Campaign for the American Reader: Pg. 69: "Happiness: A History"

Darrin M. McMahon is Ben Weider Associate Professor of History at Florida State University and author of Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (2001), and Happiness: A History (2006).

I asked Darrin to apply the "page 69 test" to his latest book; this is what he reported:

Happiness: A History, as the title suggests, is a book about the history of happiness. I see happiness above all as an alluring idea that has exercised a particularly strong hold on the Western imagination. Rather than try to define what happiness is once and for all—or give advice about how to get it!—I look at the way different periods have imagined happiness though the ages and how these changing conceptions bear on our own contemporary quest for this elusive end.

Page 69 falls at the very beginning of Chapter Two. In the Introduction and Chapter One I introduced the “tragic” understanding of happiness—common to many early cultures—that sees happiness primarily as a function of fortune or the benevolence of the gods. (We retain something of this link in the word “happiness” itself, whose root is “hap,” meaning luck or fortune). I also discussed how the Greeks, beginning with Socrates, challenged that idea, developing an understanding of happiness as the reward for living a virtuous life.

The bulk of Chapter Two is devoted to how Christianity both rejected and adapted these earlier notions. But I also talk about some of the earthier Roman conceptions of happiness against which Christians rebelled. Page 69 features a picture of a Roman coin with the Emperor Vespasian on one side and the goddess Felicitas (Felicity) on the other—a common pairing. Holding a horn of plenty, Felicitas represents bounty, and so symbolizes perfectly the popular Roman conception that to be happy is to be prosperous, and to be “poor” (miser) is to be miserable. The previous page shows an amusing picture of a great Roman phallus, with the straightforward inscription: Hic habitat felicitas. “Here dwells felicity!” Needless to say, Christians would have a field day with all this.

So page 69 is only a snapshot in a long-developing sequence. But in so far as it presents notions of happiness—happiness as pleasure and prosperity, happiness as good living, and ultimately happiness as spiritual fulfillment—that continue to be part of our modern understanding, the page is representative of the book as a whole. For my greatest concern in this book is to show how our past pursuits continue to shape those of the present.

Thanks to Darrin for the input.

There is an excerpt available from the publisher (sorry, no direct link: it involves a little searching), or you may click here.

Before last New Years Eve, Darrin previewed a theme from his book in an essay titled, "In Pursuit of Unhappiness." Click here to read it.

Curious about what the writers of the Declaration of Independence meant by the "pursuit of happiness" but can't wait to get your hands on McMahon's book? Click here for a quick lesson.