Towards a Developmental Understanding of Happiness Alexandra Jugureanu, Jason Hughes and Kahryn Hughes Abstract

Utopias: building happier worlds
You are now in the midst of a conflict which involves the deepest and dearest interest of every individual of the human race; and upon its result depends the misery or happiness of the present and future generations. It is a contest between those who believe, that it is for their individual interest and happiness that man should continue to be kept in ignorance, and be governed, as heretofore, by force and fraud; and those who are convinced, that for his happiness, he should be henceforward governed by truth and justice only. (Owen 1842: part one, xi)
In the utopian address by the social reformer Robert Owen to his King, William IV, and to the politicians of the day, the relationship between state and citizen was transformed from one where the state provides for all citizens, to all citizens shaping the perfect state, thus changing the ‘greatest happiness principle’ into a:
Rational System… purposely formed to promote the well-being and happiness of every man, woman, and child, of every clime and colour [that would] by degrees amalgamate the human race into one cordially-united intelligent family, with one language, one interest, and one object, namely, the permanent happiness of all. (Owen 1842, part seven: 64).
Owen, as with many social commentators throughout history, considered that society was morally decayed and corrupt. Furthermore, he drew these observations at an historical juncture comprising enormous opportunity through the growth of ‘empire’, and what he considered to be the great need for self-conscious, well-organised political change. His demand for utopia combines several different conceptions of happiness. Principal amongst these are both the self-serving happiness of those who would fight for its attainment, and the ‘greatest happiness’ for those for whom it would be achieved. Citizens, then, were becoming understood to be not merely at liberty to pursue happiness but as the architects and engineers of ‘its’ design and achievement. Utopian socialists such as Owen gained popularity on account of ‘their ability to give poignant voice at an early stage of the capitalist development to the ravages and uncertainties of change’ (McMahon 2006: 379). However, paradoxically, it was precisely these uncertainties that fuelled a critique of happiness, and the belief that these greater, growing opportunities presented in the name of happiness were ultimately processes turning workers into greater slaves than they had ever been.
To this day, this inherent paradox – that in recognising happiness, we recognise ‘its’ profound absence, perhaps impossibility – persists in much Western thought. To the degree that we might accurately draw broad generalisations about the discipline, sociology has typically shared such ambivalence with regard to happiness. On the one hand, particularly after Comte and arguably Marx, a good deal of the intellectual impetus behind the growth of sociology as a discipline was based upon variants of the notion that it had the potential to assist in securing ‘greater happiness for the greater number’ through providing some means of understanding and, thereby, perhaps serving as the basis for the elimination of social injustice, poverty, alienation, inequality, subjugation, warfare, and the various ‘ills’ of ‘modern life’. That self-same impetus has arguably also served as a basis for sociology to treat the concept of ‘happiness’ and the related field of ‘happiness studies’ with abject suspicion, if not outright dismissal – precisely because of its (sociology’s) critical pre-occupation with the social conditions that make ‘the happiness of many’ unlikely, perhaps an impossible ‘utopian’ ideal (for a fuller discussion of this paradox, see Kilminster 2013). Again, somewhat paradoxically, this has left assumptions about what ‘happiness’ ‘is’ or ‘entails’ largely unexplored (Bartram 2012).
