Introduction
Happiness as the ultimate goal of human endeavour is a thread running through theology and philosophy from the ancient Greeks to modern times. Such a claim raises immediately a host of critical objections and problems relating to the idea of cultural relativism. Can the theme of happiness be continuous and how would we know that? One way to overcome this dilemma is to identify ‘regimes of happiness’ – that is, clusters of ideas, practices and institutions that in one way or another connect to broad ideas of human well-being, flourishing and satisfaction or Eudaimonia to use the word that dominates Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (Contreras-Vejar and Turner, 2018). Contemporary discussions of happiness almost invariably start with Aristotle (Nagel, 1972). However, the methodology here is to some extent borrowed from Michel Foucault to understand the ‘genealogy’ of happiness across different social and cultural formations. In the Western world one could identify an Aristotelian regime of happiness based on the idea of a sound polity and flourishing citizens. There is also a Christian regime of happiness around such figures as St. Augustine and within which there have been radical shifts most notably brought about by Luther and the Protestant Reformation. Regimes of happiness can overlap with each other and their borders are obviously fuzzy. Some regimes may last a long time in various forms. For example, Aristotle’s treatment of happiness is one of the most cited versions of happiness across the West. The idea of happiness is, however, not confined to the West. For example, the Vietnamese Constitution that was devised by Ho Chi Minh, an admirer of America society, crafted the 1945 Constitution with three key words as its primary values – Independence–freedom–happiness (or niem hanh phuc). The 2013 version of the Constitution in Article 3 says, ‘The state guarantees […] that people enjoy what is abundant and free for a happy life with conditions for all-round development.’
One further notion behind our discussion of ‘regimes of happiness’ is that in principle we can detect important shifts in regimes that are associated both with specific networks of individual thinkers, and with institutional changes in the location of intellectuals in these networks. In this chapter I am especially interested in the transitions in thinking about happiness from the late eighteenth century and through the nineteenth century.
The idea of happiness had been central to the growth of political economy in the first half of the nineteenth century, especially under the long-term influence of Adam Smith. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith, 1982) in 1759 and Wealth of Nations (Smith, 2003) in 1776 Smith had argued that the basic conditions for happiness in society were equality, liberty and justice. Although Smith has been interpreted often as recommending consumption as the basis of happiness in a free market economy, in fact he saw tranquillity as the real basis of individual happiness, and tranquillity depended on justice, beneficence and prudence. He dismissed the idea that accumulation of wealth was necessary for individual happiness (Busch, 2008). Smith paints a picture of a young man of modest means who struggles his whole life for material wealth, but in ‘the dregs of his life’ he will realize that ‘wealth and greatness are mere trinkets of frivolous utility’ (Smith, 1982: 181). More specifically, he argued that only in a flourishing and liberal society, where wages and population were both increasing, could the mass of society share in the advantages of economic growth. In these works Smith in fact set up a puzzle that was to exercise political economy through much of its early development in Malthus and Ricardo (Collini, Winch and Burrow, 1983).
For example, Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) in the First Essay on Population had questioned whether the growth of the wealth of the nation would necessarily translate into rising standards of living for wage earners. As investment is transferred from agriculture to manufacturing industries, the price of subsistence goods might rise above nominal wages. If this trend towards increasing cost of domestically produced subsistence goods was combined with population growth, the majority would not benefit from economic growth. Indeed as their standard of living declined, the mass could become politically radicalized and threaten the stability of the whole society. In short there was no guarantee that increasing wealth would result in increasing happiness. These debates especially between Malthus and Ricardo never came to a satisfactory conclusion and as a result political economy did not produce any conclusive recommendations to governments about how to manage growth, inequality and political unrest. It was the Utilitarians who believed that happiness could be measured and that the proper aim of government was to bring happiness to the majority.
Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) had developed a secular and quantitative notion of happiness in his theory of utility regarding the ‘felicific calculus’. The utilitarian principle embraced the idea of the greatest happiness of the greatest number as the basis of sound policy in the production of a good society. However, Bentham had to assume a minimal idea of happiness which could be measured in terms of its duration and intensity. He did not believe that different ends or forms of happiness were significant and famously declared that ‘pushpin is as good as poetry’ (Bentham, 2003: 94). For Bentham pleasures are calculable and all pleasures and pains can be given a numerical value in terms of length and intensity.
