Civil Society and Its Discontents: The Good Life

This “Critical Conversation” takes up the question of the good life in the long eighteenth century. Defined by Lauren Berlant as the imaginary individuation of economic success as the height of social good, which functions as a powerfully compensatory image for all it excludes and is sustained by the nexus of capitalism, state power, and individual sacrifice, the good life has important antecedents in eighteenth-century culture. These essays focus on the good life’s discontents, incoherence, failures, and misfires, as well as its potential amelioration.