2.1 Freud’s pessimism about happiness

Committed to the ideals of the Enlightenment, Freud hailed the dignity, power, and autonomy of human beings and encouraged people to trust their own reason as a guide to establishing valid ethical norms. Growing up in an acculturated Jewish home in Vienna, Freud trained as a medical scientist at the University of Vienna, even though in 1925 he admitted that ‘he never wanted to be a physician’, and that his original interest lay in ‘human concerns’ and ‘cultural problems’ (Rief 1979: 3). As a medical scientist, Freud’s early work focused on physiology, aiming to correlate neurophysiological hypotheses with physical facts. Yet, Freud also saw himself as ‘a leader of a movement to extend the vision of science, by rational means, beyond the limits the empiricists had set for it’ (Rief 1979: 4). Using ‘models from physics to explain the functioning of the mind and brain, [and] thereby giving an apparent sophistication—and prestige—to his theories’, Freud discussed ‘energy, force, resistance, pressure, blocking’, the very same physical processes that made possible the industrialization of Europe in the nineteenth century (Maniacci 2012: 7). Not surprisingly, the steam engine became Freud’s main metaphor to describe the dynamics of mental life, and when electricity was discovered, electrical circuits became the model of the nervous system, even though the term ‘energy’ was no more than ‘a rhetorical mask for the ethical direction of his thought’ (Rief 1979: 21). Gradually, Freud broke with the science of medicine, and his theories came closer to philosophy. If in his early career he held that in psychology ‘the mental is based on the organic’, over time he changed his views and held that ‘the body exists as symptoms of mental demands’ (Rief 1979: 6). By 1925, Freud made a radical break with the medicine of his day as he devised ‘the nonphysical method of treating disease which psychoanalysis relies on’ (Rief 1979: 11).

Freud arduously promoted psychoanalysis as a ‘science’, which for him was necessarily in conflict with ‘religion’ since the latter was but an ‘illusion’, ‘delusion’, or a ‘universal obsessional neurosis’ that contributes to the ‘infantilization’ of the human mind (Freud 1989: 38–43, 54–56, 67–68). Despite his critique of religion and his unfavourable views of Judaism, Freud never denied his Jewish identity, nor did he sever his ties with other Jews or with Jewish organizations, such as Bnai Brith (Klein 1985: 69-85; Salberg 2007). Indeed, most of his associates were other assimilated Jews and he had strong emotional ties to his cultural heritage (Rice 1990; Yerushalmi 1991). Defining himself as a ‘Godless Jew’, Freud saw no contradiction between Jewishness and atheism or between ethnic pride and integration into non-Jewish society. While anti-Semitism thrived in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century, especially in Vienna, Freud asserted his Jewishness but rejected the anti-Semitic dismissal of psychoanalysis as a ‘Jewish science’ (Richards 2014).

The depth of Freud’s secularization is evident in his interpretation of Jewish monotheism. In his Moses and Monotheism (1939), Freud presented Moses as an Egyptian prince who led a band of followers out of Egypt. Moses was depicted as a dictatorial figure who was eventually assassinated by his followers in a revolt against his oppressive leadership. The rebels eventually merged with another Semitic tribe, adopting their monotheistic belief, and that blend eventually became Judaism. For Freud, the murder of Moses and its subsequent repression by the entire people defined Jewish monotheism because it was the subconscious guilt about the murder that manifested itself in Jewish religious obligations. Similarly, for Freud the Jewish belief in the Messiah was no more than an attempt to reconnect to the sublimated need for a father-leader. From a psychoanalytic perspective, religion in general and Judaism in particular could not bring about human happiness; in fact, happiness (that is, mental health) requires overcoming the delusion of religion and its obsessive-compulsive practices. Although Freud resisted the perception of psychoanalysis as a ‘Jewish science’, the Jewishness of psychoanalysis could be neither ignored nor erased (Klein 1985; Heinze 2004) and is still evident today (Johansson and Punzi 2019).

