What is happiness? Every era has entertained this question. Yet as Ritchie Robertson, Taylor Professor of German Language and Literature at Oxford University, argues here, the riddle of happiness took center stage among European intellectuals in the long eighteenth century. As “enlighteners” (Robertson’s preferred sobriquet) began to question the traditional theological account of the world and humankind’s place in it, the pursuit of happiness on this side of the grave took on a new urgency. Happiness is thus a theme that comes up again and again in the era’s major documents, eliciting a range of definitions and suggestions. The entry on bonheur in the great French Encyclopédie, for example, explains that it is “a state or situation which we would like to see continue forever unchanged.” In the Critique of Practical Reason, Immanuel Kant defines Glückseligkeit as “the state of a rational being in the world the whole of whose existence everything goes according to his wish and will.” In The Life of Johnson, the sage (responding to Boswell’s misquotation of David Hume’s views) remarks that happiness “consists in the multiplicity of agreeable consciousness.” (He continues, debatably, “A peasant has not capacity for having equal happiness with a philosopher.”)
