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

Towards a Developmental Understanding of Happiness

Alexandra Jugureanu, Jason Hughes and Kahryn Hughes

Abstract

In this paper we centrally explore the ‘sociogenesis’ of the concept of happiness: the social processes by which it came to be a term appropriated by different practitioner communities – from policy makers to academics, from a burgeoning self-help industry to advocates of positive psychology. Our core focus is upon shifting historical understandings of the term and how these relate to more general social processes. Our aim in this paper is not to present a definitive history of ideas about happiness, but rather something of the overall direction of changes in dominant approaches to, and understandings of, happiness particularly within what we might broadly term ‘the human sciences’. Ultimately, we offer a series of tentative reflections upon the implications of a developmental approach to happiness as both a concept and a phenomenon for sociological analyses of this increasingly popular area of concern.

Keywords: happiness, sociogenesis, sociology of happiness, positivity, history of happiness, selfhood
Introduction

The study of happiness within the social sciences, despite considerable expansion over the last two decades, is still an ‘immature science’ (to the extent that we might accurately call it this)¹ in the sense of Thomas Kuhn’s use of the term. In his 1962 classic, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn suggests that immature science represents the first of three phases in the formation of a scientific discipline. Happiness studies are considered to be ‘immature’ in as much as they lack any definite consensus over key terminology and frames of reference, and have not yet acquired a unifying ‘paradigm’ (Bauman 2008; Nussbaum and Sen 1993; Diener and Suh 1997; Carr 2004). Accordingly, we can understand ‘happiness studies’ as situated within the pre-paradigmatic phase of Kuhn’s typology. This lack of widespread consensus over key concepts and orientation to the field is in part the consequence of the multi- as well as inter-disciplinary character of the study of happiness – that it can be approached from multiple perspectives (i.e. psychology, economics, philosophy, political sciences, sociology or other social sciences). Characteristically, even though these different disciplines do not represent correspondingly competing schools of thought, they nonetheless each propose distinctive theories, methodologies and research processes, leaving therefore little room for crossovers, collective development and common enterprise. Within individual disciplines (e.g. within the sociological study of happiness), however, consensus is gradually becoming built, thus permitting the authors of bodies of literature to agree on certain commonalities in approach to the topic (see, for example, Veenhoven 2007; Veenhoven 2009; Bartram 2012; Abbott and Wallace 2012).