Utilitarianism came under considerable criticism including from its own followers. John Stuart Mill (1806–73) in his personal crisis of 1826–27 – which is recorded in his autobiography – came to realize that he was in fact not happy and that the simple assumptions of Bentham’s calculus were inadequate. After his crisis he came to declare ‘I, for the first time, gave its proper place, among the necessities of human well-being, to the internal culture of the individual […]. The cultivation of feelings became one of the cardinal points in my ethical and philosophical creed’ (Mill, 1971: 86). In On Liberty in 1859 he came to reject any simple quantitative notion of happiness, but he recognized in the essay in ‘Utilitarianism’ that ‘Questions about ends are, in other words, questions about what things are desirable. The utilitarian doctrine is that happiness is desirable, and the only thing desirable, as an end; all other things being only desirable as means to that end’ (Mill, 1910: 32). But the measurement of happiness and its definition remained unresolved. In fact ‘the sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable, is that people do actually desire it’ (Mill, 1910: 32). Despite the problems relating to its measurement, Mill concluded that liberty was a necessary condition for its enjoyment and this basic idea framed his discussion of ‘The Subjection of Women’ in 1869 – ‘while every restraint on the freedom of conduct of any of their human fellow creatures […] dries up pro tanto the principal fountain of human happiness, and leaves the species less rich, to an inappreciable degree, in all that makes life valuable to the individual human being’ (Mill, 1989: 217).
Mill unlike the other figures in his network took the status of women in society seriously in recognizing that their subjection was incompatible with human liberty, and it was thus personal autonomy that Mill saw as crucial to happiness. People had to be free to pursue their own life course without unnecessary external constraints or interference. He famously discovered personal happiness in 1851 in his eventual marriage to Harriet Taylor. In The Subjection of Women, he concluded, ‘If there is anything vitally important to the happiness of individuals, it is that they –should relish their habitual pursuits’ (Mill, 1989: 2016). While Mill’s view of liberty was obviously individualistic, he nevertheless had very definite views about the role of government in creating favourable conditions for happiness.
Was Mill then firmly committed to happiness? When Mill read the second volume of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America in 1840, he came to fear the impact of the masses on individual freedom of conscience and belief of individuals, and he argued that an extension of the franchise to an uneducated working class could only threaten the integrity of individual belief and the stability of society. Mass democracy without education would stifle social change. Although he was critical of Malthus’s bleak picture of poverty and population, he believed in progress, but in the Chapters on Socialism he noted that socialism cannot be considered as
the sole means of preventing the general degradation of the mass of mankind through the peculiar tendency of poverty to produce over-population. Society as at present constituted is not descending into that abyss, but gradually, though slowly, rising out of it, and this improvement is likely to be progressive if bad laws do not interfere with it. (Mill, 1989: 251)
While Malthus had pondered the paradoxical contradictions between general improvements in a nation’s wealth and the ongoing poverty of the majority, Mill was more concerned with the role of good government in promoting happiness. The happiness of individuals required a careful balance in which the autonomy of the individual is preserved in a society based on ‘good’ laws and responsible government. In short, while Mill had departed a long way from the philosophy of Bentham and James Mill, the utilitarian strain remained – happy individuals can only be sustained with laws and governments that minimize the obstructions to self-fulfilment. We have finally to conclude with Iain Hampsher-Monk (1992: 342) that ‘whilst happiness was still the criterion of moral action it could not, psychologically speaking, be the aim. Happiness was a consequence of pursuing some other ideal’.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, we can detect a distinctive movement away from the positivism and self-confidence that had characterized political economy and utilitarianism. Thus there was a shift in regimes of happiness between 1890 and 1930. In this discussion I follow H. Stuart Hughes (1959) who in his influential Consciousness and Society attempted to describe the ‘reorientation’ of social thought in Europe in these four decades. A variety of thinkers – Freud, Croce, Weber, Bergson, Durkheim, Sorel and Pareto – were ‘striving to comprehend the newly recognized disparity between external reality and the internal appreciation of that reality’ (Hughes, 1959: 16). In short they plumbed the gaps and tensions between an external social reality and their own consciousness of an internal reality. Hughes’s study of that reorientation was not in any specific sense about happiness, but he concluded, in a reference to Benedetto Croce, that this generation of intellectuals no longer believed, unlike the Greeks and Christians, in happiness as a future condition of humanity. In this intellectual network, happiness was understood in a secular or at least post-Christian framework.
