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Alan Ryan
Social Research: An International Quarterly, Volume 77, Number 2,
Summer 2010, pp. 421-440 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: 10.1353/sor.2010.0071
For additional information about this article
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/sor/summary/v077/77.2.ryan.html
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Alan Ryan
Happiness and Political
Theory
N O TH ING IN W HAT FOLLOWS IS CONTROVERSIAL, BUT I HAVE BEEN
u n e a sy ab o u t the topic for half a century. Asked by the late John
Plamenatz to write an undergraduate paper on happiness as a politi­
cal goal, and given the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and John
Stuart Mill as provocation, I wrote a little piece that he plainly thought
was wholly misconceived. It was, he said mildly, an excellent under­
graduate discussion of issues in m oral philosophy, but not w hat was
needed. If w hat follows seems to be groping after distinctions that
rem ain shrouded in m ist after my best efforts, I shall be distressed
but not surprised. There is a hiatus betw een the essentially private
or individual nature of happiness—w hat I call hereafter “ordinary”
happiness—and the public, universal, rule-bound character of political
action, properly speaking, that seems to m ake the creation of “ordi­
nary” happiness an unsuitable object of political action. We need only
consider Brave New World to grasp the point. Yet, both the conditions
under w hich people are likely to be happy, and the resources they
need to support the pursuit of happiness, are more nearly universal.
Salient among them is the absence of threats to security of person and
property. The provision of security is the central task of any political
system, although the question of w hat that implies beyond physical
protection against foreign invasion and criminal damage to person and
property is highly contentious. Does it, for instance, include the provi­
sion of public education so that we are able to earn a living when we
grow up? Americans who doubt the need for the state to provide access
to medical care rarely doubt the need for public education, and yet it
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Voi 77 : No 2 : Sum m er 2010 421
seems obvious that ill health incapacitates us as severely as does igno­
rance. W hat “security” im plied was obviously m uch less contentious
at a tim e w hen the state’s capacity to provide anything beyond the
protection of persons and their property (at best) was almost nil, and
when the hazards to which we were exposed did not include long-term
unem ploym ent, an extended period of postem ploym ent old age, and
expensive medical treatm ent. “Social security” is aptly named, since
its purpose is to employ the resources of a m odern society to cure the
ills to which that society exposes us. At all events, I here tackle three
topics: first, the lowly place of happiness among the goals of political
action in the great tradition of political thought; second, the novelty
of the idea that happiness is the proper aim of public policy; and last,
the importance of the distinction between w hat was aptly described by
T. H. Green as “hindering hindrances to the good life” and the promo­
tion of happiness by political action. As that m ight suggest, I shall say
some unkind things about the paternalism im plicit in some recent
emphases on happiness as an object of state action.
THE DIFFICULTY OF DISCUSSIN G H A PPINESS IS OBVIOUS ENOUGH.
“Happiness” is simultaneously a label for a goal that readily comes into
conflict w ith m any other goals—fame, glory, the service of gods and
men, the doing of justice—and as a label for the condition one is in
w hen one has achieved one’s goals, w hatever they may be: happy to
have achieved fame and glory; happy in the knowledge one has done
one’s duty by God and man; happy to be just. The Greek eudaimonia
has som ething of the same ambiguity, and it is famously one on which
utilitarian moral philosophy has traded—or on which it has been ship­
wrecked, according to one’s point of view. Consider the impossibility
of saying firmly either that the heroic ethic is or that it is not concerned
with happiness. W hether the leaders of the Greek forces besieging Troy
were “political” leaders and their “kingdoms” political systems at all is
a question we can avoid tackling at any length. For our purposes, they
are similar enough. “Kings” were not unlike the leaders of the tribal
warrior groups that infiltrated and finally brought down the western
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Roman Empire; and they were the precursors of the barbarian kings
who eventually consolidated their power over w hat became France and
Germany. Their authority over their followers rested on their military
prowess; their authority over the invisible lower orders who cultivated
fields, tended cattle, and served in the households of the visible aristoc­
racy rested on the usual m ixture of habitual obedience, the constraints
of custom, and a Hobbesian exchange of allegiance for protection. In
the case of the slave and serf population, it was more nearly a m atter
of brute force. The task of leaders was political to the extent th at it
was not solely to lead their followers into battle; they had to dispense
justice in the allocation of booty and the adjudication of disputes
over property and personal injury. It was out of this background that
com mon law developed in the W estern world. In societies that were
substantially or wholly illiterate, w hat the rules were taken to be was
heavily dependent on the memory of priests, soothsayers, and the like,
but the distinction between the merely arbitrary and the rule-governed
was well entrenched.
