------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW --------------
Published by EH.NET (March 2007)

Luigino Bruni, _Civil Happiness: Economics and Human Flourishing in 
Historical Perspective_. New York: Routledge, 2006. xv + 169 pp. $135 
(hardcover), ISBN: 0-415-32628-1.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Edd Noell, Department of Economics, Westmont College


Economists, along with psychologists, sociologists, and 
neuroscientists, are at the forefront of modern research on happiness 
(Layard, 2005). Over the past three decades economists have been 
wrestling with the quandary posed by Easterlin's Paradox, namely that 
individuals do not report an increasing level of happiness despite 
increases in personal income over time. Through an analysis of 
developments in the history of thought on "economics and human 
flourishing," Luigino Bruni's _Civil Happiness_ finds that mainstream 
economics has lost its reliance on the civil happiness tradition and 
thus is ironically ill-equipped to explain the paradox. Bruni, an 
Associate Professor of Economics at the Universita degli Studi di 
Milano Bicocca in Italy, claims that happiness invariably involves 
interpersonal relationships yet this consideration is excluded by 
economics. While there is some hope in the work of behavioral 
economists, for the most part modern economics lacks the 
methodological tools to appreciate the role of sociality as a source 
of happiness. Bruni suggests that economics will be better served by 
appreciating the insight that happiness understood in a civil sense 
does not necessarily rise and fall with changing income levels.

Why and when did economics lose sight of the interpersonal dimension 
of happiness? Bruni points to Adam Smith and Antonio Genovesi as 
crucial figures in the late eighteenth century who took similar yet 
fundamentally different approaches to addressing happiness in the 
emerging market society. Smith's approach of treating economic 
relations instrumentally was employed by "the Cambridge civil 
tradition" of Malthus and Marshall in the nineteenth century (pp. 
88-89). In the same era Bentham's utilitarianism shaped a hedonist 
approach to economics which eventually reduced happiness to pleasure 
in the works of Jevons. By the twentieth century the influence of 
Wicksteed and Pareto had eliminated even this subjectivist approach 
to happiness, excluding civil happiness from legitimate 
consideration. The eleven chapters of Bruni's book examine both 
well-known and somewhat overlooked primary works in the history of 
economic thought to describe the manner in which this banishment 
occurred and the consequences of these developments for "happiness" 
as understood in modern economics.

In the first three chapters Bruni sets out to demonstrate the 
deficiencies of economics' understanding of happiness and the 
consequent shortcomings of current explanations of Easterlin's 
Paradox. Bruni highlights the direct relationship "between individual 
well-being and sociality-as-relationality" found in ancient Greek 
philosophy but absent in the mainstream literature of economics (p. 
17). Distinguishing between hedonism and Aristotle's eudaimonism, he 
affirms the latter concept as superior in that it provides an ethical 
approach to happiness by seeing it as the realization of an 
individual's potential. Aristotle proclaims that wealth, health and 
other goods are merely means for achieving eudaimonia (classical 
happiness), which is only achieved indirectly through the practice of 
relational virtues of intrinsic value such as friendship and 
participation in civic life. After being supplanted by Neo-Platonism 
for over a thousand years, eudaimonia was revived in the form of 
civic humanism during the Renaissance. Civic humanists describe man 
as a "civil animal" pursuing civic virtue. However, the bitter civil 
strife in Europe generated reflection on a different view of human 
nature, dubbed by Bruni the "uncivil animal" tradition and 
represented by Machiavelli, Hobbes, Mandeville, and Hume. Each have 
in common "an asocial and selfish anthropology" (p. 39).