Looking at Nietzsche, Max Weber, Sigmund Freud and Mill, one can argue that this cluster of men was particularly important in the transition to a new regime, but their immediate network can be extended to include other figures such as William James (1842–1910). Hughes (1959: 112) notes that James was perhaps the only American of his generation to have such widespread influence in Europe especially over Weber and Emile Durkheim. James was a psychologist whose pragmatism had a significant impact on Durkheim (1951) who did discuss happiness in his Suicide in 1897. James (1929) published The Varieties of Religious Experience on the basis of his Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh (1901–2). He was especially interested in conversion experiences but as a pragmatist, James did not offer any criticism of them. Instead he claimed that such experiences may have beneficial psychological consequences for the individual. Pragmatically, they can contribute to happiness. Thus conversion experiences for young people may help them resolve inner tensions and contradictions during their maturation.
James distinguished between the sick souls who experience their lives in terms of pain, suffering and misery, and ‘healthy souls’ who think that everything is right with the world. Ironically he felt greater sympathy for and interest in sick souls, and especially in the ‘twice-born’, namely those who have passed through the veil of despair arriving at a state of self-assurance. Melancholy was most acute in Protestantism where the sense of personal sin can be overwhelming. In his influential reading of James, Charles Taylor in Varieties of Religion Today (2002: 41) claims that this sense of melancholy is acute in modern societies, namely ‘Melancholy, modern style, in the form of a sense of perhaps ultimate meaninglessness, is the recognized modern threat’.
The notion of ‘sick souls’ and melancholy in these lectures on religion anticipated Weber’s analysis of the rational patterns of personal legitimation and we can read The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber, 2002) as a treatise on unhappiness – radical Calvinism made its adherents supremely unhappy by creating a deep uncertainty about their prospects of ultimate salvation. While they struggled for salvation through their life span, they could never be certain that it was guaranteed.
I start however with another figure outside this network, namely Charles Darwin (1809–82). In different ways Nietzsche, Weber and Freud were each responding to the Darwinian challenge. Our network of intellectuals, who represent a high water mark of European thought, were deeply challenged more by Darwinism than by Darwin. Social Darwinism had become the dominant ideological of the business elite by the 1880s and was influential over social sciences in Britain (Hofstadter, 1959). In the public domain, Darwinism had become associated with mindless determinism and mechanical evolutionary development. Thus the late nineteenth-century regime of happiness was challenged by the threat of Darwinian evolutionary thought. As a consequence this transition became focused on three issues. It meant that happiness was now a subject of secular scientific inquiry rather than simply of metaphysical speculation. The transition involved the idea that ultimately genuine happiness is not available to humans – or at least to the majority – who will suffer disability, deprivation and pain as their normal condition. The best that modern people can achieve is pleasure – a sensation they share with lower animals. So thirdly Darwinism raised the possibility that the pleasures of human beings – food, sex and offspring – are no different from other mammals.
One important characteristic of this change was that happiness came to be seen in elitist terms in which physical pleasure was typically of the mass of people (or ‘the herd’ in Nietzsche’s terminology). The noble man/virtuous person will aim higher. Ironically while happiness remained a major theme of Western thinking, key intellectuals were inclined to argue that unhappiness rather than happiness was the constant feature of human existence. Given pain, suffering and death, happiness did not, according to Hegel, appear on the pages of history.
Radical critics such as Marx and Engels and classical sociologists such as Durkheim were critical of the utilitarianism of Bentham and James Mill, because they assumed that modern society would not and could not deliver happiness to the greatest number in any simple evolving sequence. The brutality of industrial capitalism and squalid urban conditions would inflict hardship on the urban poor. As we have already noted, for Malthus the sexual drive, the shortage of arable land and the rising cost of basic necessities of life would result in population growth and further misery for the urban poor. Nietzsche was also critical of what he called ‘English Happiness’ which for him was shallow and artificial. The irony of history is that, partly through the revision of utilitarianism by J. S. Mill, utilitarianism can be seen as triumphant in the booming popularity of Happiness Studies, government ministers of happiness, global surveys of happiness and the creation of measures of gross domestic happiness. The regime of unhappiness ruled out mass happiness and measures of happiness can be much disputed, but interest in happiness will not go away. Perhaps the major continuity between the elitist regime of unhappiness and contemporary happiness studies is that they are both secular. The key ingredients of happiness according to Happiness Studies are health and wealth. While religion is seen to play some role in life satisfaction (e.g. in contributing to familial stability), it has only a minor role when compared to health, wealth, welfare, democracy and good governance.
