Robert Zaretsky, a professor of history at the Honors College, University of Houston, and John T. Scott, a professor of political science at the University of California, Davis, are the authors of “The Philosopher’s Quarrel: Rousseau, Hume and the Limits of Human Understanding.”

The 300th birthday of Jean-Jacques Rousseau falls next week, and it is only proper to wish him a happy one. He had a few choice words to offer on the theme of happiness — the sort associated not with fleeting social pleasures but with “nothing external to ourselves, nothing if not ourselves and our own existence.”

In 2010, two Harvard psychologists, Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert, performed a study that used an iPhone app to ask volunteers, at random moments, what they were doing and how happy they were. They discovered that we spend most of our lives not thinking about what we are doing at that moment, whether it’s shopping, eating or, in particular, working. No matter how enjoyable or unenjoyable the activity we’re engaged in is, this gift for distraction comes at a psychic cost: “a wandering mind,” they wrote in the journal Science, “is an unhappy mind.”

No one seemed to remark on the incongruity of scientists’ using a technology that, in studying their subjects’ inability to focus, interrupted their focus.

The paradox would not have been lost on Rousseau, who believed we were happy only in our original state of nature — before the advent of technology and society....

Gerard N. Magliocca is the Samuel R. Rosen Professor at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law.

...Chief Justice Marshall famously found a way out of tough spot in 1803 by reading the Judiciary Act of 1789 in a peculiar way to deny William Marbury a remedy.  Following the law would have brought the Court into a terrible (and destructive) clash with President Jefferson. He lectured the President about not giving Marbury his commission, but did nothing to help....

Chief Justice Roberts did something similar today. Following the law and reading the Affordable Care Act in the most natural way (failing to buy health insurance leads to a penalty, not a tax) would have forced him to strike down the individual mandate.  So he didn't do that.  Why? Because a 5-4 straight-line party decision invalidating part or all of the Act would have have brought the Court into a terrible clash with President Obama.  The Chief Justice gave a pretty speech about federalism, but ultimately he did nothing about it.  (Maybe I'm underestimating the importance of the Medicaid issue--I'm not sure.)...

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Julian Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of "Jimmy Carter" and the new book "Governing America."

Princeton, New Jersey (CNN) -- Late last week, the campaigns of President Obama and Mitt Romney released Web videos highlighting the mistakes their rivals have made on the campaign trail.

Obama's statement that "the private sector is doing fine" was the highlight for a Romney video, while one of the president's videos featured a remark by the former Massachusetts governor that the nation does not need more firefighters, teachers or police officers. We can expect the gaffe wars to continue, since they are a staple of presidential campaigns.

Even though such statements are far from a fair indication of a candidate's record or stance on the issues, and often they are accurate statements taken out of context, they can be devastating to a campaign.

Some off-kilter comments are too slight to sink a candidacy, but when they play into preconceptions of a candidate, the remarks -- and even sometimes a gesture or sound -- can be potent....

Gil Troy, a professor of history at McGill University, is the editor, with Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Fred Israel, of “History of American Presidential Elections, 1789-2008,” fourth edition.

In running for re-election, Barack Obama commands the most powerful democratic platform in world history and the greatest backdrop, the White House. A seemingly casual announcement in a TV interview can trigger a political earthquake, as Obama did when he endorsed gay marriage. But the president’s magnificent residence can also be what Harry Truman called the Great White Jail. 

Presidents are handcuffed by their power. Presidential statements can crash financial markets or start wars. The dignity of the presidency also inhibits, even in today’s brutal political environment. Obama’s campaign ad attacking Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital made some Democrats squirm as Republicans labeled the president “another gut-punching politician from Washington.”

The ambivalence about presidents politicking goes back to the nation’s founding. George Washington liked “going on tour,” getting “huzzahed” north and south – but, reflecting his contemporaries’ distaste for democracy, he avoided explicit political talk. When the less popular President Martin Van Buren toured before his 1840 re-election campaign, his fellow Democrats feted him. Nevertheless, the new partisanship polarizing American politics had Whig Party critics denouncing Van Buren’s activities as “undignified” and “insulting,” while mocking “His Majesty, King Martin the First.”...

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author of “Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory” (Yale University Press).

Did the Supreme Court embrace an “elite vision” on Monday when it struck down state laws mandating life imprisonment for juvenile murderers?

That’s what Justice Samuel Alito said, in an angry dissent from the bench. By invalidating such laws, Mr. Alito fumed, the court’s 5-4 majority assumed that it knew better than the 28 state legislatures that have authorized mandatory life sentences without the possibility of parole for killers younger than 18.

But the court’s majority really does know better. And there’s a simple reason for that: It relied on science – in particular, the science of adolescent brain development....

Science is itself a kind of elitism, insofar as it privileges rigorous experimentation and testing over cant, guesswork, and propaganda. And we need more of it, not less....

Fouad Ajami is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and the author most recently of The Syrian Rebellion, just published by Hoover Press.

With the triumph of the Muslim Brotherhood's candidate in the presidential election, Egyptian history can be said to have closed a circle. This "Second Republic" marks a return to that tumultuous time, six decades ago, when the military officers overthrew the monarchy in 1952 and announced the birth of a new order.

Two forces inherited the wreckage of the Egyptian monarchy: the officer corps and the Muslim Brotherhood. For a fleeting moment, the Brothers thought the men in uniform were their allies. They dubbed the military seizure "the blessed movement." But the coup makers had a different script in mind. The Muslim Brotherhood would come in for decades of repression.

