Happiness: A History
by Darrin M. McMahon
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An intellectual history of man's most elusive yet coveted goal. Today, we think of happiness as a natural right, but people haven't always felt this way. Historian McMahon argues that our modern belief in happiness is a recent development, the product of a revolution in human expectations carried out since the eighteenth century. He investigates that fundamental transformation by synthesizing two thousand years of politics, culture, and thought. In ancient Greek tragedy, happiness was show more considered a gift of the gods. During the Enlightenment men and women were first introduced to the novel prospect that they could--in fact should--be happy in this life as opposed to the hereafter. This recognition of happiness as a motivating ideal led to its consecration in the Declaration of Independence. McMahon then shows how our modern search continues to generate new forms of pleasure, but also, paradoxically, new forms of pain.--From publisher description. show lessTags
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was slow going at first, but began to become quite interesting for me as it reached the last two centuries.
About happiness you can produce a library and stil not get beyond generalities; that's the problem with a container concept, such as ' love ' and ' peace '. This is also evident from this book. This is already quite an extensive book, and yet it covers only what great thinkers in Western history have written about happiness. This is intellectual history 'pur sang', at most a study of the "intellectual concept of happiness". For those that love this kind of approach, this certainly is a successful book, with fine text analysis and a broad overview of the Western philosophical tradition. But a true history of mankind's search for happiness, this is not.
Apr 29, 2017Dutch
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Darrin M. McMahon is currently a professor at Florida State University.
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- Original publication date
- 2006
- Epigraph
- My steps have held fast to your paths; my feet have not slipped.
--Psalm 17: 5
The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
--Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus - Dedication
- For Courtney, partner in pursuit, who has endured all the moods that writing a book on happiness entails, and invented some of her own.
- First words
- (Preface): "One may contemplate history from the point of view of happiness" observfed the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, "but history is nto the soil in which happiness grows."
(Introduction): The search for happiness is as old as history itself, one might venture, and in a certain sense that claim would be true.
Happiness is what happens to us, and over that we have no control. - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)We may well discover that the knights who dare to do so are less like the brave crusaders of lore than like Cervante's knight of the sad countenance, Quixote, who learns at the end of his journeys that the road is better than the arrival.
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- 5 — Dutch, English, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish
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