ABSTRACT
Søren Kierkegaard wrote of the revolutionary upsurge in Europe in 1848 that it looked now as if politics were everything; “but it will be seen that the catastrophe (the Revolution) corresponds to us and is the obverse of the Reformation: then everything pointed to a religious movement and proved to be political; now everything points to a political movement, but will become religious” (qtd. in Bloom 13). The strange intermixture of politics in religion during the Reformation is, in one sense, the obverse of all things religious now appearing in political guise since 1848. The Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, mayor of the largest town in Illinois during his day and once a candidate for President of the United States, had as much, if not more to say about the U.S. Constitution than he did about sacred happiness. John Stuart Mill, “his satanic free-trade majesty,” in the words of Henry Adams, has inspired nearly as many religious-like followers and heretics as Smith, even as his rhetoric was primarily secular (72). Reading Smith and Mill together reiterates Kierkegaard’s observation and highlights central differences between American communitarians and British libertarians in the nineteenth century. For Smith, happiness comes from obedience to God’s laws within a community devoted to keeping them; for Mill, happiness is derived from an appreciation of self-interest in political and social life, an appreciation that includes reason as the critical factor. For Smith, like much of nineteenth-century America, happiness carried religious and democratic, almost revolutionary, overtones; whereas, for Mill and much of nineteenth-century Britain, happiness was defined by reason and an increasingly democratic policy meant to secure the foundation of reason.
