Robertson - the Pursuit of Happiness

Since 2016 I have been giving variations of a lecture on the historical antecedents of current strains of behavioural public policy. It covers the Scottish Enlightenment figures such as Smith and Hume then the utilitarians, various strains of political economy, the early development of economics and psychology, and then into 20th-century utility theory, neo-classic microeconomics, and different psychological and institutional responses such as American constitutionalism, Katona, Simon, and others, and then on to Kahneman and Tversky, behavioural economics, and the current development of behavioural public policy. Over time, I have added more reflection and critique about these foundations - it is clearly a very Western, white, male history. Many scholars have convincingly argued that this social context shaped the type of models that emerged. Over time, the lecture has evolved into a discussion about what the development of modern behavioural science as it is currently practised implies for how an increasingly global and diverse endeavour evolves through the next century. 

My main approach to developing the lecture has been to read as much of the original works as possible and I have a bookcase and suitcase full of books, papers and chapters from Smith, Hume, Marshall, Katona, Keynes, Edgworth, Benthman etc., It is an annual ritual at this stage to dive into it in preparation for the next academic year, and to try to read some more to add to the discussion.  

With that in mind, I read Ritchie Robertson's "The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness 1680 - 1790". We have several lectures and courses on our programmes on happiness and well-being. Several scholars at LSE pursue a utilitarian idea of promoting happiness and well-being in society through policy. Robertson opens up the book with "The Enlightenment declared that the goal of life was happiness, and that if the goal could be attained at all, it was to be found in the here and now, despite the manifold imperfections of earthly life". He introduces a range of thinkers from Locke to Leibniz to Pope that had happiness at the centre of their intellectual ideas. The book provides an international account of the development of Enlightenment ideas of science, reason, and human progress. 

The main element that resonates with me is the constant tension between how enlightenment figures see themselves as moving humanity toward greater prosperity and dignity, and critics who see the universalist tendencies of enlightenment projects as leading to various degradations of culture and human autonomy. Something like this is at the heart of recent uneasiness around ideas like libertarian paternalism. It is clear some critics read books like Nudge and immediately see visions of Prometheus Unbound or Walden Two, or even darker visions of totalitarian governments real or imagined wielding science against pacified populations. Robertson concludes the book by arguing that the essence of key enlightenment projects is a critical sense that would generate pushback against naive utopian projects and certainly enough intellectual resistance to stop them from degenerating into static dystopias. "Enlightened thinking will reject naive ideas of inevitable progress, even those that originated in the Enlightenment. But it will also steer clear of some of the pessimism shown by some of the Enlightenment's harshest critics". From my point of view, people working on behavioural ideas in policy spaces should read things like Walden 2, Watson's Psychology as a Behaviourist Views it, and other works that take enlightenment thinking to extremes where human autonomy and agency are no longer valued. And to use this to articulate whether and how currently developing paradigms avoid falling into similar traps.