Happiness Once More

This essay intends to show that the tendency to overlook happiness as an important concept for the law is not the fruit of mere chance. On the verge of the nineteenth century, happiness still occupied a central place in theories of good government and in discourses about the law more generally. The nineteenth century witnessed the decline of the importance ofthe reference to the concept, and its progressive substitution with the notion of autonomy, or with concepts that are close to autonomy. This movement began first in the area of philosophy, and then spread to the law as well as to economics—with lasting, profound consequences for contemporary legal argumentation and legal theory as well. One could say that the ideology once adopted to justify certain practices underwent change over time, and, in a certain sense, this is an essay concerning the way ideological change proceeds