Happiness Once More

The essay shows how happiness became a suspicious notion in the law and in neighboring fields, with special regard to the field of economics. The long intellectual tradition that elaborated on happiness as a key term in the vocabulary of government and law at least since the inception of the modern age came under attack in the late eighteenth century. As a part of a general movement of ideas, several thinkers, among whom Immanuel Kant has the place of honour and, after him, German idealists more broadly, rejected the idea that the government and law should advance public happiness. On the other hand, within a few decades, happiness also turned out to be incompatible with the search for objectivity and scientific neutrality in the crucial field of economics. In the field of philosophy, law, and economics, over a century or so happiness thus became a private, rather than a public affair, namely an end that the individual can pursue, but that cannot and should not be the object of public policy. The time has come to re-think this approach.