Thus the concern for happiness increasingly came to be mobilised as an ideological motif, an ideal standard against which the progress of society might be measured. In this way, references to overall levels of happiness – or the absence thereof – came to be employed as a kind of barometer for social and political criticism, and ultimately became invoked as part of a more general critique of utilitarian principles. Significantly, towards the end of the nineteenth century, in a context of workers’ protests against dropping salaries, appalling working conditions and the rising cost of food, Thomas Carlyle claimed that the ‘greatest happiness principle’ held by utilitarian philosophers – namely the good and happiness of the majority of the members of any state, should be the great standard by which everything relating to that state must finally be determined – was at an end:
Every pitifulest whipster that walks within a skin has his head filled with the notion that he is, shall be, or by all human and divine laws ought to be ‘happy.’ His wishes, the pitifulest whipster’s, are to be fulfilled for him; his days, the pitifulest whipster’s, are to flow on in ever-gentle current of enjoyment, impossible even for the gods. The prophets preach to us, Thou shalt be happy; thou shalt love pleasant things, and find them. The people clamour, Why have we not found pleasant things? (Carlyle 1843: Past and Present, Book 3, Chapter 4: ‘Happy’)
Happiness, Carlyle argued, was seen as attainable only through satisfying the interests of each person. However, within their respective fields, politicians framed their arguments around competing interests of groups; whereas for each individual person, ‘interests’ were intimately bound up with the conditions of their own lives. Driven by ‘Mammon worship’, the interests of the wealthy were triumphing over the interests of the poor, serving merely to underscore and exacerbate their poverty. Thus, perhaps unsurprisingly, Carlyle suggested that the drive towards, and meanings of, happiness cannot be shared across society. Rather than the happiness principle, Carlyle proposed the ‘greatest nobleness principle,’ namely one built around what he considered to be the core morality of Christianity which would thus have universal applicability built into its very character. In this opus, Carlyle repeatedly argued for the nobleness of work, but against the accumulation of wealth. Indeed, he suggested that even those who had wealth, or were considered wealthy, were, so to speak, ‘labouring under an illusion’: wealth does not lie in the ownership or possession of fortune, but in the possession of morality, dignity and nobility. Through the pursuit of Mammon, Carlyle argued, society had become laissez-faire, led by an:
idle landowning aristocracy… a working aristocracy submerged in Mammonism, a gang of industrial buccaneers and pirates. A Parliament elected by bribery, a philosophy of simply looking on, of doing nothing, of laissez-faire, a worn out, crumbling religion, a total disappearance of all general human interest, a universal despair of trust and humanity, and in consequence a universal isolation of men in their own ‘brute individuality’; (Carlyle 1843: Past and Present, Book 3, Chapter 13: ‘Democracy’).
Thus, for Carlyle, the industrial age, the ‘age of machines’ was characterised by delusions of wealth, interest, and happiness in which the ‘freedom’ proposed by utilitarian utopians was unachievable unless we turned to what he considered an ‘unclassed aristocracy’ (Chartism 1839) and a spiritual rebirth of mutually orientated individual and society (Sartor Resartus 1832).
Thus to summarise, ‘happiness’ came to be a notion that was mobilised increasingly as a political principle: an existential condition and precept. Happiness as a term increasingly invoked debates concerning the ‘conditions’ under which any particular individual can be happy. To this end, we might draw a parallel between the term happiness (and the emergent field of happiness studies) and the term ‘human’ (and the related intellectual field of ‘humanism’). Particularly in the wake of a post-modernist ‘decentring’, perhaps even rejection, of the ‘human’ in the ‘human sciences’, sociologists have come increasingly to distance themselves with any single or simple engagement with ‘the human’, and have become more critically reflexive concerning the ‘humanistic’ basis of some branches of the discipline. As Plummer (2002) observes, part of this critical discomfort stems from the Western liberal emancipatory motif effectively ‘baked in’ to humanism which, like modern conceptions of happiness, was a concept born of the Enlightenment. Post-modernist, and in particular, post-colonial critiques have served to demonstrate how the discourse of humanism enshrines a range of sensibilities that have long been mobilised in the service of Western triumphalism, colonial domination, and ultimately genocide. As Aimé Césaire has commented:
They (colonisers) talk to me about progress, about achievements, diseases cured, improved standards of living. I am talking about societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out (Césaire 1972: 23–24 in Plummer 2002: 297).
Just as Carlyle observed, long before any such debates arose within sociology, that one person’s happiness is another’s misery, so we might draw a parallel with humanism: ‘your humanism is my brutalisation’. These parallels between happiness and humanism then, might again help to explain the concomitant sociological neglect of, and unease with, ‘happiness’ as a concept and an analytical approach, and may in this respect point to some possible ways in which ‘happiness’ might be ‘rehabilitated’ to serve a more explicit conceptual role in sociological analysis.
