited acquisition was a founding trait of tyrants. Williams in a recent Liberal Currents essay argues that many influential political philosophers have warned that “great wealth made … it almost impossible to be a good person.”

Here I advocate neither rosy-eyed nostalgia nor the view that iconic texts like Plato’s or Locke’s are chiseled in sacred stone. Plato was plainly wrong on many points, and there have been many positive shifts in moral values since Locke and the time of America’s founding. But our current greed-friendly moral climate has destructively devalued the implicit logic of key propositions proclaimed at our nation’s birth. One strain of liberalism, wrongly called Lockean, tends to bend the moral arc more towards greed than justice and decency. But we can no longer afford to ignore that liberty, happiness, and property are only secure if firmly founded on virtue (and especially self-restraint). Fukuyama concludes his 2022 book Liberalism and its Discontents with an appeal for the acceptance of precisely these sorts of limits: “recovering a sense of moderation, both individual and communal is therefore the key to the revival—indeed, to the survival—of liberalism itself.”

Hence it can be argued that the “greatest sentence ever written” might be amended, with no loss of meaning and with a gain in clarity, as granting the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of virtue.

Featured image is "John Locke Memorial Stone," CC-BY 2.0 Nathanael Shelley 2007.