Regimes of Happiness: Comparative and Historical Studies

Regimes of Happiness is a comparative and historical analysis of how human societies have articulated and enacted distinctive notions of human fulfilment, determining divergent moral, ethical and religious traditions and incommensurate and conflicting understanding of the meaning of the ‘good life’.

Presented in two parts, Regimes of Happiness provides a historical view of the way in which Western societies, the descendants of the Latin Roman Empire, created languages and institutions that established specific and occasionally antithetical conceptions of a fulfilled human life or ‘happiness’ in the first part. The second part explores how non-Western societies and non-Christian religions have conceived and established their own ideals of human perfection. Regimes of Happiness is a critical reflection on modern notions of happiness which are typically focused on individual feelings of pleasure.