The cheerful robot: happiness, ‘the state’ and ‘internal states’

As we have suggested above, a key development from Enlightenment and utopian thinking involved the principle of, or the pursuit of, happiness becoming subsumed within a more general new wave of writing on social justice, equality, and reform. Perhaps most notably, in Marx’s work happiness was imagined as a mode of being that was effectively denied by the species-distancing and dehumanisation characteristic of the capitalist labour process. In a manner similar to Bentham, Owen, and Carlyle, Marx situated work, or as he conceived it, labour, as the greatest means through which people could achieve happiness but, paradoxically, Marx also conceived it as the sphere in which, under capitalism, humans are most alienated from finding personal fulfilment and worth. Even in his very early work, Marx described how ‘worth can be assured only by a profession in which we are not servile tools, but in which we act independently in our own sphere’ (1835). In this early Marx, we also see the germination of his thinking around how, if we have chosen our position in life, our happiness will belong to the many. As he expressed it: ‘History calls those men the greatest who have ennobled themselves by working for the common good; experience acclaims as happiest the man who has made the greatest number of people happy’ (Marx 1835). And while in this extract he goes on to use the example of Christ, Marx elsewhere considered that:

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo (Marx 1844).
There are three key ideas converging here which can be seen also to find expression in later, and contemporary, conceptions of the value and purpose of happiness for society more generally. They characterise contemporary understandings of, and preoccupations with, happiness. First, Marx suggests that, for those endeavouring to make others happy, success will be rewarded with happiness; second, that happiness can be achieved through the right sort of work, one to which people are ‘naturally’ suited, and more importantly, work that belongs to them; and finally, that organising society so that people can own their own labour and thereby achieve happiness is universally advantageous. Thus, a flourishing society is predicated on the happiness of its members. Profoundly important here, for the sociological study of happiness, is the coupling of internal states – happiness – with actions, and in turn social conditions. In simple terms, so it follows, the happier people are, the more likely they are working to the benefit of others, and the more successful, perhaps stable, society will be.
Moreover, unlike utilitarian philosophers, Marx departed radically from the view that happiness and virtue were, for all intents and purposes, identical. Within Marx’s analysis, happiness for some groups in society would typically accompany a complete absence of virtue; and conversely, acts of virtue – such as by those who would seek to overthrow an oppressive social order – did not necessarily produce happiness, at least not in the short-term. For Marx, happiness without true freedom, without true personal expression, and without liberation from alienation was not acceptable, nor, in the strictest sense, even possible (Kain 1993: 203). Thus, within capitalist society illusory happiness was indeed possible, but this was not authentic, it was part of a ‘vale of tears’ that prevented authentic forms of genuine happiness – those consistent with ‘species being’ – from being realised.
Marx’s vivid conceptual imagery has to this day had an enduring impact upon much sociological thought. Cognate ideas – among them Simmel’s critique of socio-technical materialism in his essay on The Metropolis and Mental Life, Fromm’s conception of the automaton, and Riesman’s notion of the ‘other-directed’ personality – all, in different ways, expressed disquiet about the spectre of a dystopian form of happiness, one that might indeed come to prevail with the ascendancy of industrial capitalism and modernity. Nowhere is this better summarised than by C. Wright Mills in a passage entitled ‘On reason and freedom’ in The Sociological Imagination:
But we must now raise the question in an ultimate form: Among contemporary men will there come to prevail, or even to flourish, what may be called The Cheerful Robot? We know of course that man can be turned into a robot... But can he be made to become a happy a cheerful and willing robot? Can he be happy in this condition, and what are the qualities and the meanings of such happiness? (Mills 1961: 171).