Mohammed Morsi, the president-elect set to be handed the reins of power on June 30, has done time in prison and is now poised to be his country's first civilian president. Ever since its founding in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood yearned for power as it ran afoul of the authoritarian state. Its adherents dreamt of and agitated for an Islamic state even as its sly leaders understood the limitations imposed by the poverty of Egypt, its need for the kindness of strangers, reliance on foreign aid and the revenues of tourism...

Elliott Young teaches history at Lewis & Clark College

When President Obama announced that he would stop enforcing deportation proceedings for a select class of young immigrants, pro-immigration advocates cheered. While this is welcome news to the about one million immigrants whom the executive order affects, it is also a Faustian bargain that serves to authorize the continued harassment and deportation of ten million other immigrants who do not qualify for special treatment.      

This is not the first time that a president has sought through executive decree to soften the harshness of immigration restrictions. In 1905, in the wake of a boycott on American goods started by Chinese merchants in Shanghai, President Theodore Roosevelt also ordered immigration authorities to relax their enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Roosevelt directed immigration officers not to subject merchants and students, who were exempt from Chinese exclusion, to humiliating interrogations and invasive inspections that required measuring of their body parts. Furthermore, he ordered officers not to arrest Chinese in the interior of the country who were suspected of coming in illegally.

As President Roosevelt put it, “We cannot afford either from the standpoint of our national interests or from the standpoint of civilization to be put in the attitude of failing to do complete justice and to show courtesy and consideration to Chinese who are entitled to come here.” The result of the 1905 boycott and Roosevelt’s directive was a victory for Chinese merchants and students who managed to gain some relief from harsh immigration legislation.

But in bargaining for their own rights, Chinese merchants and students solidified the idea that Chinese laborers were not “entitled” to come to the United States, and thereby strengthened the Chinese exclusion laws that remained in place until 1943. In the same way, Obama’s embrace of certain young immigrants bolsters the idea that there are undeserving illegal immigrants who should be deported.
 
Obama has deported about 1.7 million immigrants in his time in office, more than under any other president in American history. More than half of these have no criminal record, or have only minor misdemeanors. As one million young immigrants gain a temporary reprieve, another ten million immigrants face the most extreme deportation regime in history.

In his speech, Obama declared that these immigrants are “Americans in their hearts [and] in their minds.” They are “dreamers.” What about other immigrants? The president emphasized his increased deportation of “criminals” to make it clear that there are deserving “American” immigrants who should be able to remain in the U.S., and the undeserving who should be deported.

In the very same speech that hailed the young immigrants as “Americans” and “dreamers,” President Obama said that this was not a “path to citizenship.” The message is clear. Come work and study in this country, but don’t expect full rights. In states like Georgia, these dreamers are not even able to attend public universities. Until all immigrants are given a chance -- not only to work, study and join the military, but to become citizens -- the American dream will remain just that.

Stephanie Coontz teaches history and family studies at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and co-chairs the Council on Contemporary Families. Her most recent book is "A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s."

(CNN) -- The July/August cover story of the Atlantic, "Why Women Still Can't Have It All" by Anne-Marie Slaughter, has ignited a firestorm....

Slaughter's article contains a powerful critique of the insanely rigid workplace culture that produces higher levels of career-family conflict among Americans -- among men and women -- than among any of our Western European counterparts, without measurably increasing our productivity or gross national product. And she makes sensible suggestions about how to reorganize workplaces and individual career paths to lessen that conflict....

The irony is that most jobs, even top professional positions, do not actually require as much absenteeism from family as employers often impose. University of Texas sociologist Jennifer Glass, a senior fellow at the Council on Contemporary Families, points out that corporate and government professionals in the United States put in much longer workweeks than their counterparts in Europe, where limits on work hours are common, workplace flexibility is more widespread, and workers are entitled to far more vacation days per year than most Americans -- and actually use them....

Maurice Jackson is an associate professor of history and African-American studies at Georgetown University and a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars. He is working on a book about African-Americans and Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C., the marble city begun by slave labor in the 1790s, is again in the news. As charges of campaign violations swirl around Mayor Vincent Gray, and the chairman of the city council and another member resign after admitting financial misdeeds, it is often forgotten that Washington once stood as a "city on a hill" to the nation's African-Americans. Just as the Puritan John Winthrop held the biblical image up as the ideal for Boston, so the District has long served as a beacon to blacks seeking freedom—from slavery, Jim Crow, and racism.

But for generations of blacks born and raised in D.C. and others who migrated to the city, the hill has become steeper to climb and easier to fall off. Corruption, crime, unemployment, the lack of affordable housing, and similar urban woes are just part of the problem. How we deal with them is another matter. Will Washington lose its identity in the process?

In 1957, Washington became the first major city in the country with a majority-black population. At the peak of this demographic trend, in 1970, 71 percent of Washingtonians were black, but 2010 census figures show that from 2000 to 2010, the non-Hispanic white population in the District grew by more than 50,000, to 209,000, while the black population declined by more than 39,000, to a little more than 300,000—below 50 percent. Washington is not alone; during the past decade, Chicago lost more than 180,000 black residents, and other cities long known for their black populations, like Cleveland, Oakland, and St. Louis, suffered similar losses....