There was a politics practiced in such societies, in the form of
discussion am ong the leading figures. The assembly depicted in the
first book of the Iliad—where the Greeks force Agamemnon to return
the captured Chryseis to her father in order to turn aside the w rath
of Apollo, who has stricken the arm y w ith plague in revenge for
Agamemnon’s insult to his priest, Chiyses—seems a plausible example
of the sort of occasion on w hich such discussions occurred. Illiterate
societies did not keep minutes, so we cannot be sure how exactly it all
worked. Our subject m atter—happiness—appears in the asides of the
discussion. There is frequent, but interm ittent reference to the ordi­
nary pleasures of existence that constitute w hat I call “ordinary happi­
ness” as distinct from the “all-in” happiness that philosophers invoke
as the ultim ate goal of all action. Ordinary happiness is exactly that. It
comes when there is peace, when husbands and wives can look forward
to bringing up their children, when the best off can feast among their
friends and the worst off can at least eat. Later Greek literature is very
clear on the subject; the representatives of the claims of ordinary
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423
happiness are the farm ers who need peace if they are to plant their
crops with some expectation of reaping w hat they have sown. In short,
ordinary happiness is domestic.
As such, and prescinding from H annah A rendt’s view th at
domestic life was so to speak kept out of sight of the public, political
realm (1958), ordinary happiness was the beneficiary of political activ­
ity when th at led to peace, but it was not the direct object of politi­
cal activity. Indeed, w hat the direct object of political activity was is
highly contestable; was it anything beyond keeping dissension to a
low enough level to allow a warrior band to function effectively? Take
three representative possibilities. If we can talk of the politics of the
heroic age at all, it is clear that the prim ary value of the heroic culture
depicted in the Iliad is the display of m artial prowess, extreme physical
courage, resourcefulness, and ingenuity in handling disaster. Achilles is
about as far removed from a rational calculator as one can get. He has
the emotional makeup of an overgrown child, but when he pays atten­
tion to anything beyond his im m ediate sensations, he knows that he
is doomed to die an early death and that all he can do is face that fate.
His m other is not happy for him; she laments his fate at every appear­
ance. Achilles him self never suggests th at the prospect of an early
death makes him happy. His is not the pursuit of ordinary happiness;
he exults in his murderous prowess, and in that sense achieves “all-in”
happiness, but he is a prim e example of the pursuit of a value—the
display of heroic prowess—that is in competition w ith ordinary happi­
ness. Ordinary happiness receives its most touching expression in book
six of the Iliad when Andromache tries to persuade Hector not to return
to the battlefield, knowing that he will be killed. She urges the claims
of his domestic attachments, and he is far from unmoved; nevertheless,
he does w hat a hero m ust do—he returns to the battle to kill and be
killed. If the Trojan elite had m inded about ordinary happiness, they
would have sent Helen back to her husband; and by the same token, if
the Achaeans had m inded about ordinary happiness, they would have
told Menelaus that he was better off w ithout his two-timing hussy, and
they were not going to waste their tim e recovering her.
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Heroes are perhaps bad examples for this sort of argum ent as well
as bad role models more generally. For a society with a fully structured
political system, a developed system of law, and private property as we
understand it, we should turn to Sparta; and there we find a society
whose values were anything but utilitarian, and where ordinary happi­
ness was not so m uch disregarded as systematically underm ined for
the sake of loyalty to the political community at all costs. The Spartan
political system—th at is to say Sparta’s constitutional arrangem ents
together with their supporting culture—were for hundreds of years a
byword for stability, and adm ired from Plato to Rousseau, though not
by most Athenians. To the extent that they served a purpose that can be
summed up in a sentence, it was to produce and sustain a warrior elite;
it was also to devote enormous amounts of tim e and effort to the prac­
tice of religion. Until late in the day, this was not part of an imperialist
project. Once her hegemony in the eastern Peloponnese was secure,
Sparta did not meddle in the affairs of the rest of Greece until the late
sixth century. W hat the warrior elite was for is therefore not entirely
easy to say. They periodically engaged in raids upon the helot popula­
tion, and it is plausible that their m ajor task was simply the m ainte­
nance of a system that depended on slave labor (see Cartledge 2006).