In terms of intellectual history, Freudian psychoanalysis is the culmination of Renaissance humanism: humans now stand at the centre of the world as their desires, wishes, impulses, thoughts, hopes, and yearnings became the objects of scientific exploration and analysis. Under the probing analysis of the ‘science of the psyche’, human interiority was no longer mysterious; personality, character traits, behaviour, preferences, attitudes, pathologies, and optimal functioning could all be explained scientifically by reference to materially based processes. In approaching psychic life rationally and scientifically, Freud had much in common with Stoic moral philosophy, since the Stoics believed in the power of human reason to understand and control the chaos produced by embodied emotions (Rief 1979: 17, 49; cf. Annas 1993). Although Freud was well-read in Western philosophy and literature, he did not cite these sources to protect the ‘scientific’ aura of psychoanalysis. In his theorizing of human nature, Freud tried to root human nature in larger natural forces, on the one hand, while insisting that humans are distinct from the rest of nature, on the other hand (Rief 1979: 29).

Through its distinctive methods (e.g. free association, dream interpretation, attention to jokes or verbal mistakes, and transference) Freud’s psychoanalysis claimed to uncover the unconscious processes that shape personal identity (such as repression, sublimation, resistance, projection, depression, and rationalization, among others). As self-introspection, spoken out loud in the presence of an attentive but objective listener, Freud’s ‘talking cure’ allowed the analysand to become aware of his or her previously unconscious perceptions, emotions, attitudes, or values that cause ‘neuroses’, that is, symptoms that cause social disfunction and unhappiness. Freud, the medical scientist, held that ‘happiness coincides with health and unhappiness with neurosis’ (Bukowski 2020: 12; cf. Lear 2002; Gillman 2010), and in so doing he medicalized happiness. But can psychoanalysis ‘cure’ one’s neuroses? Can psychoanalysis make one happy? What does happiness mean in psychoanalytic terms? Freud became ever more pessimistic about the power of psychoanalysis to cure neuroses or assure flourishing. In his last book, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), whose original German title was Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, Freud answered this question in the negative. Psychoanalysis does not lead to human flourishing; it only helps one cope with ‘common unhappiness’, the basic human condition.

Like the utilitarians, Freud identified happiness with pleasure, which he interpreted as satisfaction or gratification of needs (Lear 2015: 197–198). He acknowledged that people

strive after happiness; they want to become happy and to remain so. This endeavor has two sides, a positive and a negative aim. It aims, on the one hand, at an absence of pain and displeasure, and, on the other hand, at the experiencing of strong feelings of pleasure. (Freud 2002: 42)

Freud declared the ‘pleasure principle’ to be the primary motivation of human conduct – but he also maintained that the ‘pleasure principle’ does not make one happy, because social conventions and expectations (i.e. ‘civilization’) do not allow a person to do whatever gives them pleasure. Moreover, social expectations cause people to feel guilty or ashamed, and the result is that ‘civilized’ human beings are unavoidably unhappy. The intense self-examination of psychoanalysis cannot cure the incurable, but it can lead to improved social functioning when the ‘pleasure principle’ (expressed in libidinal energies) is tamed by the ‘reality principle’. Freud’s pessimism about happiness is unmistaken when he states:

What we call happiness in the strictest sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree, and it is from its nature only possible as an episodic phenomenon. When any situation that is desired by the pleasure principle is prolonged, it only produces a feeling of mild contentment. We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from contrast and very little from a state of things. Thus, our possibilities of happiness are already restricted by our constitution. (Freud 2002: 43)

If so, the psychologically healthy person is the one who recognizes that unhappiness is the inevitable human condition. Freud put it as follows:

Unhappiness is much less difficult to experience. We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally, from our relations to other men. (Freud 2002: 43–44)

Since ‘common unhappiness’ characterizes the human condition, Freud categorically asserts that ‘the intention that man should be happy is not included in the plan of “Creation”’ (Freud 2002: 43), thereby dismissing the age-old religious discourse on happiness shared by Jews and Christians. According to Freud, religion is but a ‘mass delusion’ (Freud 2002: 51) and religion does not and cannot lead one to happiness because

religion […] imposes on everyone its own path to the acquisition of happiness and protection from suffering. Its technique consists in depressing the value of life and distorting the picture of the real world in a delusional manner—which presupposes an intimidation of the intelligence. (Freud 2002: 56)

To be happy, one must give up religious delusions while becoming as self-aware as possible. Freud concluded that

[t]he programme of becoming happy, which the pleasure principle imposes on us, cannot be fulfilled, yet we must not—indeed, we cannot—give up our effort to bring it nearer to fulfillment by some means or other […]. Happiness, in the reduced sense in which we recognize it as possible, is a problem of the economics of the individual’s libido. There is no golden rule which applies to everyone: every man must find out for himself in what particular fashion he can be saved. All kinds of different factors will operate to direct his choice. […] The man who is predominantly erotic will give first preference to his emotional relationships to other people; the narcissistic man, who inclines to be self-sufficient, will seek his main satisfactions in his internal mental processes; the man of action will never give up the external world on which he can try out his strength. (Freud 2002: 54)