Nietzsche and the Critique of Happiness
Happiness is not an idea or condition normally or easily associated with Nietzsche (Urstad, 2010). Biographical accounts of Nietzsche unsurprisingly concentrate on the unhappiness that characterized much of his personal life. In his gloss on Heine’s ‘Die Lorelei’, he said, ‘The fact is that I am so sad; the problem I don’t know what that means’ (Safranski, 2003: 20). Nietzsche suffered endlessly from migraine and stomach complaints. His mother sent homemade sausages to him in Milan to satisfy his basic needs.
Nietzsche rejected Socratic and Enlightenment traditions because he believed that the equation rationality = virtue = happiness was simply another illusion of philosophers. Nietzsche’s father died young and he was raised in a household of five women. He resented his mother and his romantic attachment to Cosima Wagner quickly came to an end. Nietzsche’s relationship to women was fraught with problems and women played little or no role in his philosophy. If we are looking for a Mill–Nietzsche connection, the results will be meagre. Kaufman (1950: 212), for example, comments, in a discussion of Kant and Mill, that ‘Nietzsche’s generic conception of morality is best understood in terms of a brief contrast with the rival utilitarian definition’. Nietzsche disparagingly regarded existing theories of general well-being as contributions to ‘English happiness’. In ‘Maxims and Arrows’ No 12 in Twilight of The Idols (2009), Nietzsche was critical of utilitarianism (Anomaly, 2005). He proclaimed ‘Mankind does not strive for happiness only the Englishman does.’ This judgement was probably unfair to Mill, who broke with the quantitative measurement of happiness that was associated with Bentham’s felicific calculus and his father’s rigid views about education. In addition, Mill’s personal encounter with unhappiness was echoed in the lives of both Nietzsche and Weber. It is widely accepted that Weber was profoundly influenced by Nietzsche not only in his sociology of religion but in his personal life.
How can man rise above their primitive ape-like origins to become a higher being and hence achieve genuine happiness? A confrontation with Darwinism was part of that ‘central’ task that confronted the late nineteenth-century intellectuals, who believed that modern ‘man’ could not be genuinely happy. In Nietzsche’s terminology, the mass of humanity are merely a herd incapable of lifting themselves above the iron law of animal evolution. With the death of God and the industrialization of Europe, it requires superhuman effort to live a satisfying and creative life. The task facing the ubermensch is daunting. He must free himself from dependency on religion and convention. It is only through perpetual struggle and the will to power that the ubermensch lifts himself out of animal Darwinian evolution.
True existence was achieved when people stopped treating their own lives as yet another accident, ‘What does your conscience say? – “You shall become who you are”’ (FW270; cf335 and quoted in Kaufmann: 159). Conventional morality is a product of the weak through the process of ressentiment. Controversially, Nietzsche thought that religious values were the product of ressentiment among the disprivileged against the privileged which we see in the parable of the rich man on his camel overwhelmed by goods that cannot pass through the eye of a needle. A new set of values had to rise above mere ressentiment. At one stage Nietzsche saw artistic creativity as the essential route out of the morass of Darwinian positivism and evolutionary theory. Hence his early infatuation with Richard Wagner and the total work of art is easily understood. However, as we know, Nietzsche eventually became disillusioned by the bourgeois character of Bayreuth and came to believe that Wagnerian culture was just another substitute for the Christian religion whose days were numbered (Newman, 1946).
Great souls are not dependent on a higher power and thus the death of the ‘old god’ is traumatic but not tragic, and it filled Nietzsche with ‘happiness, relief, exhilaration, encouragement, dawn’ (‘We fearless ones’, The Gay Science Book Five). He contemptuously claimed that modern mass society is based on an impoverished notion of happiness – the greatest happiness of the greatest number would simply transform men into fattened pigs.