That suggests the m aintenance of the warrior elite was an end in itself,
to which their elaborate training was directed. The one thing that is
clear enough is that the elite did not exist in order to ensure that peace,
prosperity, and ordinary happiness should be enjoyed by themselves
and everyone else; since the warrior elite were forbidden to farm or
engage in commercial activity, and ordinary m anual labor was the lot
of the helots (who were serfs w ithout rights), there was little room for
ordinary happiness for anyone. That m ight explain why Spartans had
the reputation of being very easy to bribe; nature had been expelled
with a pitchfork but had crept back in. In any case, the young m en were
required to live in military messes, and to begin m arried life on the sly,
all of which emphasized som ething quite other than ordinary happi­
ness. It emphasized the readiness to do w ithout ordinary happiness. In
the “all-in” sense, we may certainly say that Spartans were noted for
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4 25
being happy to die where they stood rather than quit the battlefield,
but that is to say that they set an overwhelming value on a readiness for
self-sacrifice. The ethos was that of an English public school of the m id­
nineteenth century; unsurprisingly, since Sparta supplied the model
for such places.
The two societies in ancient Greece that took happiness seriously
seem to have been Athens and Corinth, the latter acquiring a bad repu­
tation for luxury and excess as a result. Reflecting on Athenian political
arrangem ents, however, Plato and Aristotle provide us w ith w hat we
need by way of an articulate view of w hat a polis or state is for. For Plato,
its telos is justice, in a slightly alien sense of that term; its aim is to see
that dike prevails and that unrighteousness does not. W hat this entails
is spelled out at length in Republic w ith its insistence that nothing will go
well unless philosophers rule, since they alone really know w hat justice
is and requires. W hat justice requires is that everyone should do w hat
he or she is fitted for by nature, the assumption being that each of us
has a place in the world to which we are naturally suited, and equipped
w ith the appropriate natural endowm ent to do w hat that place requires
of us. The ruling elite, though nobody else, is wholly subordinated to
the needs of the polis in a thoroughly Spartan fashion. For them , there
is no marriage, no private property, and no way of knowing whose chil­
dren are whose. Socrates’s interlocutors ask the crucial question: will
the Guardians be happy, and if they will not be, why would they wish to
occupy this onerous position? Notice that this is “ordinary” happiness,
and the assum ption is that the obliteration of the domestic affections
frustrates its pursuit. Socrates responds awkwardly at first, but more
confidently as he goes on (§§ 419 on). On the one hand, he suggests
that since these are the Guardians, whose nature fits them for this sort
of life, they will be happy; happiness consists in fulfilling our telos and
they are doing that. Yet he also suggests that it does not m atter that
they will not be ordinarily happy, since w hat m atters is the happiness
of the whole polis. That is more nearly the Spartan response, though the
Spartans relied on the plausibility of the first response as well. Their
training ensured that they were happier to die where they fought than to
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escape from a battle in which they had been defeated. That is not our
view; we congratulate survivors, they com m iserated w ith them.
Aristotle was quite sharp w ith this argument, insisting that a polis
could not be happy if its members were not, but that misconstrues the
Republic. The absence of family and property is a prescription for the
elite and nobody else. So, we should ask two questions: Is the point of
the institutions of Plato’s utopia to ensure the happiness of the ordi­
nary person? W hat is the connection between the avowed goal—to
achieve justice—and ordinary happiness?
It seems to be true that one advantage of the utopia set out in the
Republic is that the rank and file will in fact be happier in the ordinary
sense of the term than in any actual polis. Plato was not the last thinker
to argue th at ordinary people are distracted by excessive freedom,
cannot form a rational view of their own welfare, and are less happy
unsupervised than they would be in a m ore supervised and constrained
environm ent. The late-nineteenth-century emphasis on the conserva­
tism of the masses had a long pedigree. It is not obvious that this is the
point of the political system, but it is surely one of its purposes, since
the way the Republic is structured, beginning w ith the genesis of society
in the exchange of services between persons who have a comparative
advantage in the production of some of the necessities of life and a
comparative disadvantage in others, suggests that any society is seen
by Plato as task-oriented, w ith the production of the means of life at
its base, the m anagem ent of such a society and its military protection
in the middle of the hierarchy of arrangem ents, and the contem pla­
tion of the demands of the true, the good, and the beautiful, and their
implication for the polity at the top. It does not seem to be one of the
aims of the polity, to secure the advancement of philosophy; that seems
to be a m atter of individual illumination. It is its aim to make philoso­
phy useful—if such a thing can be done. The ideal polity m ust promote
the training of those who are fit to practice philosophy, but there is
no suggestion that Socrates was hindered in his philosophical pursuits
by the chaotic condition of Athens; certainly he could not have been
a successful politician in Athens, but th at is because he was, as the
Happiness and P olitical T h e o ry
427
dialogue Statesman makes clear, the best qualified true statesm an and
therefore the w orst possible candidate for political success here and
now.
