Bruni on The Happiness of Sociality: Economics and Eudaimonia

Mark D. White

This looks fascinating (though I have't managed to acquire a copy yet), from the latest issue of Rationality and Society (22/4, November 2010):

"The Happiness of Socialty. Economics and Eudaimonia: A Necessary Encounter"

Luigino Bruni, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy

The paper discusses some issues of the debate on happiness in economics. In particular it deals with the relationship between happiness and sociality. In fact, in contemporary ‘economics and happiness’ literature there is a new interest in interpersonal relationships thanks to the huge empirical evidence that genuine sociality is one of the heaviest components of self-reported happiness. At the same time, mainstream economics is badly equipped for studying genuine sociality, because it treats interpersonal interactions as elements to be taken into account in terms of externalities. The intuition originating the paper is the conviction that if research on happiness aims at taking into account non-instrumental interpersonal relations, i.e. ‘relational goods’, scholars will profit by a reconsideration or retrieving of the Aristotelian tradition of happiness as eudaimonia.