Among the many difficulties encountered when studying happiness sociologically, perhaps the most significant pertains to the near impossibility of defining the object of study: namely the concept of happiness. Happiness definitions are manifold, often revealing more about the epistemic and social dynamics of their inception than the character of that to which they pertain. Indeed, debates about how one might (or might not) classify the concept have arguably come to dominate the field (see, for example, Seligman 2002, Seligman 2011, and Csikszentmihalyi 1990 relating to positive psychology; Diener et al. 1995, Lu & Gilmour 2004 and Suh & Oishi 2004 in cross-cultural psychology; Veenhoven 2006 in sociology; and Thin 2005 for anthropological definitions). Typically, when producing definitional accounts of happiness, there is a tendency for authors discursively to self-position in relation to a range of dominant discourses. It is in so doing that a shared sense of what happiness ‘is’ can be developed – whether ‘it’ is seen, for instance, as a volatile emotion like euphoria, a rational construct like self-esteem, or some finely articulated amalgam of the two. However, herein resides a kind of axiomatic error: the search for an eternal, unchanging, all-encompassing definition of happiness involves the epistemological fallacy that happiness ‘has’ a kind of essence that can be rendered conceptually. Even the most carefully crafted definitions have a tendency to capture everything and therefore nothing about happiness, and, perhaps more importantly, to direct our attention away from how various definitions, concepts, and approaches to happiness came to develop as they did.
Accordingly, our approach here departs from a preoccupation with ‘classification’ and involves, instead, more of a focus on tracing the sociogenesis (Elias 2012) – the social, epistemic/cultural emergence – of ‘happiness’ both as a normative concept and as a purported technical ‘scientific’ construct. In this respect, we have adopted aspects of Norbert Elias’s ‘figurational’ approach to social analysis (see Elias 2006; 2012). Briefly, this approach involves apprehending and approaching social reality in a fundamentally processual and relational manner, where substantialism is avoided, and the primary engagement is with how the stuff of the social world comes to be (for a fuller discussion of such aspects of Elias’s approach, see Dunning and Hughes 2013; Hughes and Goodwin 2014). Such an orientation underpins our conscious avoidance of the definitional quest fully to capture ‘happiness’, and indeed our rejection of the reification of happiness as a ‘thing’ that awaits full and proper ‘discovery’. As we have applied this approach here, our investigation has involved a diachronic analysis of shifting historical understandings of happiness as they are expressed through the thought and writing of key historical figures and in various cultural artefacts. Sociogenesis thus refers simultaneously to the development of particular understandings, distinctions, ways of seeing, saying, doing and to the concomitant development of the particular social conditions under which these take form. Thus, when we examine the ideas and writings of, for example, key philosophers of happiness our aim is to present these as part and parcel of broader social developments, rather than as in and of themselves the sole motor of epistemic and cultural change.
Below we explore at a broad-brush level a number of key shifts in historical understandings of happiness together with a range of interrelated social developments. We tentatively offer a brief overview of some of the principal trajectories of development involved in the formation of contemporary associations with the term, but by no means wish to present ours as a definitive or final account. We do so through examining some of (what are now considered to be) the seminal statements, key formulations, and other kinds of exemplar concerning the concept of happiness by individuals positioned at discrete historical and cultural junctures. As Darrin McMahon, a prominent historian of happiness, astutely observes, ‘there are infinite histories of happiness to be written’ – ‘of early-modern women and late-modern aristocrats, nineteenth-century bourgeois and twentieth-century workers, conservatives and radicals, consumers and crusaders, immigrants and natives, gentiles and Jews’ (McMahon 2006: xiii). McMahon is, in our view, right to highlight the folly of attempting to present the history of happiness, and the necessity of recognising the panoply of competing histories involved in the development of the term. However, in addition to our recognition of the competing versions and variants of such accounts of the concept, we are also sensitive to what has been ‘unsaid’ as well as said: of absences and discontinuities in particular discursive trajectories. For example, Sara Ahmed in her polemical Promise of Happiness (2010) adopts a ‘sceptical disbelief in happiness as a technique for living well’ (2010: 2), and accordingly focuses upon variant hermeneutic associations with the term, instead of supposedly concrete, fixed and unequivocal ‘meanings’. Such a position involves from the outset a recognition of the highly contested character of the term, and of the politics involved in what is included as well as excluded in accounts of the representative history of happiness. For instance, Ahmed challenges the received intellectual history of the term – the history of happiness as an idea – by considering who or what is stylistically erased. Her analysis focuses upon how, for example, women are portrayed or do not even appear in McMahon’s version of history. Drawing on Hegel’s premise in the Philosophy of History, Ahmed suggests that periods of happiness are ‘the empty pages of history’ – ‘times when the antithesis is missing’. She implies that, in essence, all human history is contingent on unhappiness and negation. Conversely, unhappiness continues to be the ‘unthought in much philosophical literature, as well as in happiness studies’ (2010: 17). Thus, Ahmed aims to develop a history of unhappiness, drawing on, among others, feminist, black and queer critiques, associating the desirability of happiness with marginalised groups from antiquity to modernity.
Below we will review a series of key historical statements on happiness, focusing principally on a period from the Enlightenment to late modernity. This period, we shall suggest, is specifically formative in the development of contemporary Western understandings of happiness. Our focus here is predominantly upon the trajectory of understandings in the US and, to a lesser extent, the UK. Elsewhere (see Jugureanu and Hughes 2010) we have explored other historical cases as part of an analysis of the cultural contingency of lay understandings of happiness. The examples given below are drawn principally from the historical accounts of happiness provided, in particular, in the work of McMahon (2006), and also Ahmed (2010) and Stearns (2012), among other material from a range of primary and secondary sources. Our central focus upon McMahon – including his selection of historical data – is expressly intended to form part of our attempt to re-cast ‘the history of happiness as an idea’ as more a question of the social development of a pervasive discourse, the most recent phase of which has involved the rise of the understanding and application of ‘happiness’ as a technical concept that has been ‘operationalised’ in relation to a range of social scientific fields and disciplines. In this sense, the work of McMahon, amongst others, is both the subject and object of our analysis: effectively both informing upon the development of understandings of happiness while simultaneously illustrating how the concept has been cast, constructed, and traced in the ‘recent histories’ of the idea, which themselves feed into discourses surrounding the origins of happiness studies as an ‘emergent science’ today. After exploring and reflecting upon a series of examples drawn from the histories of happiness that have come to dominate the field in recent years, we consider the implications of a focus on the development of competing models of happiness over and above an attempt to arrive at a definitive, all-embracing definition of happiness, for some of the current sociological debates pertaining to this field.
