It is always difficult to review a Handbook. The difficulty increases when the Handbook is 1127 pages long. The task becomes extremely arduous when, as is the case with the Oxford Handbook of Happiness, it has more than one hundred contributors, and even embarrassing when the reviewer is an economist trained as a historian of thought, given the very narrow space assigned to the ‘economics of happiness’ and to the history of the concept of happiness. The editors state the aim of the Handbook in the first lines of their (very short!) introduction: ‘In the opening speech to the first World Congress of Positive Psychology held in Philadelphia, USA, in 2009, the founder of the positive psychology field Professor Martin Seligman called for the discipline to expand its boundaries and transform into a “positive social science”, uniting psychologists, economists, sociologists, policy-makers, philosophers, educators, health and business researches and practitioners, and thinkers in the fields of religion and spirituality’ (1). This is a stark methodological declaration, both for Oxford University Press and for the editors. The decision to make this peculiar and controversial approach to psychology (let alone to all social sciences) the vantage point for the Handbook is the major weakness of the volume. Instead of being ‘a coherent, multidisciplinary, accessible text on the current state-of-the-art in happiness research and evidence-based practice’ (4), it is a sort of manual for the spread of the term Positive Psychology. On the Oxford Handbooks website, we find that a Handbook ‘brings together the world's leading scholars to write review essays that evaluate the current thinking on a field or topic, and make an original argument about the future direction of the debate’. The present Handbook of Happiness does not match this description very well, because the ‘world's leading scholars’ of happiness are very few among the authors, and fewer are the chapters that can be considered to present an ‘original argument’. Nevertheless, this volume deserves the attention of scholars, also from disciplines other than psychology or positive psychology, interested in happiness, social relations, positive management, work design and well-being, and in recent empirical findings from the newborn field of positive psychology. It is composed of ten parts, from psychological approaches to happiness (sections I and II) to happiness interventions (section X), passing by philosophical approaches (III), social sciences and organizations (V and VII), spirituality and relationality (IV and VIII) and education and personal well-being issues (VI and IX).

The most interesting parts of the Handbook – because they are the most controversial from an Economics & Philosophy perspective – are the chapters in sections III and V, although I found some interesting and stimulating issues also in sections VII and VIII (in particular Ch. 53, ‘Work Design and Happiness’, by Searle and Parker, and Ch. 60, ‘Close Relationships and Happiness’, by Saphire-Bernstein and Taylor). Original and insightful is Ch. 20, ‘Happiness in Early Chinese Thought’ (P.J. Ivanhoe). It offers non-Western perspectives on happiness from the Confucian tradition that differ from the Aristotelian idea of eudaimonia. Particularly interesting in this chapter is the analysis of the role of music in human joy or happiness in the ancient Chinese ethical tradition.

Less convincing instead is the only chapter of the handbook entirely devoted to the history of happiness in the Western civilization, from pre-philosophical Greece to J.S. Mill (by McMahon). It is very easy to criticize ‘longitudinal’ papers or books that have to cover thousands of years of philosophy. But there are some major omissions in this historical-philosophical chapter. In presenting the very rich Greek philosophy of happiness, for example, there is no discussion of the differences between the main schools of happiness as eudaimonia (i.e. Aristotelian, Platonic, Epicurean and Stoic) that are very important for understanding contemporary approaches to happiness and the related debates (i.e. Carol Ryff vs. Daniel Kahneman, or Amartya Sen vs. Richard Layard). It is also very odd to devote only one page to ‘Christianity's philosophy of happiness’ and claiming that John's gospel idea of happiness as a blessing is ‘a simple re-assertion of the wisdom of the tragic tradition’ (255). McMahon's main justification for this claim is the etymology of the word happiness in the ‘main European languages’. The English word happiness appears in the English language in the late Middle age and comes from ‘hap’, which refers directly to luck or fate (the same root of happen). The same association between happiness and luck or fate can be found in the pre-Socratic Greek tradition and (partially) in the tragedies. McMahon thus claims that it ‘is hardly surprising that every one of these words – from the German Glück to the French bonheur – is linguistically related to good fortune or luck, what the old English called “hap”’ (255). Unfortunately, there are many problems with McMahon's claim. First, it is not obvious at all that there is a link between the German and English linguistic ways to express the concept of happiness and Christianity. In the middle age the heritage of German, Saxon and Nordic non-Christian cultures were still very deeply rooted in northern Europe, hugely affecting the evolution of languages, much more than the theological and philosophical debates and theses of Meister Eckhart, Anselm of Canterbury and the scholastics. Second, the French word bonheur does not contain a direct link to good fortune, because it is much more related to the idea of good (bon), goodness and thus not far away from the semantic region of the good life or eudaimonia. Thirdly, and more decisively, this claim completely misses the Latin influence. For McMahon the ‘main European languages’ do not include Spanish, Portuguese or Italian. But these European languages are of course the main heir of the Roman tradition. And the main Roman word for what the English and American call happiness was felicitas. In the word felicitas there is the prefix fe that is the same that we find in fe-cundus, fe-mina, fe-tus, fe-rax. The fe- recalls the concept of fecundity and flourishing, and hence the cultivation. The Latin verb Feo means ‘to produce’, to generate. This idea of happiness is therefore closer to the idea of the cultivation of virtues (post-Socratic eudaimonia) than to the mythical idea of ‘fortune’. In both the Fathers of the Church and in the scholastic theologians of the middle age, the term felicitas and not the term beatitudo is present. The Latin Felicitas is associated directly to the human flourishing, to the concept of cultivation of virtues, of bearing fruits. Furthermore, in the Roman age, and later in civic Humanism and the Latin Enlightenment, felicitas was often coupled with publica, to express the importance of the social nature of happiness rather than the individual pursuit of it.

