Introduction

Happiness as the ultimate goal of human endeavour is a thread running through theology and philosophy from the ancient Greeks to modern times. Such a claim raises immediately a host of critical objections and problems relating to the idea of cultural relativism. Can the theme of happiness be continuous and how would we know that? One way to overcome this dilemma is to identify ‘regimes of happiness’ – that is, clusters of ideas, practices and institutions that in one way or another connect to broad ideas of human wellbeing, flourishing and satisfaction or Eudaimonia to use the word that dominates Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (Contreras- Vejar and Turner, 2018). Contemporary discussions of happiness almost invariably start with Aristotle (Nagel, 1972). However, the methodology here is to some extent borrowed from Michel Foucault to understand the ‘genealogy’ of happiness across different social and cultural formations. In the Western world one could identify an Aristotelian regime of happiness based on the idea of a sound polity and flourishing citizens. There is also a Christian regime of happiness around such figures as St. Augustine and within which there have been radical shifts most notably brought about by Luther and the Protestant Reformation. Regimes of happiness can overlap with each other and their borders are obviously fuzzy. Some regimes may last a long time in various forms. For example, Aristotle's treatment of happiness is one of the most cited versions of happiness across the West. The idea of happiness is, however, not confined to the West. For example, the Vietnamese Constitution that was devised by Ho Chi Minh, an admirer of America society, crafted the 1945 Constitution with three key words as its primary values – Independence–freedom–happiness (or niem hanh phuc). The 2013 version of the Constitution in Article 3 says, ‘The state guarantees […] that people enjoy what is abundant and free for a happy life with conditions for all- round development.’

One further notion behind our discussion of ‘regimes of happiness’ is that in principle we can detect important shifts in regimes that are associated both with specific networks of individual thinkers, and with institutional changes in the location of intellectuals in these networks. In this chapter I am especially interested in the transitions in thinking about happiness from the late eighteenth century and through the nineteenth century.

This book started as a conversation about successful societies and human development. It was originally based on a simple idea— it would be unusual if, in a society that might be reasonably deemed as successful, its citizens were deeply unhappy. This combination— successful societies and happy citizens— raised immediate and obvious problems. How might one define “success” when dealing, for example, with a society as large and as complex as the United States? We ran into equally major problems when trying to understand “happiness.” Yet one constantly hears political analysts talking about the success or failure of various democratic institutions. In ordinary conversations one constantly hears people talking about being happy or unhappy. In the everyday world, conversations about living in a successful society or about being happy do not appear to cause bewilderment or confusion. “Ordinary people” do not appear to find questions like— is your school successful or are you happily married?— meaningless or absurd. Yet, in the social sciences, both “successful societies” and “happy lives” are seen to be troublesome.

As our research into happiness and success unfolded, the conundrums we discussed were threefold: societal conditions, measurements and concepts. What are the key social factors that are indispensable for the social and political stability of any given society? Is it possible to develop precise measures of social success that would give us reliable data? There are a range of economic indicators that might be associated with success, such as labor productivity, economic growth rates, low inflation and a robust GDP. Are there equally reliable political and social measures of a successful society and human happiness? For example, rule of law and the absence of large- scale corruption might be relevant to the assessment of societal happiness. These questions about success led us inexorably to what seems to be a futile notion: happiness. Economic variables such as income or psychological measures of well- being in terms of mental health could be easily analyzed; however, happiness is a dimension that has been elusive to the social sciences.

In our unfolding conversation, there was also another stream of thought, namely that the social sciences appeared to be more open to the study of human unhappiness rather than happiness.

Introduction: Classical Sociology

A product of Harvard's famous Department of Social Relations created by Pitirim Sorokin, Professor Tiryakian's academic work has ranged over many issues, but the intellectual focus of his sociology has primarily been Emile Durkheim and the legacy of the Durkheimian School (Tiryakian 2009). Tiryakian's work has engaged with various controversies, both political and academic. Situated in the borderland between American and European social theory, Tiryakian often found himself drawn into the professional and ideological conflicts that erupted in the 1960s and onward between various generations of scholars. Many of these confrontations in the academic world of sociology were influenced by student radicalism in 1969, the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement. He has recently complained that scholars have forgotten the profound disruptions around 1969 on both sides of the Atlantic (Tiryakian 2013: xxiv). More specifically, the ideological conflicts hinged on the charge that sociology—especially in the elite university departments—was inherently conservative, both culturally and politically. For Tiryakian, part of the attraction of Pitirim Sorokin was that he was also famously a critic of mid-century American sociology in his Fads and Foibles in Contemporary Sociology and Related Social Sciences (Sorokin 1956). Consequently Tiryakian's interpretation of Durkheim has been distinctive in rejecting the conventional view that Durkheimian “functionalism” was ultimately a conservative reaction to social change. Sorokin's marginal and often maverick position in American sociology and his view of large-scale civilizational change influenced Tiryakian's deep engagement with Durkheim's key notion of anomie.