While Darrin McMahon (2006: 425) claims that happiness was central to Nietzsche’s view of life, very few Nietzsche scholars have identified happiness as a defining aspect of his philosophy. This absence is odd given the centrality of happiness in the Gay Science of 1882. The translation of Die Frohliche Wissenschaft as The Gay Science perhaps does not capture the message of joyful playfulness in Nietzsche’s analysis of modernity and its crisis. While the theme of happiness in Nietzsche has not been central to the secondary literature, some commentators have noticed the theme of joy that is connected to the eternal return theme in Nietzsche’s late work, for example, in Henri Birault (1977) on ‘Beatitude in Nietzsche’. Kaufmann (1974: 122) claims that ‘Nietzsche’s basic problem is whether a new sanction can be found in this world for our values; whether a new goal can be found that will give an aim to human life; and to what is happiness?’ Despite Nietzsche’s overt criticisms of Christianity, the challenge of Jesus to the State was welcomed because it appeared to him as the power that intimidates man into conformity. Jesus’s challenge to his disciples was originally a call to man not to conform, to leave father and mother, and to perfect himself (Kaufman, 1974: 164).
Kaufman (1974:278) commenting on Zarathustra (Zarathustra: iv 1), ‘I do not covet […] pleasure’:
If happiness is defined as the state of being man desires; if joy is defined as the conscious aspect of this state; and if pleasure is defined as a sensation marked by the absence of pain and discomfort; then Nietzsche’s position can be summarized briefly: happiness is the fusion of power and joy – and joy contains not only ingredients of pleasure but also a component of pain. (Kaufman, 1974: 278)
For many who seek to interpret Nietzsche, the joy he experienced around the discovery of the idea of the eternal return was truly transformative at the end of his life.
Weber and the Melancholy Imagination
We might reasonably describe sociology as a melancholy science (Lepennies, 1992). Sociologists are characteristically interested in failed marriage resulting in divorce, collapsing institutions or why revolutionary sects become conservative denominations, unsuccessful social movements, failed revolutions and negative unintended consequences. The sociological vocabulary is dominated by negative concepts – alienation, anomie, authoritarianism, bureaucratization, rationalization, social pathology and suicide. These institutional failures produce human unhappiness. Where does this vocabulary come from? One obvious explanation is the development of what Lepennies referred to as the ‘Bourgeois Melancholy’ of eighteenth-century Germany. As we have noted, Nietzsche was scathing about those who devoted their lives to the search for pleasure – which he distinguished from joy and happiness. The critical figure for classical sociology is clearly Weber whose famous lectures on ‘politics as vocation’ and ‘science as vocation’ provided a profoundly pessimistic view of modern times. Weber’s authority in the creation of modern sociology is the notion of value neutrality which has contributed to this reluctance of sociologists to engage in debates about and research on happiness. In the conclusion to Politics as a Vocation which was eventually published in 1919, he famously described the future: ‘Not summer’s bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness’ (Weber, 2009: 128). For Weber in his ‘sociology of fate’, the ‘unintended consequences’ of history were always negative; for him there were no good unintended consequences (Turner, 1981). Weber was explicit in rejecting happiness as a goal of public policy. In Happiness: A Short History, McMahon (2006: 359) quotes a passage from Weber’s article on ‘Die deutschen Landarbeiter’ (volume 4 of the Gesamtausgabe on the agricultural worker question): ‘I believe we must renounce human happiness (Glucksgefuhl) as the goal of social legislation […] We want to cultivate and support what appears to us valuable in man: his personal responsibility, his deep drive towards higher things, towards the spiritual and moral values of mankind.’ Weber’s personal ethic might be described in terms of endurance. The man of science was to endure reality rather than to seek happiness within it. Men who are neither heroes nor leaders must ‘arm themselves with that steadfastness of heart which can brave even the crumbling of all hopes’ (Weber, 2009: 128). In short (and probably following Nietzsche) Weber rejected the idea of pleasure.