It is thus at least controversial to write a history of the word ‘happiness’, especially within a Handbook on positive psychology and relationships, without taking into consideration this mainstream of the Western civilization. The absence of the Latin side of the happiness coin affects also McMahon's reading of the return of the issue of happiness in the European Enlightenment – and the revival of the classic issue of ‘public happiness’ – that was at the centre of the Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and French programmes of social and economic reforms. Finally, this historical chapter ends up jumping from the XVIII century to J.S. Mill, bypassing the entire earlier Utilitarian movement that made the ‘greater happiness’ the core of their philosophical and political programme, but in a direction that has little to do with eudaimonia and felicitas, and much more with Epicurus's happiness as pleasure, and the ideas of the sensist philosophers of the XVII and XVIII centuries.

Section V of the Handbook is dedicated to Happiness and Society. The only chapter dedicated to economics is ‘Economics and the Study of Individual Happiness’, written by Bruno Frey and Alois Sturzer, two of the leading economists of happiness. It is a survey of the subjective approach to happiness. Although this chapter offers in 12 pages a good account of the state of art of the topic, 12 pages out of 1127, one chapter out of 77 are not enough in a volume called ‘Handbook of Happiness’, given the quantitative dimension of the economics and happiness literature and the relevance of the issues at stake. About 40 years ago, happiness has come back into focus in economics, thanks to several empirical studies that have shown that in affluent societies subjective happiness is not only not increasing but probably decreasing. The true starting point of the new interest in empirical studies on happiness in the social sciences, however, is the research of the social psychologist Hadley Cantril (who is not present in the Index of names of the Handbook) that was published in his seminal book The Patterns of Human Concern (1965). Cantril administered questionnaires to people in 14 countries around the world, from Nigeria to Japan, thus to a highly heterogeneous mix of cultures and levels of economic development. Among the various questions aimed at measuring people's ‘hope, fear and happiness’, the following question was included: ‘Think of the worst situation in which you could find yourself and assign that 0 points; now think of the absolutely best situation and assign that 10 points. Now evaluate your present situation with a choice between 0 and 10’. Cantril's methodological provocation – and of all the ‘economists of happiness’ after him – was that of thinking that a number, say 7, by a Nigerian was comparable to a 7 by an American (a hypothesis entirely foreign to economics, as least from Vilfredo Pareto on), on the basis of the hypothesis that his approach is so fundamental that it is not significantly affected by cultural elements – each person would know how to imagine their own best and worst worlds. A second stage of happiness in economics was represented by the work of the American economist and demographer Richard Easterlin who, in 1974, building on Cantril's data, started the debate around the paradox of happiness in economics (also known today as the Easterlin paradox). Easterlin's controversial research (see also Frey and Sturzer, p. 435) showed the following results:

• - Within a single country, at a given moment, once a certain threshold value of income is exceeded, the correlation between income and happiness is not always significant and robust, and the wealthiest people are not always the happiest;

• - The comparison between countries does not yield significant correlations between income and happiness, and, once a certain threshold has been met, the poorest countries are not significantly less happy than the wealthiest;

• - Through the course of a life cycle, people's happiness seems to depend very little on variations in income and wealth.

