The following is Part I of a four-part article originally published in full in the Spring 2003 issue of Fidelio magazine.
In 1766, ten years before the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin met and discussed, with the German scientific republican Rudolph Erich Raspe, the Leibnizian idea of forming a nation based upon “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” In 1765, Raspe had just edited and published the first edition ever of Leibniz’s suppressed manuscript, New Essays on Human Understanding, in which Leibniz had systematically torn apart the colonialist apology of John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
Locke had based man’s “freedom” upon the sanctity of property relations, a materialist and barbarian philosophy that Locke personally embedded in his authorship of the feudal, and pro-slavery, 1669 “Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina.” Leibniz, on the other hand, had developed the characteristically human capacity for formulating ideas, as the key, causal element in fashioning human institutions.
In 1776, Franklin was the leader of the Committee of Five, which had Thomas Jefferson commit to paper: “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men ….”
The Founding Fathers did not confuse “happiness” with pleasant entertainment, a “good time,” or material possessions. Happiness, or felicity, was and is the composition of the universe by the Creator, such that the physical, objective conditions of existence—life1—are uniquely addressed and solved by the free exercise of man’s subjective, playful, agapic capacities—i.e., liberty. It would not be Leibniz’s “best of all possible worlds,” had the Creator flubbed it, and created a universe where the freedom of man was not uniquely necessary for life. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is not a laundry list of rights. They are, and were for Benjamin Franklin, a succinct encapsulation of Leibniz’s political philosophy.
How a bunch of unhappy ideologues ever managed to sucker Americans into hearing Leibniz’s “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as Locke’s actual laundry list—“life, liberty, and property”—is a type of tale upon which civilizations have been won or lost. That Franklin actually met with the men who broke the tyranny of the suppression of Leibniz’s manuscripts, a tyranny run personally, for fifty years, by the Hanoverian Kings George I, II, and III of Great Britain, is a story that needs to be told. For, were a people to discover that they actually had a legitimate father, and an actual mission for human civilization, then, instead of acting like bastards, they might come to know happiness in the fulfillment of their world-historic mission.