So, the Platonic utopia promotes ordinary happiness for the rank
and file. The connection between th at and the justice of the entire
polity is perhaps that the telos of ordinary people is to live ordinarily
happy lives. Their salient virtue is temperance, which is to say neither
meddling in affairs of state, nor w anting w hat will do them no good
and will m erely aggravate their neighbors by inciting envy, but being
content to do w hatever job they are suited to and to live peaceably
w ith their neighbors. Capitalist liberal democracies score poorly on the
prom otion of tem perance so understood; this would not have surprised
Plato. If justice is a virtue of the whole society, then a self-restrained
lower class, courageous Auxiliaries, and wise Guardians are each
displaying the virtue appropriate to them , and their union is justice.
We may not practice democracy as Athens understood it, but we are
com m itted to the egalitarianism and freedom that Plato denounced;
and many people think we make ourselves ordinarily unhappy in the
process.
As usual, Aristotle makes plain sailing of the question. Justice is
certainly essential to the stability of the polis, but mostly because persons
who think they are unjustly deprived either of w ealth and income or
of the political influence that is legitim ately theirs will be prone to
attem pt a revolutionary overthrow of the constitution. Oligarchs and
democrats revolt for opposite reasons, but in either case in the name
of (their conception of) justice. Political justice is the proper alloca­
tion of political influence to social and economic groupings, and the
proper allocation is determ ined by their competence and their capac­
ity to participate soberly and farsightedly in determining the law and
public policy. It is not in the Politics but in the Nicomachean Ethics that
Aristotle gives a general account of the good for the sake of which we
act, and very deftly explains success in life as the achievement of the
happiness that comes from pursuing the good life according to reason.
Some ends transcend ordinary happiness; perhaps the happiness of the
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just m an who thinks him self better off being just and suffering terribly
than he would be being unjust and prospering, though Aristotle thinks
not. The ultim ate good of seeing the world through the eyes of God and
sharing in the timeless blessedness of the divine is such a transcen­
dent good, but its possessor is properly described as blessed rather than
happy. (The Catholic Church describes martyrs as “blessed” but not as
“happy.”)
The place of ordinary happiness in Aristotle’s conception of polit­
ical life is clear enough, but ambiguous in w hat it implies. We come
together in families, villages, and poleis to live better lives than we could
live as isolates. The polis exists not only to prom ote the good life in
common but to allow us to live the best life in common, this suggesting
that the exercise of the capacities of citizenship is a part of properly
fulfilled existence. Aristotle him self was not a citizen of Athens, but a
resident alien, the father-in-law of Alexander’s viceroy Antipater, and
an object of suspicion to his Athenian neighbors, but he was recording
w hat he took to be the common sense of properly brought up Greeks.
Unless we had a prepolitical idea of a good life—essentially the success­
ful pursuit of domestic happiness—we would not have any idea of what
the life was that a polis enables us to live. Because citizenship is itself a
good, as is the exercise of authority and the holding of office, m en will
feel themselves unjustly treated if they are excluded from citizenship
and eligibility for office except on very good grounds. Justice is then a
m atter of giving everyone their due and proportioning their rewards to
their merits. It is not the bleakly self-sacrificing picture of the Republic
or of the Spartan barracks, but of two sorts of happiness, the first the
ordinary happiness provided by the nonpolitical goods of everyday life
and the other the perhaps less ordinary happiness—certainly available
only to economically independent free m en and therefore not to ordi­
nary day laborers, women, slaves, and foreigners—that comes from the
exercise of distinctively political capacities.
It is w orth noticing th at in this picture of the world, avowedly
a picture of w hat “all m en agree” on, there is no suggestion that the
state should make us happy. This is not because Aristotle, any more than
Happiness and P olitical T h e o ry
429
Plato, has principled objections to paternalism . Like Plato, he thinks
that it is a central task of a well-conducted polis to bring up citizens
to be law-abiding, loyal, and just in their dealings w ith each other. In
the last two books of the Politics, he sets out his own picture of an ideal
state, and it is an understatem ent to say that it is not one in which the
notion of individual hum an rights finds a place. Rather, Aristotle takes
it for granted that there is so to speak a public face and a private face to
our lives; the public face concerns our capacities to act as good citizens
of the polity that he imagines, and the private face is the satisfaction we
shall find, both in exercising those capacities and in leading the lives
that the existence of a stable polity makes possible. We may in spite of
everything m eet w ith all sorts of misfortunes, and if we do it makes no
sense to say that we are happy, even if we need not go all the way with
Solon in refusing to call anyone happy until they are dead; but it is not
the state’s business to ward off all misfortunes, and it is not the philoso­
pher’s business to persuade us that we may be “ordinarily” happy when
we are in acute pain or suffering unjustly.
