Signs of Happiness: A Proposal for a New Spanish Empire

A Thousand Ways to Understand happiness in the Economy of the European Union’s “Next Generation” funds. A comprehensive vision under the lens of social marketing, history and happiness management, 2022

This article presents the conceptions of great thinkers such as Thales of Miletus, Socrates, Plato, Antisthenes, Aristotle, Epicurus, Locke, Leibniz, Kant, Bertrand Russell, Nietzsche, Ortega and Gasset, Slavoj Zizek, Karl Marx and Marcuse about the happiness conquest.

A brief overview of the history of the incorporation of happiness and social well-being into economic development policy.

Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 2008

2017

Detras de los debates altamente politicos sobre la modernizacion economica espanola en los siglos XIX y XX, subyacen distintos presupuestos ideologicos de la naturaleza de sociedad. Este ensayo explora el desarrollo de las politicas de intervencion economica en Espana y las alianzas opuestas e inestable que las sustentaban a traves de una revision del pensamiento de cinco figuras clave que resumen en si misma las distintas etapas del largo camino espanol que va desde el liberalismo laissez-faire hasta la autarquia de Franco. Se concluye que las presiones economicas e ideologicas externas jugaron un papel crucial en la conformacion este amplio debate. Palabras clave: Modernizacion economica de Espana; Ideologia politica; Politicas de intervencion; Comercio libre Abstract: Behind the intensely political debates over the economic modernisation of Spain in the nineteenth century lay fundamentally different ideological assumptions about the nature of society. This paper explores the d...

Emotions and Daily Life in Colonial Mexico, 2014

Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 2015

A few notes on the concept of ‘felicitas publica’ in 18th century Political Economy In this contribution I present a few notes on the concept of public happiness to the students of the history of political economy in order to clarify the meaning of “public happiness” in the 18th century Italian context. This clarification appears to be necessary because of the recent rise in popularity that the notion of happiness enjoys among economists and historians of political economy. Recently, in particular, some authors have identified Public Happiness as the distinctive trait of a continental, mainly Italian way of understanding political economy, stressing how understanding political economy as the science of achieving public happiness, as the Italians did, differed from understanding political economy as the science of increasing the wealth of nations. These authors insisted on the importance of rediscovering the lost art of “Civil Economy” as a more humane alternative to free market capitalism, in order to provide a theoretical framework within economics for non-profit activities , or even as an ambitious “foundation for an economic theory of civil society” associated with claims that before the peace of Westphalia “social evolution was much more complex and richer than the one characterizing modernity”. My contribution is a reappraisal of the concept of public happiness in the context of the Italian Enlightenment. First of all, I want to clarify that by public happiness Muratori and Genovesi meant something very specific, namely the goal of a good Monarch. For Genovesi and Muratori, public happiness was a formula useful in asserting the rights of the Prince and the government over and above the rigidity of the legal system . It was obviously not the individual happiness of the members of the community but the final goal of the Monarch and his duty toward the Society. I have showed elsewhere by examining the image of China in the Neapolitan Enlightenment, how at least since the 1760s the political program of Genovesi and his pupils envisaged a strong government that would be able to pursue public happiness rather than be entrapped by the legal litigations of private interests. I also want to show that although public happiness resembles the Aristotelian ideal of bonum commune, it has also different characteristics and it actually originates in that sort of Aristotelian synthesis that we find in the German natural law tradition. The German tradition of Natural Law provided Muratori and Genovesi with an overall framework to understand these issues. Finally, I will show that Italian economists fell within a broader stream of thought that dominated Central Europe, and that their intellectual roots in the Natural Law tradition make them close relatives of the German Cameralists rather than the Scottish Enlightenment.

2012