William Davies

The Happiness Industry

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In winter 2014, a Tibetan monk lectured the world leaders gathered at Davos on the importance of Happiness. The recent DSM-5, the manual of all diagnosable mental illnesses, for the first time included shyness and grief as treatable diseases. Happiness has become the biggest idea of our age, a new religion dedicated to well-being. In this brilliant dissection of our times, political economist William Davies shows how this philosophy, first pronounced by Jeremy Bentham in the 1780s, has dominated the political debates that have delivered neoliberalism. From a history of business strategies of how to get the best out of employees, to the increased level of surveillance measuring every aspect of our lives; from why experts prefer to measure the chemical in the brain than ask you how you are feeling, to why Freakonomics tells us less about the way people behave than expected, The Happiness Industry is an essential guide to the marketization of modern life….
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350 printed pages
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Impressions

  • Nadya Yurinovashared an impression6 years ago
    💀Spooky
    💡Learnt A Lot
    💞Loved Up

    Just can’t stop quoting it.

Quotes

  • shmynhas quoted6 years ago
    Words such as ‘goodness’, ‘duty’, ‘existence’, ‘mind’, ‘right’, ‘wrong’, ‘authority’ or ‘cause’ might mean something to us, and they have come to dominate philosophical discourse. But, as far Bentham was concerned, there is nothing which these words actually refer to.
  • shmynhas quoted6 years ago
    ‘Man does not strive for happiness’, wrote Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘only the Englishman does that.’
  • Nadya Yurinovahas quoted6 years ago
    The reduction of social life to psychology, as performed by Jacob Moreno and behavioural economists, or to physiology as achieved by social neuroscience, is not necessarily irreversible either. Karl Marx believed that by bringing workers together in the factory and forcing them to work together, capitalism was creating the very class formation that would eventually overwhelm it. This was despite the ‘bourgeois ideology’ which stressed the primacy of individuals transacting in a marketplace. Similarly, individuals today may be brought together for their own mental and physical health, or for their own private hedonistic kicks; but social congregations can develop their own logic, which is not reducible to that of individual well-being or pleasure. This is the hope that currently lies dormant in this new, neoliberal socialism.

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