Happiness as fate and luck
Thundering Zeus, lad, hath the ends of all things there be, and doeth with them what he will. There’s no mind in us men, but we live each day as it cometh like grazing cattle, knowing no whit how God shall end it. (Elegy and Iambus Volume II [Edmonds 1931]).
The citation above is a translation of the opening lines of a treatise by the Greek poet Semonides, circa 664–1 B.C. The sentiment expressed in these lines captures something of the fatalism of attitudes towards happiness in Greece around this period: that happiness was invariably a matter of chance, and required the blessing of gods in order for one to attain it. Ostensibly luck and fate are opposites – the former implies randomness and chance, whereas the latter involves some sense of pre-determined order and destiny – but as the statement from Semonides illustrates, the two concepts were closely related. The gods – in this case Zeus – were understood to know how the ‘ends of things’ will be, and according to their will, to determine every person’s fate ‘and doeth with them what he will’. In this, the ‘tragic’ tradition, luck was understood to pertain to how the gods determine what role we humans might play (whether that be predominantly fortunate or not) in the unfolding of our destinies. However, simultaneously, the fates were seen to be not of our making and already known and decided: Zeus ‘hath the ends of all things there be’. Whether by luck or by fate, then, the course of human events was understood to be determined not by human decision, but by what happens to us (McMahon 2006: 10). As McMahon observes, to this day, in almost all Indo-European languages, the terms for happiness are closely related to those pertaining to luck and fate (2006: 10). The etymological roots of the English word are in the Old Norse happ meaning chance, fortune, happenings, and so forth. Happ also forms the basis of other words like ‘happenstance’, ‘haphazard’, ‘hapless’, and ‘perhaps’. Similarly, the German Glück still has the dual meaning of both happiness and luck; and the French bonheur is literally a compound of bon, good, with the old French heur meaning fortune or luck.
The intertwining of fate, luck and fortune is thus a motif that has an enduring consistency in historical accounts of happiness. Numerous further examples could be provided. Among them are the dramatic lyrics of the thirteenth century Goliardic poem ‘O Fortuna’, famously put to music in Carl Orff’s cantata, Carmina Burana:
O Fortune, like the moon you are changeable, ever waxing and waning;
 hateful life first oppresses and then soothes as fancy takes it; poverty and power –
it melts them like ice. Fate – monstrous and empty, you whirling wheel. You are malevolent. Well-being is vain and always fades to nothing, shadowed and veiled you plague me too; now through the game I bring my bare back to your villainy. Fate is against me in health and virtue, driven on and weighted down, always enslaved. So at this hour without delay pluck the vibrating strings; since Fate strikes down the strong man, everyone weep with me! I bemoan the wounds of Fortune with weeping eyes, for the gifts she made me she perversely takes away. (Krutulis 2010: 403–404)
In the poem, fate is personified as fickle, malevolent and vindictive. By contrast to the extract from Semonides, here happiness is understood to be something even more fleeting, more precarious. ‘Fortuna’ is understood to ensure that happiness and wellbeing are transitory and ultimately subject to the vagaries and whims of a deity. In this sense, fate is understood to eclipse luck since, irrespective of position – both ‘poverty’ and ‘power’ can be ‘melted like ice’.
Such examples serve to demonstrate how historically peculiar and distinct are contemporary Western understandings of happiness. For a much longer period, happiness was understood to be something outside of human control. It was not something that one could ‘make’ or ‘expect’, or indeed, have the right to ‘demand’. To be happy very largely meant to be lucky, or at least, to have had the benefit of fate’s generosity. Happiness, then, was understood to reside outside the span of human control, was experienced as arbitrary, chaotic, and lacking in any kind of structure. This was fundamentally related to a more general set of social conditions which, as Elias (2012) centrally argues, typically, but by no means exclusively, fostered emotional lives that were experienced as more spontaneous, volatile, less predictable and stable, less open to individual nuance and steering than those that are characteristic of their present-day counterparts. It is beyond the scope of this paper to provide a full exposition of Elias’s arguments concerning what he refers to as ‘civilising processes’, however, for present purposes it is important to note that Elias advances these arguments concerning the long-term development of structuring of emotional lives as part of a more general thesis regarding the dynamic interplay between sociogenesis and psychogenesis – long-term social developments and psychological development. Briefly, Elias’s central thesis is that as Western societies have become increasingly structurally complex – as the, to use his language, chains of interdependence between people have lengthened, and social networks (figurations) have become denser – so there has mounted a net increase in the social pressure for individuals to restrain, modify, shape, and otherwise attune their affects and behaviour to take account of that of the others who surround them, and indeed the many more whom they may never meet. To summarise: long-term social developments involved in ‘civilising processes’, Elias proposes, come to be imprinted upon the human psyche; that is to say, they foster the conditions which favour a distinctive moulding of human psychic apparatus that we now consider to be characteristic of ‘the modern self’. Elias neatly summarises this tendency as the increasing social restraint towards self-restraint. Such processes are complex, multi-directional, non-linear, sometimes contradictory, and wide-ranging. In relation to happiness, certain elements of a former stock of associations are historically enduring, whereas others shift in a particular ‘direction’, following the more general ‘curve’ that involves the ascendancy of distinctively ‘modern’ social and emotional selves. Thus, as we have already suggested, while certain fatalistic associations – notably, the happ of happiness – persist to this day, the term began to take on a subtly yet significantly different set of associations, particularly in the Enlightenment era and the period subsequent to this.
Happiness, virtue and self-fulfilment

