The Happiness Craze: Books in Search of Bliss

Action may not bring happiness but there is no happiness without action.

—William James

In 1831 the French government asked political thinker and historian Alexis de Tocqueville to travel to the “new” world to study America’s penal system. When he returned to France Tocqueville turned his observations of the young republic into Democracy in America, a two-volume work that came out in 1835 and 1840. Tocqueville observed that compared to cramped, overcrowded Europe, America had seemingly limitless space and natural resources. The country was also overflowing with opportunity and prosperity, which allowed for greater social mobility. Yet he saw that such evolutions intensified the rhythms of daily life, creating new needs and desires while advancing expectations. He marveled at the ceaseless energy Americans put into their search for better lives. In America, he wrote, “no one could work harder to be happy.” Yet he argued that the unintended consequence of the pursuit of happiness was rampant discontentment. For him, America epitomized the restlessness of human desire. He saw it as a culture that would settle for nothing less than bliss.

Happiness: A History
Darrin M. McMahon. Grove Press, 2006, 544 pp., $15 (paper).

In America, not much has changed. We are still the land of unmet desire. We work longer and harder with fewer vacations than Europeans in pursuit of the good life, and, if the recent spate of weighty philosophical and scientific books on happiness is any indication, our search for this elusive state remains well underway. Serious thinkers from the fields of philosophy, economics, social science and psychology are tackling the subject and offering some surprising but also pragmatic insights into our single-minded motivation to feel good.

In Happiness: A History, historian Darrin M. McMahon poses the central question: Is happiness eternal and universal, or does it have a history, a specific record of time and place? He takes a literary approach to the subject, bringing to his discussion a deep reading of several great books of the Western intellectual tradition. As he traces the genealogy of happiness through the classics over two thousand years of thought, he proves that while happiness as an aspiration has always had a firm hold on the Western imagination, the concepts of the past bear little resemblance to our modern ideal.

Today we believe that it lies within our power to find happiness, but this novel concept was slow to evolve. The ancient Greeks lived in a fatalistic world and generally ascribed their fate to the gods. Democratic Athens was the culture in which people first seem to have believed that happiness was within human grasp. Individuals dared to believe joy was something they could pursue and that they had some control over their lives. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle all believed that though happiness is a rare and fleeting gift, it should be people’s ultimate aim. Socrates insists on the importance of human conduct and in the Symposium outlines an education of desire, suggesting that people should learn to love the right things in the right way. Aristotle builds on Socrates’ thesis when he puts forth the “doctrine of the mean” in which human beings calibrate their behavior between extremes; desire should always be tempered by rational restraint and virtue. He believed that the good life was one in which you develop your strengths and potential and become what it is in your nature to become.

Christian thinkers offered ways to tamp down desires to prevent anxiety, disappointment and the shallow pursuit of any particular object of happiness. Christian doctrine converted corporeal suffering...