Another distinctive feature of this engagement with Durkheim concerns the problematic relationship between philosophy and sociology, on the one hand, and between normative and empirical analysis on the other. In Sociologism and Existentialism Tiryakian (1962) lamented the separation between philosophy and sociology that was bound up in the opposition between the Old World and the New World. This separation was mutually problematic. By ignoring sociology, philosophy—while seeking universal truths—remained bound implicitly to specific cultural contexts. By ignoring philosophy, sociology worked at the microscopic level and failed to address problems of a global significance. The general result was that sociology has failed to develop a global perspective and “research projects accumulate, but are not cumulative.

Introduction: On Simplification

All scientific work starts with some simplification of basic concepts. Once these have been defined and established, we begin to pile up empirical variations. During this process, the simplifying notions are modified and, eventually, they may disappear. For example, economics assumes scarcity, and hence the need to rationalize and economize; politics presupposes the existence of struggles to maximize power; and sociology insists upon the necessity of social solidarity. Taking our cue from the etymology of socius, sociology is the science of companionship or friendship. For social science as a whole, civil society is the space in which these somewhat contradictory assumptions about markets, states, civil institutions, and shared values find a place and are played out. We can further modify these presuppositions: we can say that civil society is caught in another structuring principle – namely ‘the sacred’ and ‘the profane’. This dimension was one aspect of the anthropology of Clifford Geertz (1973), who connected ‘the sacred’ to sovereignty and core power holders, while ‘the profane’ was related to peripheral positions. Charismatic authority and conflicts over charisma involve political struggles to control the core. While this particular assumption about a sacred and secular binary turns out to be historically variable, it provides a starting point (Turner, 2013).

Now moving away from simplification, it is clear that finding agreements in civil society in the contemporary world appears to be increasingly problematic – partly, at least, because of the global fluidity of the labour market, the creation of diasporic communities, the growth of parallel communities, and the failure of traditional forms of citizenship to adjust to social complexity. While all human groups tend to create exclusionary boundaries between ‘the inside’ and ‘the outside’, the potential for conflicts between majorities and minorities have increased with globalization, and these social tensions are expressed in widespread xenophobia. In my own work, I have argued that the paradox of globalization may be to create social enclaves, and we can observe this development through the growth of gated communities and the erection of physical walls to separate communities (Turner, 2007).

Introduction: ‘Practice’ in Marxism and Sociology

One persistent theoretical and practical problem in Marxism was to explain the failures of working-class opposition to capitalist exploitation. Karl Marx had assumed that the organized working class would eventually engage in a successful political struggle against the ruling class alongside a background of systematic crises in the economic system. A wide range of explanations as to why this transformation did not take place has been developed over the decades after Marx's death in 1883. At the end of the nineteenth century, it appeared that the condition of the German working class had improved, suggesting that capitalism could be reformed. In Germany, Bismarck had created a minimal social security system for the working class; and, in Great Britain, Asquith had created a similar welfare safety net. Social security legislation had thereby given the industrial working class some minimum level of protection, and the Beveridge Report of 1943 laid the foundation of the British welfare state and the social rights of citizenship (Mommsen, 1981). Apart from the impact of ‘reformism’, other explanations of the incorporation of workers into industrial capitalism involved ideas from Antonio Gramsci about the creation of a moral and ideological hegemony through the church and educational institutions over the working class. These arguments suggested that a combination of factors – a dominant ideology, the coercive apparatus of the state, and some amelioration of the social condition of the workers through welfare institutions – could explain the acquiescence of the worker to capitalist exploitation (Abercrombie, Hill, and Turner, 1980). In other words, the indignation of the worker is constrained by a web of ideological and institutional barriers to effective political action.

There is a parallel theoretical problem, but not a practical political problem, in academic sociology: namely, how to account for human agency in relation to social structure. In some sociological traditions, this problem is not especially prominent.