It was not until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, what we might loosely call the ‘age of Enlightenment’, that prevailing understandings of happiness in the West began to change in important respects. A central shift is exemplified by the ascendancy of Protestant ideas about predestination, justification and moral worth: developments which, in turn, were grounded within a much broader set of social processes – their relation to which was the primary focus of Weber’s analysis. As Weber famously explored in his Protestant Ethic, through various iterations – principally Calvinist notions of predestination and Lutheran ideas about salvation – a dominant ‘ethic’ emerged during this period centring on the notion that people must seek to prove their moral worth through pursuing a life of virtue. Virtue might typically be exhibited through displaying proficiency in relation to a ‘calling’: a particular occupation, profession or vocation for which each person had been ‘predestined’. In this way, devotion to God could be demonstrated through a life of toil, temperance, a sense of duty, commitment, effort and obedience.

Weber’s analysis centrally considers the relationship between the rise of such beliefs and the ascendancy of capitalism. A key part of his argument is that such notions of ‘virtue’ find clearest expression in capitalist society in relation to an ethic that stresses the importance of making, acquiring and accumulating money – not as a means to enjoy pleasurable pursuits and the satisfaction of needs, but increasingly, as ends in themselves. In this way, worldly ‘happiness’ came to be understood as something superficial: something to be avoided, even shunned – perhaps the mark of someone who had ‘lost their way’ to true and lasting ‘fulfilment’ – in the favour of achieving ‘grace’ and ‘justification’. True happiness, then, was something to be achieved through a lifetime of personal endeavour and striving, through professional obligation, in the strict avoidance of all forms of spontaneous enjoyment, and ultimately, in the union with god. In a word, to be happy, one must be virtuous. Thus for Weber, the Protestant ethic of duty in a calling exemplifies a core aspect of a pervasive social ethic of capitalistic culture, the summun bonum of which – the accumulation of wealth – is, Weber writes:
completely devoid of any eudaemonistic, not to say hedonistic, admixture. It is thought of so purely as an end in itself, that from the point of view of the happiness of, or utility to, the single individual, it appears entirely transcendental and absolutely irrational. Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life. Economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs... If we … ask, why should ‘money be made out of men’, Benjamin Franklin himself, although he was a colourless deist, answers in his autobiography with a quotation from the Bible, which his strict Calvinistic father drummed into him again and again in his youth: ‘Seest thou a man diligent in his business? He shall stand before kings’ (Prov. xxii. 29). (Weber 1985 [1930]: 53)
According to Weber, in this way, the earning and accumulation of material wealth, so long as it is done within the law, is a distinctively capitalist ‘result and expression of virtue and proficiency in calling’ (1985: 54). For our purposes here, the key observation to be drawn is that in the Enlightenment era, happiness came to be understood as something that must be ‘achieved’; destiny needed to be ‘fulfilled’. Despite the fixity of fate – for according to Calvinist doctrines, fates cannot be changed – such ideas served to facilitate a shift towards the understanding that happiness resided in ‘self-fulfilment’: it was something that individuals must toil for, must pursue throughout their lives.
There are some important differences between the sociological analyses of Weber and Elias which, again, are beyond the scope of our discussion here. Nonetheless, a point of complementarity for present purposes at least is the documentation by both authors of growing social demands for the curbing of spontaneous impulses, pressures to resist the unrestrained sating of ‘animalic’ desires, the social pressure towards foresight: of looking towards future ends, and the related ascendancy of notions of social obligation, purpose and position. All in all, these developments marked an important step towards the idea that social and spiritual advantage – grace, favour, virtue – might be attained through ‘good selfhood’: self-fulfilment.
The pursuit of happiness

