Abstract
The siren’s call of happiness surrounds us everywhere; our friends post selfies of themselves with the hashtag ‘happy’, wellness websites like GOOP host articles that promise simple tips on the habit of being happy, bookstores stock the self-help shelves with titles such as Getting Back to Happy and The Happiness Advantage, even the United Nations publishes the annual ‘Happiness Report’. Happiness, as Edgar Cabanas and Eva Illouz point out, haunts our cultural imaginary. It is more than an emotion. Under neoliberalism, it is a political concept where the pursuit of happiness legitimizes and institutionalizes the individualism in seemingly neutral terms (p. 52).
In their new book Manufacturing Happy Citizens: How the Science and Industry of Happiness Control Our Lives Cabanas and Illouz critically reflect upon the contemporary obsession with happiness and positivity. The book is a scathing commentary on how the moral dictates of happiness and positivity undermine citizenship and our social commitments to community.
Cabanas and Illouz argue that our obsessive drive to happiness spurred on by psychologists, economists, and self-help gurus has generated new forms of oppressive governmental control and regulation. Drawing from critical sociology, while building on the field of affect theory and critiques of neoliberalism, the book outlines how happiness, and what the authors call the ‘tyranny of positivity’ control our lives. Supported by the neoliberal logics of individualism, market economics and governmental policies that objectify the individual pursuit of happiness over the communal desires for public institutions, this produces what they call a ‘hapacracy’ where citizens are recast as ‘psyitzens’. The psytizen, is an individualist and consumerist subjectivity in which the ‘continuous self-optimization through psychological means’ is a form of selfhood which can never be completed, and requires a constant return to the market (p. 116). Happiness is a form of control and we are ‘servants of its obsessive pursuit’: a consumerist logic where the drive for happiness functions to legitimize happiness as worthy of pursuing (p. 177).
Cabanas and Illouz base their arguments on a deep analysis of the science and industry of happiness, specifically, the happiness experts, the wellness gurus, and the pop culture psychologists who espouse the refrains of positive thinking and mindfulness as emotional well-being. The authors have four main critical concerns of the reductionist view that happiness is the desired state of being. The first concern, they call epistemological, critiques how happiness as a concept is positioned as being scientific, objective, and measurable. The second, is sociological in that the pursuit of happiness privileges individual pursuits over collective consciousness. The third concern, deemed the phenomenological, exposes how the quest for happiness and personal fulfilment is normalized and promised through a whole range of market commodities. The last concern is moral in that the science of happiness presents an illusion of choice, as it obliges the individual to be happy and blames the individual for not leading a more successful and fulfilling life, erasing the structural and political realities, and the possibilities of change.
One deficit of the book is that the authors fail to address the environmental implications of happiness’s role in the expansion of commodity culture and how happiness functions as a means to distract from the environmental devastation of the material pursuit of happiness. Despite this Manufacturing Happy Citizens is an important book that exposes how these seemingly benign and valiant goals of happiness and positivity fit within the commercial logics of the marketplace as they strengthen neoliberal political regimes of control. It is an engaging read for anyone interested in the fields of political economy, affect studies, as well as those looking for a critical analysis of popular psychology, neoliberalism, or the contemporary workings of capitalism. The book speaks to many audiences and sections of the book could be used by upper-level undergraduate students and graduate students to illustrate the complex workings of neoliberalism and consumer capitalism.
The book is well crafted and skilfully researched. The authors eloquently draw upon a wide array of familiar examples from the happiness industry to underline their key arguments. Interviews with happiness and wellness experts on Oprah, movies such as the 2006 blockbuster the Pursuit of Happyness [sic], quotations by Don Draper on Mad Men, in addition to a deep dive into a plethora of self-help books, empowerment guides and manifestos on living one’s best life, all provide fodder for their analysis.
In conclusion, Manufacturing Happy Citizens, offers a rich addition to a growing array of scholarly work that excavates the complex workings of happiness, and our overwhelming hedonistic drives to find happiness in commodity culture. It is a timely book in which its underlying thesis must be read in the context of our current ecological crisis.