In other words, sociology – and again, we are obviously making this claim by invoking a high degree of generality – has at its very core a radical scepticism that happiness, particularly within the social conditions that prevail in industrial capitalist societies, is likely to be illusory. More recent expressions of this concern involve, for example, the related idea that happiness and virtue have become ephemeral, elusive, fluid and transient (see, for example, Bauman 2000, 2003, 2005; Sennett 2000).
Discussion and conclusions

Thus far we have discussed the ascendancy of contemporary understandings of happiness since the Enlightenment, first as a state of being, and then increasingly as a state of society. We have centrally explored these shifts in conjunction with a consideration of broader sets of social developments, notably processes of ‘civilisation’, state formation, and the ascendancy of industrial capitalism. Finally, as a means of developing an overall conclusion to this paper, we now turn to consider a third key approach providing for understandings of happiness, particularly in relation to contemporary happiness industries, where happiness has come to be seen increasingly as a being state. Where philosophical and sociological understandings of happiness serve, respectively, to exemplify the first of these two ways of thinking about happiness, the defining disciplinary framework for the third is psychology.

We can trace the development of contemporary psychological understandings of happiness within a more general epistemic shift which has been extensively considered by Michel Foucault, namely through the growing pre-eminence of medical knowledge. In The Birth of the Clinic (2003, [1963]) and in The Order of Things (2002 [1966]) Foucault documents the emergence of a distinct form of consciousness in Western Europe, a different mode of self-understanding, which Foucault describes as part and parcel of an epistemological rupture consequent upon a decisive shift in the structure of knowledge. Specifically, the clinical science of medicine came to exist as part of a wider structure of organising knowledge that allowed the articulation of medicine as a discipline, making possible conditions that define ‘the domain of its experience and the structure of its rationality’ (2003: xv). New forms of knowledge built out of epistemological developments from the Enlightenment, reconceiving of ‘the individual’ which accrued diverse attention from newly emerging scientific disciplines asking an array of different questions about this ‘individual’, numbering among them questions about this triadic relationship between society, happiness, and actions/behaviour, and the implied threat these contained for social stability. 
Across his work, Foucault explores the emergence of particular self-relationships born of the modern ‘sciences of man’ wherein ‘the individual’ is ‘opened up’ to the language of rationality, becoming the focus of epistemologically ascendant ways of seeing that were simultaneously ways of saying and, ultimately (in Care of the Self) ways of doing. In this epistemic break from what he described as ‘classical’ modes of thought, Foucault argued that in such emerging sciences, particularly in medicine, the individual (e.g. the patient) becomes not the mode of knowledge, but the world of objects to be known. Foucault argued for an understanding of medical science as producing a proliferation of new technologies of self-reflection and management tending towards greater self-regulation. While Foucault himself rejected the idea of a psychoanalysis of history, his work nevertheless lends itself to an understanding of how psychoanalysis itself could be counted as part of the broader swathe of such self-regulatory technologies. Psychoanalysis has, as one of its fundamental pursuits, the goal of self-knowledge. It is ancestor to a colossal panoply of hybrid therapeutic approaches seeking to address questions directly related to happiness, or the lack thereof. Through the expert manipulation of therapeutic narratives, the goal of these technologies is precisely to make people happier so that they are able to situate themselves more effectively within their social contexts. 
Happiness has thus emerged as a function of human existence, an expectation which, if thwarted, needs to be addressed through expert intervention. Indeed, we might understand the development of the happiness studies ‘movement’ – to the extent that we might adequately refer to it as such – itself as intimately related to the rise of a particular kind of self-relationship, and the notion that happiness is the mark of self-mastery: in Foucauldian terms, of governmentality – a skill to be cultivated and perfected. ‘[S]wallow a pill, get happy; do yoga, find bliss; hire a life coach, regain your self-esteem’ (Schoch, 2006: 1).