THIS VIEW IS AS SENSIBLE AS ARISTOTLE BELIEVED IT TO BE, AND IT
represented the common sense of innum erable political thinkers in
the following two millennia. Nonetheless, different thinkers had very
different views of w hat the payoff was from living under an orderly
political regime. Augustine, w ith a very acute sense of the limitations of
earthly life, had no interest in the pleasures of citizenship, but a strong
interest in the way in w hich our earthly passions could be used to
prom ote the m odest goods of earthly life—peace and security above all,
but a space w ithin which to practice our faith as well. Machiavelli and
his republican adm irers down to the nineteenth century emphasized
the possibilities of a certain sort of liberty—w hat Constant labeled the
liberty of the ancients—and the glory that a state organized for expan­
sion could achieve. Nonetheless, although ordinary happiness is not
salient among the values emphasized by Machiavelli, it is quite clear
than one of the payoffs of living in a successful republic is th at the
ordinary person has a chance to live a happy life w ithout fearing inva­
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sion from outside or oppression from within. Perhaps because these
thoughts are so banal that one would have to be m ad to think other­
wise, few writers spend a great deal of tim e discussing the purpose of
government; m ore often than not, they either subordinate it to the
question of who may legitim ately rule, or the question of how the
show can be got on the road or kept on the road. Defenders of absolute
monarchy by divine right, such as Bossuet, were interested above all in
how our rulers come by their authority, and they answer that they are
invested w ith it by God. Divine right theorists received their comeup­
pance at the hands of theorists such as Locke, who insisted that rulers
get their authority when “we the people” invest them w ith it. The ques­
tion of w hat the state is for is largely neglected by Bossuet because it
m atters so much to answer a different question, whereas Locke tackles
the question of w hat it is for because that provides the answer to the
question of how political authority is constituted, and w hat its scope
and lim its are; the prom otion of our earthly interests, or bona dvilia,
our lives, liberties, and estates (for example, Second Treatise §87). W hich
is to say, not the salvation of our im m ortal souls, a wholly illicit object
of political action. Of course, Bossuet takes it for granted that a state in
which we all obey our lawful rulers and have the good fortune to find
a godly sovereign to look after us will be one in which ordinary happi­
ness is to be found. As I say, we argue for w hat m ight be contradicted,
not for w hat nobody in his right m ind could deny.
A change in perspective, however, seems to have come about in
the eighteenth century. It was not the trium ph of Locke’s instrum ental­
ist view that political authority should rest in the hands of those who
could be relied on to prom ote the common good; Aquinas had borrowed
from Aristotle to say as much. It is rather that ordinary happiness seems
to have become valued in a way it previously had not. It is far from obvi­
ous why this should have been so—supposing that it did. The tem pta­
tion is to suggest that orthodox Christian belief was gradually losing its
hold on the minds of educated W estern m ankind, w ith the result that
it became possible to say m ore boldly th at deferring hopes of happi­
ness to the hereafter and regarding this life as an antecham ber to the
Happiness and P olitical T he o ry
431
life to come were mistakes, and that we should attend to the pursuit
of happiness here and now. There are three obvious anxieties that this
sort of claim provokes: in the first place, those whom one would expect
to be least concerned w ith prom oting ordinary happiness were impres­
sively devoted to it. The Puritan nuclear family was an advertisement
for the virtues of m arital com panionship and the pleasures of family
life; and although a culture of privacy m eant that there was not much
public discussion of the domestic pleasures, it is clear from correspon­
dence and diaries that for all their piety, protestant Christians had a
well-developed capacity for enjoyment, perhaps all the more because
of the rigors of their faith. So, it does not seem that the slackening of
religious faith is a precondition of taking earthly happiness seriously.
In the second place, it is not obvious how m uch of a loosening of the
bonds of faith actually took place. In countries where religious censor­
ship was less effective and the laws against blasphem y were lightly
enforced, it became possible to ventilate skeptical views more openly,
though it rem ained unrespectable to do so—as it remains in the United
States to this day. But w hether the possibility of expressing doubt more
openly simply revealed doubts that were already there, or w hether the
doubts rather than their expression were novel, it is impossible to say.
Third, it seems m ore likely that w hat made the difference was a greater
confidence in the possibility of earthly happiness as economic growth
took off in western Europe, and a new im patience grew up w ith the
obstacles to happiness presented by government incompetence and the
pursuit of misguided goals on the one hand and by superstition on the
other.
