What’s Old Is New Again: William Blackstone’s Theory of Happiness Comes to America

This essay considers Lauren Berlant's call to “reimagine state/society relations . . . in which consumer forms of collectivity were not the main way people secure or fantasize securing everyday happiness” in light of William Blackstone’s early poetry and his important Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765). The encounter with justice was, for Blackstone, a central emotional and aesthetic experience, available to anyone, associated not with vengeance or self-satisfaction, but with a pure form of happiness. The essay traces this relation between happiness and justice, especially as the Commentaries are invoked in Harper Lee's novel, To Kill a Mockingbird.