Freud and Ordinary Unhappiness
In the twentieth century the growth of psycho-therapy was also indicative of a new regime of unhappiness. Sigmund Freud died in 1939 and represents the end point of this network. Freud worked for most of his life in Vienna treating women from the Jewish bourgeoisie. In dealing with their repression and neurotic guilt, Freud developed a technique (free association and transference) as much as a theory (the unconscious and the Oedipus Complex). Freud’s theories, as he reluctantly admitted, were connected to Nietzsche’s philosophy. For example, Nietzsche’s concept was that many ethical ideas in Judaism and Christianity were a product of resentment against superior or dominant groups.
His ‘talking therapy’ can be understood as an individual technique that was not aimed at achieving the happiness of his patients. Rather, he offered them a therapy that would allow a subject to confront ‘bad memories’, thereby releasing the individual to live more adequate lives in the present. In fact, Freud released his patients from their psychological misery to have an existence coping with normal unhappiness. Perhaps it was Philip Rieff (1959) who best summarized the legacy of Freud in Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, when he observed that Freud had urged his patients to make the best of their normally unhappy existence.
Through his early case studies into hysteria with Joseph Breuer, Freud came to see human mental behaviour in terms of the repression of bad memories, but unfortunately for his patients this burial of bad experiences was never entirely successful. The repressed memories became unwanted symptoms that medicalized the mental condition. The use of free association was intended to release the harmful memories to allow the patient to manage these tensions more effectively. In his more mature work, Freud interpreted human behaviour in terms of the endless struggle between id, ego and superego. Throughout his work, humans are never in a state of calmness or tranquillity, and the best outcomes in terms of coping behaviour are never understood in terms of happiness.
Although Hughes places Freud in the cohort of intellectuals whose work was influential in the decades of European reorientation, Freud was essentially a medical man whose main contacts were through personal associations with other physicians, most of whom were Jewish. While Freud was a hard-working physician, his views on society and sexuality were often regarded as subversive, and subversive from a Jewish and this anti-Christian perspective (Yerushalmi, 1993). Given widespread anti-Semitism in Vienna, Freud was excluded from the University. In 1923 he underwent radical surgery which reduced his capacity for work and which also left him in constant pain. In the 1920s and 1930s he turned to more speculative work on religion and society – The Future of an Illusion and Moses and Monotheism – which were also subversive and thus characteristic of the generation that came to public attention between 1890 and 1930. At the same time, he had abandoned the original idea of psychoanalysis as a medical science, which again for Hughes was characteristic of the general movement away from empiricism and positivism. Thus by mid-century scientists ‘were shrugging their shoulders at Freud’s meta-historical speculations. Between rational method and literary meaning a chasm had opened’ (Hughes, 1959: 431).
But there were serious criticisms of Freud’s methods that they were expensive and that his subjects required more or less continuous treatment. Even worse, his methods rarely relieved his patients from their unhappiness. We can suggest consequently that after Freud there was a ‘democratization of happiness’ through popular therapies such as yoga, self-help strategies and by the adoption of psychedelic and recreational drugs such as cannabis and Prozac that, if they do not deliver lasting happiness, offered relief from the cycle of depression. Post-war affluence created a social environment in which happiness was increasingly associated with pleasure. In the 1960s various movements for self-actualization emerged in the United States that combined meditation, experimentation with drugs, spirituality and Eastern religions. In California ‘sex, drugs, Gestalt, and encounter groups made Esalen a magnet for affluent, educated seekers in their twenties and thirties, who would soon be joined by the first wave of baby boomers’ (Goldman, 2012). The classical connection between the good of the polis and the flourishing of citizens of Aristotle’s political and ethical theories appears to have been broken by the modern emphasis on individualism and hedonistic consumption.
Key Characteristics
Let me then in summary identify more clearly some elements of the late nineteenth-century regime of unhappiness. Firstly it was radically secular. Nietzsche, for example, believed that Darwin’s account of nature and selection made any presuppositions about divine activity in shaping the world completely redundant – leading to his famous slogan about the death of God and his frustration that humanity had failed to grasp the earth-shattering consequences of that insight. Freud treated religion as a comforting myth that might help damaged people better manage their afflictions and give them some solace in this world. While Nietzsche, Weber and Freud were secular thinkers promoting a secular vision of happiness, they recognized the historical importance and the force of religion in human societies. However, in a secular society according to these thinkers, people would and should have to struggle to find well-being without the comfort of religion.
