Darrin M. Its publisher, of course, is the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, founded in at a time when Americans β newly independent and free β were demanding that their institutions, like their government, serve a purpose, that they be useful. The English philosopher Jeremy Bentham is often credited with first articulating the creed. To many enlightened souls on both sides of the Atlantic, the need to promote happiness had assumed the status of a self-evident truth.
That this truth, for all its self-evidence, was a relatively recent discovery β the product, give or take a decade, of the preceding one hundred years β is important. For though happiness itself already possessed a long history by the eighteenth century, the idea that institutions should be expected to promote it β and that people should expect to receive it, in this life β was a tremendous novelty. It involved nothing less than a revolution in human expectations, while raising, in turn, a delicate question.
Just who, precisely, was worthy of happiness? Was it fit for all? Was happiness a right or a reward? And what, for that matter, did the curious word really mean? The answers to such questions take us to the heart of an eighteenth-century contradiction that remains with us to the present day. And the implicit assumption is that those living in bondage or sin are not worthy of happiness. In light of the fact that slavery was long considered but a species of sin, and freedom but a product of living well, I want to focus solely on the remaining term β virtue β sketching in what follows a genealogy of its close links to happiness.
The belief in the intimate association of happiness and virtue was widely shared in the eighteenth century. But the evidence for it was not at all recent.
On the contrary, it had accumulated so steadily, so imperceptibly over the course of centuries as to become less a self-evident truth than a truth unexamined, one that seemingly required no evidence at all. It was Aristotle, in the fourth century B. And that end, he says, is what gives expression to the highest nature and calling of the thing.