This is not to say that everyone in the eighteenth century suddenly
professed him self a utilitarian. Almost nobody did. Consider Kant. The
political problem, if one can so describe it, was not that of making m en
happy—making other m en happy according to our conception of their
happiness was, he said, the worst of all tyrannies. The political problem
was the justification of coercive law, and the solution of that problem
lay in the thought that we could regulate external conduct while leaving
the m ind entirely free; ultimately, we are obliged to follow the moral
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law, and no government can legitimately force us to act against it. All
a government can do is require external conformity to those coercive
laws whose content was consistent w ith a hypothetical social contract.
Nonetheless, if freedom rather than happiness was the crucial concept,
ordinary happiness was far from absent from the argum ent. If it was
not possible for there to be such external coercive law, property would
be impossible; if property was impossible, the world could not legiti­
m ately be made use of; and it seemed absurd to think that m ankind
could not employ their own talents and such natural resources as came
their way in order to make themselves happy. All that, however, lay in
the realm of the prudentially rational. The point of a properly political
solution to the question was to allow ourselves to live as moral agents,
and the goal of such agents was to deserve happiness rather than to
achieve it. Achieving it was a m atter of luck; deserving it was wholly
w ithin our control, since any rational creature could conform his will
to the moral law. The search for happiness—and this is equally true of
Hegel—prom pted the creation of a lawful political order that would
protect persons and their property, but its end is freedom. Happiness is
the motivator, but freedom is the goal.
The w riters who supply w hat we are looking for are a mixed
group; they include Diderot and Voltaire, though hardly Rousseau,
who in this context is the precursor of Kant that Kant thought he
was. They also include the political economists, and enthusiasts for
“improvement.” One of the most influential documents in this respect
was Diderot’s Supplement to the Voyages of Bougainville, which consists of a
comic—fictional—account of a visitation by a French naval expedition
to Tahiti, where the Frenchmen, and particularly, their accompanying
Jesuit priest, discover that there are societies where sexual inhibition
and religious superstition have yet to render m en miserable. The point,
of course, is not that there really are such societies, nor yet that Diderot
thought we m ight return to the natural innocence of the Polynesians,
but that if a country—France, for instance—learned not to attach itself
to the absurd values implied in its support of the Catholic church and
the inculcation of guilt in the face of harmless pleasures, the m ainte­
Happiness and P olitical T he o ry
433
nance of an enormous standing army, and the preservation of a largely
useless aristocracy, happiness and enlightenm ent m ight be achieved.
The thought is not that the happiness of individuals should be the
direct object of government action; Diderot and his friends were liber­
als, not paternalists. It is that individuals should be protected in their
pursuit of w hat constituted their happiness according to their own
understanding of it.
Because political theorists as a class have always tended to concen­
trate on two sorts of question to the exclusion of m ost others, there
are few writers who answer the question, “Is happiness the chief end
of politics?” in the way one would wish. That is, given that legitimacy
and stability are central preoccupations, happiness commonly features
either as a condition of stability or as its obvious result: if the population
is sufficiently unhappy, insurrection is likely, and if the state is chaotic,
happiness is hard to seek. Legitimacy is not directly founded on happi­
ness; legitimacy is a m atter of w hether governm ents are entitled to
our obedience, and that is not the same question as w hether they pres­
ently or even generally make us happier than any plausible alternative
regime m ight do. The Jacobites held that because the heirs of James II
were the legitim ate kings of England, the fact that the English were
prosperous and contented under the rule of Dutch and German inter­
lopers was neither here nor there. Neither W illiam III, nor Queen Anne,
nor the assorted Georges who succeeded them had a valid title. W hen
Hume raises the question, it is not to insist that because the English
were happy, their rulers were legitimate; it is to insist that anyone who
raises the question is a m enace to the peace. Ordinarily, Hume teased
the Whigs by pointing out that their favored contract theory of political
obligation was absurd in itself, and did not in the least imply that James
II had violated its (nonexistent) terms and had therefore forfeited the
throne. If we were to argue about legitimacy, as we ought not, the argu­
m ent would favor the House of Stuart.
This is why it was a real shift of perspective to treat such questions
instrum entally and in a utilitarian framework, as did Bentham and his
successors, though one m ight say they walked through the door that
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had been opened by Hume and the encyclopédistes. It also opened up all
sorts of possibilities that had rarely been entertained before. One was
that we would in fact be happier if we contrived to do w ithout govern­
m ent. At least one version of the anarchism preached in Godwin’s
Political Justice argued that government was an insult to our standing as
m oral beings, since we should respect the rights of m an w ithout being
forced to do so by external pressure, and yet it was a device th at did
m ore harm than good. If w hat was w anted was to maximize hum an
happiness, abolishing law and government was the way to do it.