Towards the end of the eighteenth century the notion of the pursuit of happiness emerged as core to several processes involving state re-formation and enactment such as those subsequent to both the French (1787–99) and the American (1775–1783) revolutions; the uncoupling of divine ordination from state and religion, and changes in the orientation of religious doctrine itself; and most significantly, the growth of discourses of the ‘individual’. The emergence of American individualism and its relationship to the development of American ideas about freedom, nationhood and civilisation is complex, and in certain respects contradictory (see, for a detailed analysis, Mennell 2007). The relationship is famously explored by the French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville who describes the ascending tide of American individualism as typically expressed in a, ‘mature and calm feeling, which disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellow-creatures, and to draw apart with his family and friends; so that, after he has formed a little circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at large to itself’ ([1835–40] 1961: 118). For present purposes, we mention this ascendancy as it figures prominently in shifting understandings of happiness. Proclamations concerning the ‘sovereign individual’ during the US of this period can be understood, once more, to relate to more than simply changing ideas: more than solely the rise and fall of particular political ideologies. Rather, once again following Elias’s core thesis concerning processes of civilisation, their development is intimately related to a set of social processes which gradually come to foster the emotional conditions under which individuals come to experience themselves as 'selves' – as objects of their own reflection. This individualising self-relationship emerges in tandem with growing social pressure upon individuals to fine tune their affects and behaviours to increasingly complex social networks: to ‘work on the self’ (Elias 2012; see also Dunning and Hughes 2013).

In the American context, such individualisation found a distinctive form of articulation expressed as a kind of contract predicated upon a simultaneous separation and connection between ‘the individual’ and ‘the state’ – a relationship understood to be bridged through discrete endowments and rights. Perhaps most notably, in the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson stated that individuals should have the right to pursue happiness. In the same period, George Mason – Jefferson’s colleague from the Virginia Declaration of Rights – maintained that pursuing and obtaining happiness was as a ‘natural’ right endowed by god; resulting in the most famous, second, line of the Declaration of Independence, namely:
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.

(US National Archives 2013 [1776]).