The ascendancy of happiness as a technology of the self, then, marks a relatively recent stage in the long-term development of understandings of happiness, but in that context, one that has its origins in a series of antecedent developments. In our brief overview, we have documented a series of processes in which happiness as a concept, an idea, an ideal, and most recently, as an ‘industry’ have emerged and transformed. To state it boldly, understandings have shifted dramatically away from the notion that happiness is something ‘ascribed’ and towards something that is ‘achieved’. From at one time being understood as a consequence of what happened to a person – the consequence of luck, fortune, fate, and so forth – increasingly happiness is understood as something within human control. From an ‘external’ ‘force’, to an ‘internal’ ‘state’. This shift towards the understanding of happiness as something amenable to human control was, we have argued, intimately related to much broader sociogenetic shifts which fostered the conditions for a structuring of emotional lives marked by greater reflexivity, restraint, and more openness to individual nuance. Drawing upon the work of Elias, we have tentatively explored the dynamic interplay between growing social structural complexity and shifting demands upon the psyche – social constraints towards self-restraints – which we suggest, in turn, have informed long-term developments in understandings of happiness.
We have argued that a decisive shift of direction, in this respect, was marked at first by the ascendancy of Protestant ideas of predestination and justification, particularly as these found expression in a capitalist work ethic, chiefly since these involved a move towards the individualisation of happiness. Such ideas, we have suggested, found later expression in the notion of happiness as self-fulfilment and, somewhat paradoxically, paved the way for more secular understandings of happiness in body as well as ‘soul’: as residing equally in earthly joys and pleasures as spiritual destination. In tandem with such processes, and as a development from them, we have documented the rise of notions of happiness in relation to models of citizenship, where the pursuit of happiness increasingly came to be understood as an individual right and a responsibility for the state. In this way, understandings of happiness became intimately bound up with notions of social justice, inequality, and reform, undergirding a paradox that has maintained an enduring significance in much of Western thought: that in understanding and pursuing happiness as a utopian ideal, we become acutely aware of its absence, and perhaps its impossibility, ‘for the greater number’.
Nowhere has this paradoxical ambivalence towards happiness become more apparent than in the discipline of sociology. With a few notable exceptions (see, in particular, Veenhoven and Bartram; also, with a growing membership, the British Sociological Association’s Happiness Study Group), sociologists have tended to neglect, perhaps even dismiss, happiness as a legitimate object for social analysis. And yet, we have argued, much of the momentum behind the development of sociology as a discipline, and arguably much of its critical impetus to this day, has been informed by a concern with unhappiness, discontent, and the uncertain possibility of ‘genuine’ happiness for particular groups, perhaps humanity as a whole. We have already speculated on why this is so, noting the predominance of understandings of happiness as illusory, and more recently, elusory. However, in offering an account of the sociogenesis of understandings of happiness, our aim has also been to consider the implications of a shift from a preoccupation with debates concerning the classification of ‘happiness’ and towards a concern with the development of understandings of happiness – including those in which the issue of classification has come to the fore – for debates within the sociology of happiness. To this end, we offer a few further, tentative reflections.
Commonly, in sociology (as well as in positive psychology and behavioural economics), definitions of happiness characteristically focus upon the purported mental, emotional, or behavioural processes that are understood to lead to happiness. Following from such ‘criteria’, Veenhoven (2006) categorises four types of definitions that see happiness as life-satisfaction: affective, cognitive, attitudinal, and mixed definitions. When depicted as an affective phenomenon, happiness is an emotion and is understood as an overall evaluation of both pleasant and unpleasant experiences, or how the sum of these experiences balances out (Wessman & Ricks 1966; Fordyce 1972; Bentham 1789; Kahneman 2000). As a cognitive phenomenon, happiness is the result of a deliberate evaluation process according to one’s chosen criteria (Veenhoven 2006); the smaller the distance between one’s aspirations and one’s reality, the greater the level of perceived happiness (Schmitz 1930; Annas 2004; McDowell & Newell 1987). In the third category of definitions, happiness is often depicted as a positive attitude towards one’s life. Finally, mixed definitions can integrate affect, cognition or attitude into the same understanding. For example, Ed Diener (1997) combines attitude with affect in his definition of subjective wellbeing; which, in this case, means being satisfied with your own life while feeling good.