One of the particularly strong contributions of the book is Bruni's 
discussion in chapters 4-6 of the lesser known eighteenth-century 
Italian Public Happiness tradition and its attempted reconciliation 
of the civil and uncivil perspectives on human nature. Misunderstood 
as a concept imported from the French Enlightenment, the notion of 
"public happiness" instead stems from the natural law tradition of 
Scholasticism and Civic Humanism. A key element in this tradition is 
that "there is no happiness outside society and there is no society 
without civil virtues and intentional love for the public good" (p. 
42). Genovesi is most significant here as a leader of the Neapolitan 
School of Civil Economy, which identifies happiness with reciprocity, 
in that "happiness and positive interpersonal relationships are ... 
two sides of the same coin" (p. 67). The reconciliation of civil and 
uncivil perspectives draws on the crucial role of marketplace 
reciprocity. Bruni asserts that for Genovesi "engagement in economic 
relations is an exercise of civil virtues" (p. 70) because "making 
oneself happy doesn't mean impoverishing others, but means making 
them rich as you enrich yourself and thus you become happier 
together" (p. 76). At the same time Genovesi does not facilely 
identify wealth and well-being as identical measures.

In Chapter 7, Bruni turns to the British classical school and finds 
both continuities and discontinuities with the Italian school in 
understanding civil happiness. Both Smith and Genovesi claim that 
"wealth is a means for obtaining the distinction and admiration from 
others, upon which our happiness chiefly depends" (p. 80) but wealth 
is not an end in itself. Yet Smith does not see "civil virtues as _a 
precondition for markets_" (as Genovesi does), but instead depicts 
commerce as "the 'creator' of civil virtues" (p. 83, emphasis in the 
original). For Smith market relationships don't depend on the classic 
relational virtues of friendship, benevolence and/or sympathy. Bruni 
acknowledges that Smith views them as "natural sentiments" and 
"fundamental features of human beings, just because the human being 
is naturally social and needs cooperation to survive." Still, he 
states that in Smith's estimation "_the market_ itself doesn't 
require them, and works even better without them" (pp. 87-88, 
emphasis in original). Instead of Genovesi's approach to sociality in 
the market, it is Smith's conception of the market as a place for 
instrumental yet civil relationships which shaped nineteenth-century 
classical economics.

"The Cambridge civil tradition" is examined in Chapter 8 and is 
contrasted in Chapter 9 with a "parallel stream" of thought also 
flowing in late eighteenth and nineteenth-century England, Bentham's 
Utilitarianism. Here Bruni focuses particularly on the works of 
Malthus, Marshall, and J.S. Mill. While Malthus and Marshall 
acknowledge that wealth is merely a means to happiness, and that 
happiness depends on elements in life such as friendships, leisure, 
and religion, they also consider these components of happiness to be 
"external" to economics. Malthus finds them "... to be too 
ill-defined for inclusion in the economic domain, since economic 
analysis needs data and objective measurement ..." (p. 91). At the 
same time, Mill's particular recognition of the public, relational 
dimension of happiness places him close to the civil economy 
tradition and in opposition to Bentham's reduction of happiness to 
hedonist utility. Bruni moves on to helpfully discuss the rise and 
influence of the hedonist and individualistic version of 
utilitarianism. He highlights the manner in which hedonic utility 
penetrates neoclassical economics in England (Jevons, Edgeworth) and 
Italy (Pantaleoni) so that the meaning of happiness is shrunk and 
"all connections with civic virtues" are severed. Bruni observes 
"Once Economics broke away from the classical idea of happiness, 
happiness became pleasure and Public Happiness became the sum of 
individual pleasures" (p. 104).

In Chapter 10 Bruni discusses "the solipsistic foundations of 
contemporary Economics" for which even the hedonist approach to 
happiness is abandoned. At the turn of the twentieth century, Pareto 
and Wicksteed play a key role in excluding "non-instrumental 
interpersonal relations"; Bruni makes a convincing case that in their 
work we find the reasons for "the passage from happiness/pleasure to 
purely instrumental choices without any reference to the psychology 
of the subject" (p. 108). Where Pareto drops consideration of motives 
and focuses exclusively on rational choice, Wicksteed understands 
economics to be "compatible with any motive, including altruism" and 
indeed holds that "most non-selfish behaviour is instrumental" (pp. 
115, 117). Bruni ends the chapter with a short discussion of two 
examples of modern research agendas which continue to rely on an 
instrumental framework and exclude interpersonal relationships, i.e., 
game theory and Becker's extension of economic logic to a very wide 
range of human behavior.

