Introduction: Democratic Ideals and Institutional Failure

While I was writing my doctoral thesis at the University of Leeds in the 1960s on the decline of the Methodist Church, I used Philip Selznick's account of grassroots organizations to understand political conflicts within the church. I have in more recent years become interested in the idea of successful societies primarily through my longstanding interest in what I call “social citizenship” as the real foundation of a political democracy. Perhaps this idea is too simple to provide an explanation why whole societies fail, and so it may be more appropriate to look at specific institutions such as churches, trade unions, or football clubs as the focus of research. Alongside this idea of successful societies, I also became interested in the idea of happiness. Perhaps like “social success,” the notion of happiness is either too grand or too complex to act as a useful idea in mainstream sociology. Happiness has in modern times been downgraded often to mean little more than personal “satisfaction.” In any case, happiness as a concept has a long history that we can start with the Greek notion of eudaimonia that, for Aristotle, was based on the virtuous life. In contemporary politics and political theory, it is inevitably connected to utilitarianism and consequentialism. Insofar as Selznick was a pragmatist, we could also regard him as a consequentialist. I treat early utilitarianism as a version of consequentialism. Of course, Jeremy Bentham's “felicific calculus,” or the pain–pleasure principle, has been heavily criticized, and therefore a more usable idea may be “well-being” as a concept for capturing the welfare of individuals and as the basic goal of social policy. By combining “democratic citizenship” and happiness or well-being, we may start to get somewhere toward giving the sociology of successful societies more adequate foundations (Stones and Turner 2020). While to my knowledge Selznick did not write explicitly about happiness, he certainly addressed the question of the success or failure of democratic ideals, and he regularly talked about human “flourishing,” which underpinned his commitments to communitarianism, for example.