The History of Emotions by Thomas Dixon

Author:Thomas Dixon [Dixon, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192550408
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2023-03-13T00:00:00+00:00

What was happiness in 1776?

In the 18th century, as today, people could mean different things when they talked about ‘happiness’. The ancestry of the idea of happiness as an emotional state that can be measured numerically in wellbeing surveys is to be found in the figure of the English thinker and social reformer Jeremy Bentham, founder of the philosophy of Utilitarianism. His key idea was that the aim of all individual actions and government policies should be to secure ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’. Bentham thought of this ‘happiness’ in both an emotional and a mathematical way. It was the surplus of pleasures over pains and, in theory at least, those states of feeling could be quantified and measured.

Bentham’s philosophy gained more supporters during the 19th century but his was not the most influential understanding of happiness in the era of the American and French Revolutions. To find that we need to look instead at the Declaration of Independence adopted by the 13 original ‘united States of America’ at the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia on 4 July 1776. The document was drafted by Thomas Jefferson and edited by a committee whose members included John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. After a preliminary opening sentence about the need to break the historic bonds between one people and another, the text famously proceeds:

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.

The declaration goes on to affirm the intention of the people of the newly independent states to form for themselves a government on such principles that ‘shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness’.

Happiness, then, was a central ideal for the newly founded United States of America. But what kind of ‘happiness’ did Jefferson and his colleagues have in mind? It was something quite different from Bentham’s measurable state of feeling, and it had its roots in older, non-emotional meanings of the term. The ‘hap’ in ‘happiness’ is the same as the ‘hap’ in ‘perhaps’ and ‘happenstance’. In other words, it refers to luck, or chance, rather than to emotions. In some contexts, that meaning is still preserved, as when we refer to a ‘happy coincidence’. To be happy in this sense is to be lucky, to enjoy good fortune. Among the other non-emotional uses of ‘happiness’ is the way it has been defined in philosophical and political contexts to refer to the broadest aims of human life. ‘Happiness’ is sometimes used, for instance, to translate the ancient Greek eudaimonia, a term for human flourishing. To achieve eudaimonia was to live successfully, which, for Aristotle and others, meant living in accordance with virtue and reason.

The kind of ‘happiness’ that the founders of the United States had in mind was within this non-emotional group of meanings. One clue pointing towards this interpretation is a short essay, ‘On True Happiness’, written by Benjamin Franklin and published in the Pennsylvania Gazette some decades earlier.

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