In the concluding chapter, Bruni names deficiencies in modern 
economic methodology yet lauds some recent developments. While many 
economists explain "genuine sociality" as a positive externality, 
they don't see "family life, friendships, and close relationships" 
(p. 122) as relevant for happiness. While they expound positional 
theories of happiness, for the most part they don't recognize 
relational goods "which cannot be produced, consumed or acquired by a 
single individual, because they depend on interaction with others and 
are enjoyed only if shared with others" (p. 124). Yet particular 
fields of economics are emerging which emphasize the significance of 
interpersonal relations. Bruni is hopeful that developments 
recognizing the role of "reciprocity, trust, intentions, fairness, 
esteem and similar concepts" in both behavioral and experimental 
economics indicate "a new season of interest for the interpersonal 
dimension" (p. 123).

Historians of economics will likely find in _Civil Happiness_ both 
useful insights and certain gaps in the thesis that call for further 
explanation. For example, researchers on Smith should benefit from 
Bruni's largely careful comparison of the Scottish moral philosopher 
and the Italian Genovesi on the market and civil life. Bruni's 
observation that the term "happiness" rarely is found in either of 
Smith's two major works and his interpretation of Smith's position on 
"happiness as deception" could well generate a new line of inquiry 
for Smithian scholarship. Yet one wishes that Bruni had more fully 
explored the role of sentiments, passions and instincts lying behind 
rational decisions which are emphasized by Smith and others prior to 
nineteenth-century classical and neoclassical economics. In addition, 
Bruni's argument leaves out any sense of why Bentham's identification 
of happiness with pleasure is so influential upon Jevons, Edgeworth 
and Pantaleoni. Further exploration of the transformation of economic 
thinking on motivation and choice with respect to happiness is needed 
here; pursuit of the analysis provided by Schabas (2005) on how 
economists came to more narrowly depict individuals as rational 
utility-maximizing human agents would be particularly helpful.

Nonetheless, _Civil Happiness_ presents an important addition to the 
economics literature on happiness through an analysis of the key 
turning points in economic thought. Bruni is particularly helpful in 
demonstrating the implicit connections between earlier sources in 
economics and two quite different facets of modern thought. One is 
the work of behavioral and experimental economists which draws on 
nineteenth-century utilitarianism; as Bruni notes, "the approach of 
the contemporary scholars working on happiness is Benthamite or 
Jevonsian, an approach where it is also allowed that people get 
happiness/pleasure from social interactions" (p. 118). The other 
feature is characteristic of mainstream economics. It relies upon the 
"methodological move performed mainly by Pareto and Wicksteed" to 
exclude subjectivist considerations and thus "has tremendous 
difficulties in understanding the interpersonal matter that is 
happiness" (pp. 108, 118). This turn in economic methodology needs to 
be reconsidered. Bruni is probably correct in asserting that an 
"economic theory more open to genuine sociality could better 
understand not only the 'Easterlin paradox' but also those 
interactions (that are growing more and more in postmodern market 
societies) characterized by the presence of relational goods" (p. 
123). _Civil Happiness_ challenges economists not to reify a narrow 
concept of happiness but rather re-examine its nature in order to 
realize greater progress in our research on a number of substantial 
dimensions of civil society.

References:

Richard Layard (2005), _Happiness: Lessons from a New Science_. New 
York: Penguin Books.

Margaret Schabas (2005), _The Natural Origins of Economics_. Chicago: 
University of Chicago Press.


Edd Noell is Professor of Economics at Westmont College and an editor 
of the journal _Faith and Economics_. His current research is 
directed towards developments in economic thought on the living wage 
in Adam Smith and in early twentieth-century British and American 
economics.

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