His work was influenced by experimental psychological research. In particular, in 1971 the psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald T. Campbell, extending the theory of adaptation (or ‘set point theory’, mentioned very briefly at p. 889 of the Handbook) to the study of individual and collective happiness, reached the conclusion that improvements in the objective circumstances of life (income and wealth included) do not produce lasting effects on people's well-being. They are only temporary effects. A third important influence on Easterlin's work was the publication of The Joyless Economy by Tibor Scitovsky in 1976, a prominent American economist (not present in the Index of names). Scitovsky's work is essentially a critique of the American way of life, and, in a certain sense, the Western model of development of that time (and even more of our time). The book is among the first attempts to create a dialogue between economics and psychology. Its key idea is the distinction between comfort and stimulation goods: markets increase the demand of comfort goods, but happiness depends chiefly on stimulation goods, as most positive psychologists also think, but ignoring Scitovsky. He complained bitterly about both the economy and the society of his time: we have the technological and economic means to live a good life, but, foolishly, we remain trapped in psychological and economic mechanisms that are fuelled by the interests of large corporations and by the requirements of their economies of scale. The descriptive analysis of The Joyless Economy is thus tightly intertwined with normative considerations. These normative considerations should not be bracketed from the debate on economics and happiness.

Let me end with some (further) critical remarks about the subjective approaches to happiness in general. The important contribution that positive psychology can make to the economics of happiness stems from its emphasis on the positive anthropological characteristics of individual and social life. The anthropology of mainstream economics, by contrast, is basically focused on a very parsimonious and pessimistic idea of human beings as motivated almost solely by self-love: ‘Whether we like it or not, human beings are rivals, and it is time for mainstream economics to incorporate this key element of human nature’ (Layard Reference Layard, Bruni and Porta2005: 147). But while it is not difficult to agree with economists that frustration and dissatisfaction are a consequence of high expectations (perhaps driven by advertising) and positional comparison with others, I do not believe that we can consider human happiness something that is measured wholly along the lines of envy and competition. In other words, the prevailing economic theories seem to me to be good explanations of unhappiness and frustration, but I am not convinced that they amount to a positive theory of human happiness. Comparison with others is frequently frustrating, but we hardly consider our lives happy or fulfilled because we consume more than our co-workers. The emphasis that the positive psychology movement puts on positive relationality and sociality is important and parallels the concept of ‘relational goods’ (Gui and Sugden Reference Gui and Sugden2005) explored by some economists. In addition, both the economics of happiness and positive psychology ought to take very seriously the objective approaches to happiness, in particular A. Sen's theory of capabilities or C. Ryff's (Reference Ryff1989) idea of ‘eudaimonian wellbeing’ (also mentioned in the Handbook, p. 235). The basic question to be addressed to the subjective approach then is: Can we entrust the evaluation of the quality of our lives, of our happiness, solely to subjective perception? Subjective happiness is certainly important, but it alone is not sufficient to evaluate the goodness of life. Amartya K. Sen's claim about the ‘happy slave’ is always relevant in this regard:

Positive psychology has to take more seriously not only the positive side of emotions, feeling and life, but also the negative ones; not only the ‘blessing’, but also the ‘wound’ of social relations (Bruni Reference Bruni2012), including political and institutional wounds, associated with power. Not surprisingly, the Foreword to the Handbook is written by Jigme Khesar, the king of Bhutan, and in a second Foreword, Felicia Huppert, Director of the Cambridge University's Well-being Institute, writes: ‘Among the individual governments that have begun to consider well-being as the most fundamental goal of human progress, Bhutan has shown extraordinary initiative’ (ix). Alas, the promotion of Bhutan as the model to emulate in search of a Gross Domestic Happiness (GDH) index is troubling given the gross violations of human rights perpetrated by that country's government. I agree with Sen that the good life is measured principally on the basis of what people actually do and can do and that this objective dimension cannot be detached from how people feel about their lives (subjective happiness). Happiness that results from adapting to conditions of deprivation is radically different from happiness that occurs in circumstances without deprivation. From this perspective the old and forgotten tradition of felicitas publica may still have something important to say.