At a similar historical juncture, Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, the French revolutionary leader declared in a speech to the National Convention during the height of the Jacobin revolution in France in 1794 that ‘Happiness is a new idea in Europe’ (cited in Marcus 1989: 350). In many and complex ways, it actually was a new idea underpinning, legitimising and, in that sense, shaping radically new processes of state formation. However, beyond the ideational level, common to these processes was the intertwining of political states and emotional states through two codes of actualisation. Firstly, the notion of a liberated, self-actualised state organised around the needs of its citizens. And, consequently, secondly, the state provision of the possibilities for self-actualisation and therein the liberation and happiness of its citizens.
Thus, with the growth of state ideologies conceiving of, and purposefully reframing, power relations between their members in ways which ostensibly sought to redress happiness, two core principles of happiness came to emerge. The first was that happiness is needs-based – a principle that persists in underpinning contemporary sociological work on happiness (Diener and Diener 2000). The second was the principle of freedom to pursue happiness and, in relation to the development of this idea, the notion that it is the responsibility of the state to allow for such a pursuit. These ideas pull even further away from how happiness was conceived in antiquity, elaborating broader, socially contingent dimensions. In effect, while happiness was still hermeneutically confined to individuals in both its experience and effects, ideas of the possibility and responsibility for happiness began to intertwine political state and individual in new and increasingly more complex sets of relations.
The growing currency of the idea that people should be free to achieve happiness both drew upon, and in part found expression within, concomitant philosophical developments. An exemplar in this respect is that of such as ‘the greatest happiness principle’ – whose ambassadors include such British Enlightenment philosophers as John Stuart Mill and, John Locke, and most centrally of all Jeremy Bentham. In a thesis entitled, ‘Introduction to morals and legislation’ (1789), Bentham developed the argument that the moral qualities of human actions are determined, not by a priori moral categories – i.e. that some behaviours are intrinsically ‘good’/ ‘virtuous’ or ‘bad’/ ‘evil’ – but by the consequences of such actions for aggregate levels of human happiness. Bentham’s oft-cited maxim thus stressed the importance of striving towards the ‘greatest happiness for the greatest number’. This principle, wrapped up as it was with a much more general set of shifts in dominant modes of understanding and belief, marked a further step away from understandings of happiness as pre-ordained and the result of divine attribution, and, in a number of important respects, fundamentally challenged the abstemious and ascetic puritanical overtones of the Protestant ethic.
As Stephen Mennell (2007: 46) observes, the emphasis on the ‘individual soul’ characteristic of Calvinist principles among New England settlers can be understood as an important pre-cursor to later forms of American individualism. In a similar way, we can observe the development of sentiments that at first partly stem from, and then in key respects run counter to, aspects of the social ethic analysed by Weber: a challenge to the notion that true happiness could not be found in the pleasures of this world, and the spread of the idea that morality – and the good life – were not determined by the word of God, but were and are ‘man-made’. Accordingly, ‘happiness’ came to be understood to be attainable both in the afterlife, and within the world of men. Indeed, as Locke expressed it, it was the ‘business of men’:
to be happy in this world, by the enjoyment of the things of nature subservient to life, health, ease, and pleasure, and by the comfortable hopes of another life when this is ended; and in the other world, by an accumulation of higher degrees of bliss in an everlasting security, we need no other knowledge for the attainment of those ends but of the history and observation of the effect and operation of natural bodies within our power, and of our duty in the management of our own actions, as far as they depend on our will, i.e. as far also as they are in our power. One of those is the proper enjoyment of our bodies, and the highest perfection of that, and the other of our souls; and to attain both of these we are fitted with faculties both of body and soul. (Locke in King 1884: 91)
Locke’s proclamation begs for the pursuit of happiness both in ‘body and soul’; both in worldly pleasures and in the afterlife. In this way, individuals came to be understood as being not simply responsible for their souls and their happiness in heaven, but for their happiness on earth, too. Contemporary with these developments, and in these particular locations, was the continued uncoupling of religion from ‘the state’, which Stearns (2012) considers integral to the timing of this happiness surge. The philosophical developments of Enlightenment thinkers occurred in the context of a shift in values underpinning a new, less strict, Christianity. This shift, while in many ways running directly counter to Calvinist doctrines, was not strictly antireligious as such; it was more that God was understood increasingly to be open to the idea of people being cheerful (2012: 106).
Through the philosophical developments of Enlightenment thinkers such as Locke and Bentham, the right to the pursuit of happiness became effectively a ‘double-edged sword’, gradually coming to transform happiness into a ‘right’, and, ultimately a responsibility. Thus, on the one hand, the individual seeking of happiness was understood to be perfectly legitimate, but on the other, not being or seeming happy was increasingly understood as a problem many wished to avoid (Stearns 2012). Indeed, in his highly (1961 [1835–40]) influential analysis of Democracy in America, Tocqueville argued that regardless of the times’ freedom and prosperity, underneath the pursuit of happiness lay a strange melancholy that appeared to haunt the American people. He observed that ‘no one could work harder at being happy than Americans do’ and still ‘a cloud habitually hung on their brow’ (1961: 278).
It was thus at this juncture that meanings of happiness came to incorporate ideas of individual responsibility, both of individuals towards themselves, and towards the state. In this way, the seeds of contemporary notions of citizenship based on discourses of rights and responsibilities begin to emerge, with ideas of happiness at their core. These processes involving defining individual rights based on the pursuit of happiness, legislating them in the manner of the Declaration of Independence, built towards particular conceptions of the need for individual reflexivity, where individuals must not only be able to understand whether or not they are happy, but why they are not, and what they need to do to achieve happiness. In this way, understandings of happiness made a further fundamental shift: from ‘outside’ to ‘inside’ – away from fateful or lucky circumstances construed by ‘external’ forces such as deities, and increasingly ‘internalised’, and understood to be within the control of the person who seeks to be happy.