Admitting that people try to be happy in different ways, Freud maintained that happiness remains largely unattainable. Jonathan Lear has insightfully noted that Freud’s pessimism (or realism) echoes Aristotle’s. Although Aristotle was the first to state that happiness is what all human beings seek, he also held that ‘happiness by and large eludes the human condition’:

most people are not and will never be happy; […] the elite who lead an ethically virtuous life, achieve only second-rate happiness; [and] those few who are able to lead a contemplative life will at best be able to contemplate for relatively short period of their lives. (Lear 2002: 55)

Freud’s pessimism notwithstanding, in the twentieth century psychoanalysis emerged as a secular, scientifically grounded path toward human flourishing, helping people to understand themselves better so that they can remove or overcome factors that hamper their flourishing. This more optimistic approach was articulated and promoted by Alfred Adler, one of Freud’s early collaborators who later became his critic and rival.

2.2 Alfred Adler: happiness as social interest

Alfred Adler was born into a family of Hungarian-Jewish grain merchants that settled in a suburb of Vienna (Stepansky 1983; Hoffman 1994). The family’s fortunes vacillated between affluence and near-poverty, and Adler, who grew up in a predominantly Christian neighbourhood, was strongly aware that Jewishness imposes social marginality (Heinze 2004: 74). As a young child, Adler also experienced the loss of his infant brother and his own physical weakness due to rickets. Adler’s success in overcoming these limitations contributed not only to his theorizing of the inferiority complex, but also to his approach to happiness as the desire to fulfil human potential and to realize ideals and goals. Like other assimilated Jews in Europe, Adler’s parents attended synagogue only sporadically, and Adler’s Jewish upbringing centred mainly on the Bible. Attending the same Gymnasium as did Freud fourteen years earlier, Adler was schooled in the German humanistic tradition, with its emphasis on history, literature, and philosophy, before he went on to pursue medical studies at the University of Vienna, specializing in ophthalmology.

Trained as a clinician rather than a medical researcher, and inspired by his socialist and political activist wife, Raissa Epstein, Adler established a clinic in a lower-to-middle class neighbourhood where he attended to people’s medical needs and added psychiatry to his medical practice. In his clinical work, Adler was struck by the ability of people ‘to compensate and overcompensate for their deformities and still meet the tasks of life, work, friendship and love’ (Maniacci 2012: 2). Using Freud’s psychoanalytic theories, Adler focused on organ deformities, especially in children, and his early path-breaking studies led Freud to invite Adler and three others to the Wednesday Night Meetings, which became the first psychoanalytic society. Adler, rather than Freud, was appointed its first president, and with Freud he co-edited the first psychoanalytic journal they launched together (Maniacci 2012: 3). After working together with Freud from 1902 to 1911, the two parted ways because Adler deviated from Freud’s theories regarding the Oedipus complex, repression and the ‘masculine protest’, and the inferiority of women. Since Adler challenged the cornerstone of Freud’s psychology – that sexual libido is the primary motivating force in human personality – Adler had no choice but to resign his position as president of the society and chart his own psychoanalytic career. He established the Society of Free Psychoanalytic Research (which changed its name to The Society for Individual Psychology in 1912), and Adlerian psychology generated its own cadre of psychotherapists whose methods differed significantly from Freudian psychotherapy. Unlike Freud, who despised religion, Adler respected religion and tried to understand the role of religion in the worldview of his patients. According to Adler,

there can be no question that the idea of God really includes within it as a goal the movement towards perfection, and that, as a concrete goal, it best corresponds to the obscure yearnings of human beings to reach perfection. (Adler 2009a: 199)

Also unlike Freud, in 1904 Adler converted to Christianity, whereas Freud remained a proud ‘Godless Jew’ to the end of his life.

