Abstract

By analyzing the changing narrative structure of a group of important eighteenth-century novels, this study identifies a momentous transformation in the concept of happiness during the eighteenth century. It then traces the effects of the transformation in moral and political theory of the period. Happiness is transformed from a judgment about the totality of the narrative of a life made by a community of others, into an affect experienced by an isolated, solitary individual. As a result, the concept of happiness is so impoverished as to become incapable of serving as a guiding concept for ethics or politics. ;The study begins by describing the narrative-based concept of happiness, which finds its purest expression in Solon's proverb "Call no man happy until he dies," and in classical funeral orations. In Aristotle's philosophy, the narrative-based concept of happiness gives rise to a "hermeneutic horizon of happiness," which orients all thinking about biographical narratives, ethics and politics. Evidence of a hermeneutic horizon of happiness can be found early in the eighteenth century, but Samuel Richardson's Pamela inaugurates a new paradigm for biographical narration that is capable of suspending and displacing the hermeneutic of happiness for the duration of a narrative. I call this paradigm the "trial narrative." Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Julie radicalizes the paradigm, while Oliver Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield reveals that marriage, rather than the funeral oration, provides the exemplary occasion for the new judgment of happiness. ;In moral theory, Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments makes possible an ambiguous interpretation of happiness as narrative and affect, which is then denarrativized in Kant and Bentham. Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism shows that the new concept of happiness cannot support a hermeneutic horizon, whereas Immanuel Kant's ethics eliminates happiness as a guiding concept altogether, thereby limiting responsibility. In political discourse, I demonstrate that happiness is indispensable in American revolutionary rhetoric, but the horizon of happiness is only secondary in Jefferson's Declaration of Independence , and vanishes in the Federal Constitution. Early drafts of Rousseau's Social Contract also insist on the horizon of happiness, which is no longer in evidence in the final version of the text