Secondly, these writers were deeply critical of modern society and feared the negative consequences of industrialization, which would undermine the traditional foundations of happiness such as family and community. There was no comfortable relationship between modernity and individual happiness. Nietzsche was very clear about this problem:
What I attack is that economic optimism which behaves as though, with the increasing expenditure of all, the welfare of all would also necessarily increase. To me the opposite seems to be the case; the sum total of the expenditure of all amounts to a total loss; man is diminished – indeed one no longer knows what purpose this immense process has served in the first place, A purpose? A new purpose – that is what mankind needs. (Nietzsche WP 886; Stern Nietzsche 1978: 89)
Weber almost certainly followed Nietzsche in regarding modern culture and society as nihilistic and as ultimately devoid of meaning. He famously said that science could help us cross a road, but give no convincing answer as to why we should do so.
Thirdly these men, but especially Nietzsche and Weber, struggled to find happiness, health, well-being and sexual satisfaction in their own lives. Nietzsche and Weber had notoriously unhappy and problematic relationships with women. Nietzsche had the famous mental breakdown in Turin in 1889 and for the next 12 years was incapable of coherent thought. Weber also had a nervous breakdown in 1898 associated with conflicts with his father and the death of his father – he only began to recover at the time of his visit to America in 1904. Both Nietzsche and Weber abandoned their professorships and worked to some extent as private scholars. In summary, Nietzsche, Weber and Freud were deeply sceptical about the possibility of human happiness and were critical of theories of individual happiness.
Happiness Studies
Despite this transition in the meaning of happiness from the Greeks to the moderns, the study of happiness is increasingly a feature of contemporary psychology, economics and development studies. Happiness Studies first emerged in the 1970s. Interestingly, the idea of measuring happiness by a government came in 1972 from the remote Buddhist nation of Bhutan when King Jigme Singye Wanchuk announced that Gross National Happiness would replace Gross National Product as a meaningful measure of successful progress. His index had four major streams or ‘pillars’ – good governance and democratization, stable and equitable socioeconomic development, environmental protection and preservation of culture. To some extent this policy has been successful in Bhutan as measured by life expectancy which rose from 43 years in 1982 to 66 years in this century (Bok, 2010: 2). Many countries now have happiness measures and government ministers for happiness. The Journal of Happiness Studies first appeared in 2000 and Psychology of Well-Being in 2011. An online search for ‘well-being’ and ‘happiness’ produced almost two million entries, and ‘well-being’ is the second most popular key concept in the Science Citation Index between 1998 and 2005 (Alexandrova, 2012: 678). It also remains an enduring topic of philosophy (Cavell, 1981).
There is a whole chapter dedicated to happiness in Stephen Pinker’s Enlightenment Now (2018). Pinker is obviously not an authority on gerontology but his views are popular and influential. Like Malthus, he is primarily interested in the comparative puzzles in the relationships between wealth and happiness. Unlike Malthus, Pinker thinks there is a positive and consistent relationship between increasing general wealth and happiness. The basic argument is simple enough. Modern societies are generally speaking getting richer, and rich people and rich societies are happier than poor people and poor societies. He argues that in global terms happiness has increased: ‘we know that richer people within a country are happier, that richer countries are happier, and that people get happier as their countries get richer (which means that people get happier over time)’ (Pinker, 2018: 270–71). He believes that the facts speak for themselves and thus he draws on multiple sources to show that people are living longer and with aging they become more happy. There is a considerable factual basis to support the conclusion that, despite recent fluctuations in well-being, people live longer and with better health.
As with Mill, perhaps good government is as important as a good economy. There is a clear connection between democratic responsible government, individual freedoms and happiness. Almost all countries in the world that have high levels of overall satisfaction have been successful democracies for more than 80 years (Bok, 2010: 23). In general terms, these societies also have functional welfare states. It is perhaps not surprising that the highest ranked societies are Denmark, Finland, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Sweden. Three countries with a history of Westminster-style democracy and sound economies, namely Australia (often referred to as ‘The Lucky Country’), Canada and New Zealand, are also highly ranked (Veenhoven, 1984). In world happiness surveys such as the United Nations World Happiness Survey (Helliwel, Layard and Sachs, 2015), ‘optimal societies’ enjoy stability over time, high productivity of goods and services, realization of national ideals and demonstrable levels of ‘liveability’ as measured by health and life satisfaction. Global happiness data show that societies that have been ravaged by war, civil unrest and natural disasters (e.g. Ethiopia, Iraq, Myanmar and Tanzania) have generally low happiness or life satisfaction (Helliwell, Layard and Sachs, 2015).