This, of course, struck Bentham and m ost utilitarians as more or
less mad. Certainly, we should have as little governm ent as we could,
because governm ent was expensive, prone to be clumsy, and vulner­
able to corruption. Nonetheless, once law was defined as the positiv­
ists defined it—as the rules prom ulgated by a sovereign and backed
up by sanctions—the two obvious questions were w hat rules would
m axim ize the utility of all affected parties—the subject m atter of
censorial jurisprudence—and how could we ensure that the local sover­
eign attended to the general interest and did not subordinate it to his
or their own—the subject m atter of political theory and institutional
design. In principle, this opens the door to any am ount of regulation
of individual lives for the sake of the individual's happiness; J. S. Mill
complained that Bentham had no conception of individual freedom as
a value in its own right, and Gertrude Himmelfarb regarded Bentham’s
Panopticon project as a prevision of the sort of totalitarian state that
utilitarians such as Bentham and James Mill intended. I think that both
Mill and Himmelfarb were wrong. It is true that Bentham did not have
a principled account of the value of freedom; indeed, he observed that if
we were offered the chance to lose the freedom to do wrong we should
take it. Nonetheless, the Panopticon was intended as a “mill for grind­
ing rogues honest,” and it was only rogues who were to be subjected to
the regime of inspection, isolation, and reform ation that he envisaged.
For the rest of us, Bentham was perhaps more instinctively inclined to
let people get on w ith their own lives as they wished than J. S. Mill was.
The argum ent was simple; individuals need no incentive to seek their
Happiness and P o litica l T he o ry
435
own happiness, and are better informed as to w hat will create it than
anyone else is. Stopping us ruining other people’s lives is the proper
task of governments. Beyond that, less is more.
LATER NIN ETEEN TH -CEN TU RY W RITERS W ERE LESS IN C LIN ED TO
such strenuous antipaternalism . N onetheless, even the British
Idealists, who repudiated both the individualism and the utilitarian­
ism of Bentham and the two Mills, were careful not to advocate pater­
nalism. Nor, indeed, did their defense of w hat later writers term ed
“positive liberty” envisage w hat Berlin called “com pulsory rational
freedom.” Berlin’s criticisms of the positive liberty tradition are histori­
cally quite off target. The Idealists considered the role of the state to
be the provision of w hat T. H. Green called “hindrances to hindrances
to the good life.” This perm itted moves in the direction of the m odern
welfare state, but they were tentative. The thought usually was, to
take education as an example, that a person who grew up illiterate
was incapacitated from becoming a full citizen of his or her society; by
the same token, these theorists’ defense of tem perance, either in the
form of closing bars and saloons, or restricting their opening hours and
taxing alcoholic drink, rested on the thought that poor people w ith few
sources of entertainm ent besides the pub on the corner could not be
expected to resist the tem ptation to drink too much, w ith the risk of
succumbing to alcoholism, or at the least becoming less com petent to
earn their living and play a full part in the life of their society. But this
was always presented as a case of hindering a hindrance. Indeed, there
was a m ore principled defense against unabashed paternalism avail­
able within Idealism than w ithin utilitarianism; the “good life” was not
just a m atter of happiness, but of living in the way that the individual
would rationally endorse as the right way to live. It was a thoroughly
moralized conception of a successful life, not unlike the conceptions
put forward by Michael Sandel (1982) and Charles Taylor a century later.
For a way of life to be rationally endorsed, it had to be freely chosen;
and for that to be possible, it could not be coerced. Coercion was incom­
patible w ith the moral quality that Idealists sought.
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Recently, however, there has been a revival of a m uch m ore
straightforwardly utilitarian defense of the idea th at public policy
should be directed toward m aking citizens happy. The justification of
this stance is simple enough. It is noticeable that although real incomes
in W estern countries have risen dramatically since 1945, there has not
been any great increase in subjective happiness, as evidenced in w hat
people say about their levels of contentm ent. There are any num ber
of explanations of the phenomenon, some extravagant, some straight­
forward. The m ost plausible explanations share a com mon property,
w hich is an em phasis on the role of com parison in w hether we are
happy or not. That is, more goods than one m ight think are “positional”
goods, goods whose value depends on w hat other people possess or are
consuming. A house is not just somewhere to live but som ething to
relish as larger, more m odern, more expensive or whatever than the
houses of those w ith whom you compare yourself, which may be your
neighbors, your parents, or your former self. This thought goes back
to Veblen’s emphasis on conspicuous consumption, but recent writers
have often supplem ented these fairly simple ideas w ith larger anxiet­
ies about w hether we are suffering from a serotonin deficit, and have
therefore become increasingly vulnerable to depression.
