Public Happiness in the Enlightenment: Evolution of a Discourse

From José Antonio Maravall to Gabriel Paquette, numerous historians have commented on the tendency of the enlightened absolute monarchies of the eighteenth century to justify their policy decisions in terms of the “public happiness.” While the phrase became vastly more popular after the publication of Ludovico Muratori’s regalist Della pubblica felicità in 1749, the phrase can be traced back to the neo-Tacitean constitutional regalism of the late Renaissance, and before that to Roman imperial propaganda. The focal point of this poster will be an annotated timeline of references to public happiness in European political discourse between about 1650 and 1800. It will argue that the apogee of public happiness as a justificatory rhetoric for French, Spanish, and Italian enlightened absolutism occurred between about 1745 and 1770. During this 25-year period, the public happiness was frequently marshaled as a good which could only be defended by the absolute monarch and his administration, which consequently needed to seize as much power as possible from local representative bodies and the established Church. Before 1745, public happiness was commonly conceived eudaemonically, a result of the synthesis engineered by Justus Lipsius between virtuous conduct on the part of the prince and explicit constitutionalism. After 1780, public happiness was often framed by political writers as a mere byproduct of civil liberties and economic freedom, with a reduced or absent place for the absolute monarch and central state.

Major events on the timeline which will receive the most extensive commentary and annotation include Muratori’s 1749 publication and its European reception; Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes’s several defenses of state expropriation of ecclesiastical mortmain properties on the grounds of the state’s better ability to manage them in service of the public happiness; and Voltaire’s defense of absolutism in the History of Peter the Great (1759). Before and after this heyday of eudaemonic enlightened absolutism we find “public happiness” more commonly associated with a constitutionalist monarchy overseeing a eudaemonic civil society, as in Fénélon’s Telemachus, Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and Andrés Mendo’s Perfect Prince. After 1770, numerous French publications after around 1770 marshaled Muratori’s own arguments against absolutism, including those of François-Jean de Chastellux, confidant of George Washington, François-Joseph de L’Ange, socialist justice of the peace, and most famously Necker and Rousseau. In Spain, Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, the father of the constitution and national parliament, redefined public happiness as widespread access to civil liberties, education, and entrepreneurship, and was followed in this by the romantic nationalist Juan Pablo Forner, among others. Enlightened absolutism was above all a propaganda rhetoric, and a relatively short-lived one, rather than a reality. This poster therefore contributes important data as to its periodization and more generally to the lexical history of the Enlightenment.