Mourning Happiness: Narrative and the Politics of Modernity

For many eighteenth-century thinkers, happiness was a revolutionary idea filled with the promise of the Enlightenment. Vivasvan Soni argues, however, that the period fails to establish the importance of happiness as a guiding idea for human practice, generating our modern sentimental idea of happiness. Mourning Happiness shows how the eighteenth century's very obsession with happiness culminates in the political obsolescence of the idea. Soni explains that this puzzling phenomenon can only be comprehended by studying a structural transformation of the idea of happiness at the level of narrative form. Happiness is stripped of its ethical and political content, Soni demonstrates, when its intimate relation to narrative is destroyed. This occurs, paradoxically, in some of the most characteristic narratives of the period: such eighteenth-century novels as Pamela, The Vicar of Wakefield, and Julie; the pervasive sentimentalism of the time; Kant's ethics; and the political thought of Rousseau and Jefferson. For Soni, the classical Greek idea of happiness--epitomized by Solon's proverb "Call no man happy until he is dead"--opens the way to imagining a properly secular conception of happin