Among the most influential definitions within sociology, in the sense that it is commonly used as a guidance in creating sociological surveys to measure levels of happiness, is that developed by Ruut Veenhoven in 1984, as, ‘the degree to which an individual judges the overall quality of his life-as-a-whole favourably’ (1984: 22–24). Thus defined, Veenhoven operationalises happiness as predominantly an attitudinal state. According to this definition, when people globally assess their overall level of happiness (satisfaction with one’s life-as-a-whole), they do so by appealing to two distinct sources of information, mainly affect and cognition. Seen this way, happiness has two sub-levels or components; the first is the hedonic level of affect, which is the sum or the balance of both pleasant and unpleasant experiences; and the second one is contentment, which stems from cognitive comparison (the perceived realisation of wants and needs).
What these definitions of happiness share, then, is the persistent conceptual image of happiness as essentially, an, or an aspect of, individual ‘feeling’ and/or cognition. As Bartram (2012: 645) succinctly summarises it, ‘Happiness is the affective component of subjective well-being, while ‘‘life satisfaction’’ is the cognitive component, the evaluations we make about how well our lives are going’. What is striking, given our account of the sociogenesis of happiness, is how peculiarly ‘modern’ such definitions are. That is to say, such definitions rely on a view of happiness as residing ‘within’ ‘the individual’, and are intimately related to historically specific designations in which happiness has become inextricably tied to aspects of a ‘stratified self’. Elias has referred to this manner of conceptual and definitional imagery as homo clausus; literally meaning ‘closed person’ (see, for example, Elias 2012: 522–526). Elias’s argues that the predominance of this conception of humans in much contemporary social scientific writing and conceptual architecture is based in a much broader set of social processes. These ‘civilising processes’, which we have touched upon in earlier sections of this paper, underpin the spread of a particular form of self-experience – one of ‘me in here’ and ‘society out there’ – which is in fact an existentially-derived cognition based upon psychogentically instilled affect restraints accompanying shifting social dynamics (Elias 2012: 523). Elias advances a relational sociology based upon an image of homines aperti – open, interdependent pluralities of humans – as a means of overcoming this dominant conception, which, he suggests, in turn underpins such dichotomies as the individual–society, structure–agency, mind–body, culture–nature, and so forth that are commonly encountered in much social scientific thinking. We shall leave the question of what a ‘relational sociology’ of ‘happiness’ might comprise to subsequent analyses. However, for the moment, it is worth noting that recent work in the sociology of emotions has begun to embrace the radically relational conceptualisation of emotions advanced by Elias, amongst others (see, in particular, Burkitt 2014), and has come to challenge the idea that happiness is one of several ‘basic’ emotions that, like fundamental human essences, reside in ‘us all’. The very notion, then, that happiness is a common emotion – and at that, one that can meaningfully be said to pervade all cultures in all historical periods – which ‘in itself’ can ‘flourish’, in this context or that – is now increasingly coming to be challenged.
Ultimately, if we jettison some aspects of these peculiarly modern formulations, we might reclaim ‘happiness’ as a properly sociological concern through its conceptual rehabilitation via more relational formulations – as consisting of shifting human relationships, rather than simply ‘within’ these. Such an enterprise involves a more general shift that Mustafa Emirbayer (1997) has termed a ‘relational turn’, where the substantialist conception of ‘the’ individual, knowledgeable, affective human agent operating ‘within’ a ‘social context’ – the ostensible starting point for much current research within the field of happiness studies – is replaced with more fundamentally relational alternatives (see, for a fuller account of these issues Dunning and Hughes 2013). Indeed, it is precisely through developing alternative models of happiness in which the individualistic and psychologistic ‘hangovers’ of the term that stem directly from a specifically Western trajectory of sociogenesis, that we might allow for a reconciliation of happiness studies with some of the key branches of contemporary sociology.