| For Jefferson, happiness is really linked to America for deep reasons, that are all together personal, historical and political reasons. His personal representation, on the model of the moments at Chaville with Maria Cosway, is tensed "between the society of real friends and the tranquillity of solitude". In his reading of human history as oriented by the realisation of the republic, only the New Word, allows to find, or to build, a rural, conjugal happiness, that makes possible a very special kind of society, which Jefferson calls a "society of real friends", or a "rational society". And, more than for personal reasons, this type of "society" is necessary for the citizens to build up their political relationship and to constitute the republic itself in a righteous way. What is such happiness , whose Monticello appears as a matrix scene, made of ? Ease and independence, that do not only concern the individual dimension of life, but a precise type of society: avoiding too large statuses of "wealth", fighting "misery", allowing the citizens to live in "freedom", and specially, in "independence", which plays such an important part for the virtue of the Republic's citizens. Happiness in America is also a rural and conjugal happiness; "The tranquil happiness of domestic life", corresponding to what is dictated by our moral sense, delivers a real model, a structural scheme, for every social, and even political, relationship : a "just commerce", or exchange of material goods, as well as ideas about the common interest; We are here very close to the aristotelician "philia", this specific amity of the deliberating citizens. Being a central element of happiness, amity is altogether an element in the construction of the political relation and a goal of this political relation we call a "republic", which is, fundamentally, a great "rational society". This can be one of the reasons why, as soon as 1776, Jefferson raised the pursuit of happiness not only as one of the main natural rights every government should protect, but also as one of the "ends" that a just government should help the citizens to reach. |
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