ABSTRACT
Since 2012, the United Nations’ ‘World Happiness Reports’ have implied that happiness is a ‘basic human emotion’, experienced globally in broadly similar ways. Beginning with a prehistory that looks back to ancient China and Greece, this chapter provides a global overview of the shifting history of ‘happiness’ since the eighteenth century. It acknowledges the role of religions in shaping notions of happiness, but mainly focuses on political attempts to define and produce happiness – from the liberalism that was a legacy of eighteenth-century political economists and utilitarians, to the radical experiments of communism and fascism in the twentieth century, and finally to the current century's neo-liberal approaches. The chapter concludes with a mention of recent scholarly critiques of current global happiness agendas.
