Happiness has historically enjoyed many different definitions, perspectives, and transformations. We provisionally understand “happiness” in terms of “regime of happiness” that is as a social configuration in which different discourses articulate a vision of human fulfillment. These social configurations or regimes change over time and in different contexts. Furthermore any given society may have different competing views about what constitutes happiness. Happiness is therefore semantically equivocal and inevitably contested. To simplify our entry, we will focus exclusively on Western traditions.
Any discussion of happiness has to engage with Aristotle's ideas. His ethical writings pioneered the debate, and have been essential in creating the philosophical as well as the politico‐religious vocabulary of Western civilizations. For Aristotle, happiness is a state between being independent and simultaneously being dependent on others for pleasure and companionship. Aristotle did not write much about the related notion of hope. However, he realized that it was connected with a lapse of time: memory captures the past, hope the future. Thus in Greek philosophy,
eudaimonia
or human flourishing was recognized in Aristotle's ethics. In Christianity, it was developed through the notion of
beatitude
.
After Immanuel Kant, the normative realm was reduced to
moralität
, the domain of obligations.
Sittlichkeit
, ethical life, became deontological and the questions regarding the
telos
of human life was eradicated from serious intellectual discussions. Social facticity came to be devoid of moral life. However, happiness was important in British utilitarianism. Jeremy Bentham constructed a measure of happiness. J. S. Mill, rejecting this simple quantitative approach, recognized that happiness is the end of all human activity and the principle underpinning liberty. Another source of the modern notion of happiness was the pragmatic social psychology of William James who influenced both Max Weber and Émile Durkheim. However, Weber was reluctant to see happiness as a suitable topic for sociology and in the famous Munich lectures at the end of his life painted a picture of life as miserable and lacking in meaning. For both Durkheim and Weber, secularization raised questions as to whether happiness could be found in modern society.
While the analysis of happiness has largely dropped out of modern social and political theory, it is widely used to measure how successful societies are in providing for the well‐being of their citizens in terms of health, wealth, and happiness. So‐called happiness studies have become a topic of scientific inquiry and of interest to governments and policymakers in judging the success of governments in delivering “well‐being” to their citizens.