Since jerem iads are two a penny, we can take an arm ’s-length
view of these larger anxieties. There are three small points w orth
making. The first is the extent to which the empirical evidence cuts in
all sorts of directions, rather than one. For instance, one might suppose
that the evidence of “framing,” or our tendency to estimate how well
we are doing and therefore to be happy or not by reference to how well
others are doing, would imply that the increasingly unequal distribu­
tion of income and wealth in advanced capitalist societies since 1979
had made the bulk of the population utterly miserable. It has not. The
evidence is not decisive, but it looks at least as though people are more
or less as contented or discontented as they have been for the past 40
years. There are old, but plausible explanations of this, if it is true. The
theoiy of reference groups draws our attention to the fact that whom
we compare ourselves w ith is w hat m atters. If it is our form er selves,
Happiness and P olitical T he o ry
4 37
then even if we have had a meager share of the growth in the economic
pie over the past 40 years, we shall feel all right, since we are better off
than we were. If it is the chairm an of Goldman Sachs, then we shan’t.
Few people think the latter is the appropriate comparison. If a suffi­
cient num ber of people did, revolution m ight loom; but 80 percent
of Americans believe themselves to be “middle class,” which suggests
broad contentm ent.
The second is that just as philosophers have always had a diffi­
cult tim e distinguishing between “ordinary happiness” and its “all-in”
cousin, so do the rest of us, both those who are asked questions by
social scientists and the social scientists themselves. It is not unduly
difficult to get respondents to make choices between hypothetical situ­
ations, at any rate in a laboratory situation, so that one could turn ques­
tions about w hat would make us happy into questions about how we
would rank states of affairs. But, it m ust generally be true that this is to
ask people about “all-in” happiness rather than “ordinary happiness.”
Someone who wants to climb Everest, knowing that there is something
close to a one in six chance th at he will die in the process, wants to
climb Everest. It is hard to think w hat other description of the object
of his desire is more perspicuous or m ore illum inating than that. It
may well be true that unless he climbs Everest, he will always feel a
nagging discontent at not having done so; not having done it makes
him unhappy. If he does it and survives, he will always after feel a warm
glow at the mem ory of having got up and down; having done it makes
him happy in a pretty straightforward way. But is doing it the pursuit of
ordinary happiness? At 27,000 feet, trudging past the corpses of those
who failed to m ake it, is he happy? Almost certainly not, even if he
would not wish to be anywhere else. “Hfaut imaginer Sysiphe heureux,”
said Camus; “We m ust imagine Sisyphus happy.” It’s not obvious that
we must. In which case, it’s also not obvious that we should take survey
data at face value. To put the point less obliquely, it may be that people
have, or have the opportunity to enjoy, a great deal of “ordinary happi­
ness,” but hanker after som ething the transcends it—some less high
altitude equivalent to being cold, terrified, and exhausted at 27,000
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feet. Dissatisfaction in the face of m aterial comfort, the absence of war,
m ore than adequate opportunities to entertain ourselves may not be
best described as a failure by m odern political systems to make their
citizens happy; certainly, there are enough failures to go round, but
that may not be w hat they are.
Lastly, then, a swift conclusion. Given that it is not a foregone
conclusion that w hat we m ost w ant is to be happy, and given the extreme
difficulty of knowing just w hat it is we do want, a direct attem pt to
“m ake” citizens happy seems misconceived. Even “nudging,” which is a
polite way of referring to the technique of fiddling w ith the incentives
offered to the citizenry to secure good—or at least prudent—behavior
on their part, runs the risk of turning in the Kantian tyranny whereby
we substitute our conception of someone else’s happiness for her or his
own. It may not be a terrible failing of modern states that they do not
set out to make people happy, but to supply the resources with which
people can pursue their own goals. The United Nations well-being indi­
ces, on which the same group of social democracies always seem to
come top, are not straightforwardly happiness indices. They measure
the extent to which most people have the resources to live their own
lives—health, social insurance, decent education, low levels of crime,
and so on. These are em inently things th at governm ent policy can
attend to, and they raise no nasty questions, w hether about the discrep­
ancy between universal arrangements and the quirkiness of individual
happiness or about the intrusiveness of too energetic a policy of saving
us from ourselves. As Mill, who counted him self a utilitarian, observed,
happiness is too indeterm inate a goal to be pursued directly. We should
pursue other goals, and then perhaps we shall find ourselves happy.
REFERENCES
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1958.
Cartledge, Paul. Thermopylae. New York: Random House, 2006.
Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1988.
Happiness and P olitical T he o ry
43 9
Plato. Republic. Ed. G. R. F. Ferrari. Trans. T. Griffith. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2000.
Sandei, Michael. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1982.
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