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  • Mourning Happiness: Narrative and the Politics of Modernity by Vivasvan Soni
  • Brian Michael Norton
Vivasvan Soni , Mourning Happiness: Narrative and the Politics of Modernity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010). Pp. xi + 536. $49.95.

Vivasvan Soni’s superb and astonishingly wide-ranging study places happiness at the center of modernity’s emergence in the eighteenth century, linking such otherwise disparate phenomena as the novel, social contract theory, sentimentalism, Kantian ethics, and the political discourse of the American Revolution. The story he tells, however, is not the familiar one of the Enlightenment “legitimizing” a secular mode of happiness and promoting it as part of the political agenda as never before. In fact, Mourning Happiness stands this account on its head. According to Soni’s provocative reading, the eighteenth century does not witness the triumph of happiness so much as its “impoverishment,” a process of “privatization” and “reification” that effectively drains the concept of all political potential. Modernity here is decidedly a narrative of loss. But Soni’s project is exceptional—perhaps audacious—in the way it does not limit itself to critique: “even more importantly than explaining how the idea of happiness changes in the eighteenth century, my goal in this book is to describe an alternative idea of happiness that is capable of serving as a guiding idea for politics” (5). This avowedly “utopian” impulse, along with the author’s distinctive focus on the form of ideas, make this a truly remarkable book.

The effort to construct an “alternative idea of happiness” leads Soni back to antiquity—not primarily to Aristotle or the Hellenistic tradition, as is the case with recent attempts to revitalize “virtue ethics,” but to the proverb attributed to the pre-Socratic statesman and lawgiver Solon: “Call no man happy until he is dead.” This is an unlikely point of departure, for a number of reasons. Here, at what Soni calls the “brink of philosophy,” facts are scarce and the historical record is thin. (It is not at all certain that Solon ever said this, and he almost certainly never said it to Croesus, as the legend maintains.) Moreover, the proverb itself, so confounding to modern sensibilities, would seem to underscore precisely what is [End Page 357] inaccessible or irrecoverable in ancient eudaimonia; Soni speaks of the “immense gulf” separating us from this classical ideal. But neither turns out to be a serious obstacle for Soni, as empirical questions about the proverb’s origins matter less to him than formal ones about its meaning, and it is specifically the rigor and difficulty of the proverb that he finds appealing. His discussion opens with a dazzling, chapter-long meditation on Solon’s “cryptic injunction,” in which Soni looks beyond the content of Solonian happiness (which remains radically unspecified) to tease out its “structuring assumptions”: happiness concerns a life in its “totality”; as such, it is not something that can be present in a given moment (as with our modern “affective” model); it is predicated on “contingency” and “finitude”; it can only be evaluated through “narrative”; the “judgment of happiness” cannot be made in one’s lifetime but must be entrusted to the surviving “community.” The next two chapters demonstrate how this “difficult” or “tragic” understanding of happiness finds concrete (if provisional) expression in the polis in the forms of Athenian funeral orations and classical tragedy. The fourth chapter gauges an early mutation of Solonian happiness in Aristotle, a “first forgetting” that anticipates its later abandonment in the eighteenth century.

One of Soni’s key theoretical propositions is that the Solonian question of happiness provides the ultimate “hermeneutic horizon” in which we order and make sense of our lives. In contrast to the “judgment of happiness,” which must wait until death, the “question of happiness”—that is, the “ethico-existential question” of one’s life as a whole—“cannot be suspended or deferred” (75–76; original emphasis). According to Soni, this governing framework “reigns nearly unchecked until the eighteenth century” (178), at which point something “strange and paradoxical” occurs (181). Although the Solonian hermeneutic, by Soni’s own definition, can never be fully displaced, it is the eighteenth century’s dubious achievement to invent a form...

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