We can argue that these findings suggest that a key aspect of government policy in liberal democracies since the 1970s has been to pay attention to the happiness of its citizens. A key measure of the success of social policy is happiness or the life satisfaction of its citizens. These values and policy objectives have been negated or compromised by growing levels of income inequality in the developed world and by the related rise of populism arising from the alienation of the so-called ‘left behind’. Populism and other forms of political extremism have been a serious challenge to Western democracies. The condition of the working class in the democracies has been compromised by the fall-out from the financial crisis of 2008–11. For example, various economic surveys have shown how life expectancy, mental health and general well-being have declined in the American working class (Case and Deaton, 2015). The threat of populism to conventional wisdom about the proper function of democracies may well alert elites to restoring the utilitarian principle of the greatest happiness of the greatest number.
Happiness Studies have established a well-grounded consensus that health and wealth are critical to an individual’s sense of well-being. Interestingly, they also note diminishing returns in addition to wealth after a certain threshold – in the United States around $75,000 per annum. In other words, after the first million dollars the addition of another million does not significantly contribute to any further life-satisfaction. Perhaps health is more elastic in these terms – one can never get enough of health. Improvements in public health were especially important towards the end of the nineteenth century as a result of improvements in the water supply, sanitation, the food supply and hospital care. There were also radical developments in vaccination, diet and child care. Consequently, infant mortality rates fell dramatically and with the availability of contraception, birth rates also fell. As women were having fewer children, there was a greater emphasis on the ‘quality’ of children rather than their ‘quantity’. Whereas in medieval society, plagues and famine had ravaged the population, improvements in general health for the mass (or Nietzsche’s ‘herd’) had increased the general well-being and happiness of the population, or in utilitarian terms, government interventions through better drainage, sanitation and urban planning had enhanced the happiness of the greatest number.
Conclusion
In conclusion we believe that in the contemporary period there is instability in the regimes of happiness. There is competition between: a negative view that interprets life as essentially unsatisfactory; a hedonistic interpretation of happiness as pleasure; numerous guides for self-help, weight control, sexual fulfilment, success at work and the promise of longevity through modern medical technology; and social policy paradigms that take gross domestic happiness as a key measure of government success or failure.
There remains, especially among an intellectual elite, a view of unhappiness following Nietzsche that modern happiness, especially when associated with individual consumption and hedonism, is trivial and superficial. Nietzsche’s objections to modernity remain relevant as a critique of this modern paradigm of happiness as hedonistic consumption – insofar as he drew a distinction between joy, pleasure and happiness. For Nietzsche, happiness is not a conglomeration of pleasures but a way of life in which strong-souls can flourish. In his understanding of hedonism as weakness, Nietzsche offers a critique of modern approaches to happiness simply as pleasure. At the same time, Freudian talk therapy and psycho-analysis in the 1960s became a major feature of American alternative culture and continues to play a major role in popular culture. In California in particular, communities such as Esalen found happiness in combining Eastern spirituality, Freudian psycho-analysis and meditation. The American hippie counter-culture was carried along in the explosion of popular music, youth cultures and alternative lifestyles. Then as we have indicated, there developed a strong policy interest in measures of gross domestic happiness, which we have described as utilitarianism (as modified by Mill).
Whereas in previous historical periods we detected greater stability over time – such as in the Greek and Christian regimes – modern happiness regimes appear to be fragmented and unstable as various social groups compete over establishing alternative visions of the good life. Perhaps what they share in common is a greater emphasis on individualism, self-autonomy and enjoyment – as the road if not to happiness then at least to self-fulfilment. They also share a basically secular view of happiness and unhappiness, in that failure, sickness, psychological problems or accident are not the work of the gods or fate. Failure and mishap are simply contingent events for which atonement is no longer relevant. But there is no, and perhaps never can be, definitive answer to ‘what is happiness?’
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