‘Individual Psychology’ is a confusing term since Adler’s psychological theories and clinical practice, unlike Freud’s, focused on human socialization (Ansbacher and Ansbacher 1964). Indeed, the goal of Individual Psychology was proper social functioning. The term ‘individual’ came from the Latin individuum (indivisible) to convey Adler’s insight that the human person is a self-consistent unity. Adler taught that ‘the foremost task of Individual Psychology is to prove this unity in each individual—in his thinking, feeling, acting, in his so-called conscious and unconscious, in every expression of his personality’ (Adler 1956: 175, cited in Mosak and Maniacci 1999: 14). For Adler, human character, functioning, and flourishing are all predicated on a sense of self-worth and belonging – or, as he named it, ‘community feeling’ (Gemeinschaftsgefühl) – that the individual experiences, starting within the family unit. Precisely because humans are social animals, they need to feel significant; they need to belong and to be accepted by others. Those feelings and self-perceptions emerge first within the family through interactions with parents and siblings. Psychic health and flourishing are thus inherently relational, emerging out of social relations rather than gratification of psychic needs. Given this insight, Adler paid attention to birth order, parental education, parenting style, sibling relations, and the negative emotions they generate, such as inferiority, humiliation, or marginality. While these emotions are not pleasant, they are not rigidly deterministic: they can be changed because individuals have the freedom to choose to act differently, overcoming their initial perceived inferiority and achieving superiority, or self-mastery. The goal of Individual Psychology is social adjustment and improved functioning.

Open to philosophy, Adler was more transparent than Freud about the philosophical sources that framed his ideas about humanity and human happiness (Tirosh-Samuelson 2026a). From Aristotle, Adler derived the notion that human behaviour is purposeful, so that human life is always a goal-directed movement. The most common human goal is to belong, and that goal may be either accomplished or thwarted. From Spinoza, Adler took the insight that all organisms are motivated by the striving from ‘moving from a perceived minus situation to a perceived plus situation’ (Mosak and Maniacci 1999: 21) and that striving can be done in prosocial ways when the individual considers the long-term goods, or welfare of others, or in antisocial ways, when the individual considers only short-term gains at the expense of others (Mosak and Maniacci 1999: 23). Friedrich Nietzsche’s insightful probing enabled Adler to see that

people attempted to distance themselves from responsibilities, and that most problems people developed were because they were competitive, and their unwillingness to acknowledge such competitive striving fostered all sorts of dysfunctions. Unconscious processes led people to make choices for which they were responsible but unaware. (Maniacci 2012: 8)

Additionally, in the teaching of the existentialist philosopher Heinz Vaihinger, Adler encountered the notion (which can be traced to Immanuel Kant) that individuals develop conceptual frameworks as ‘maps’ that enable them to navigate through the world. Some people, however, treat these ‘maps’ too rigidly, confusing the map with terrain it is meant to describe. Adler developed these ideas into a holistic theory and clinical practice in which the conscious and unconscious of the individual were two sides of the same coin, and one’s lifestyle reflected one’s perception of the world and one’s creative response to it.

Flourishing, Adler observed (echoing Spinoza), is what all organisms aspire to. Humans strive for completeness (Volkommenheit) and their path towards it is determined in part by biological facts they inherited from their parents and the social conditions into which they were born. When human beings react to these facts creatively and responsibly, they thrive, overcoming an initial sense of inferiority or deficiency. Human beings can only flourish in society when they creatively own and express their innate powers, if necessary with the help of psychotherapy. Human flourishing is thus predicated on cooperation with others and psychic health is achieved when we feel connected and able to cooperate. Working with the poor, socially marginal, and even criminals, Adler developed his social theories that took into consideration the cognitive structures that underline personality (e.g. the self-concept, ideal self, life-pattern, worldview, motivation, and ethical convictions) that people acquire by interacting with others in school, with peers at work, and in religious institutions. In contrast to Freud, who considered religion as ‘mass delusion’, Adler regarded it as the basis for prosocial behaviour, because religion allows us to consider the common good. The biblical maxim, ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’ is the very basis of our ‘community feeling’ or ‘social interest’ that constitutes human flourishing.

For Adler, individuals flourish when they address three major challenges: communal life or social relationships; work or useful contribution to society; and sex and intimacy. Each holistic and indivisible person flourishes in a distinct way reflecting their striving toward the attainment of their life goal through creative overcoming of initial sense of inferiority. If in his early career, under Freud’s influence, Adler emphasized ‘deficits, pathology, and remediation’ as he developed his own theories, Adler shifted the emphasis to ‘strengths, healthy human development, and prevention’ (Watts 2012: 44). This is precisely the shift that Martin Seligman later called for in his famous speech to the American Psychological Association in 1998, which gave rise to positive psychology and happiness studies (see section 3). Adler’s focus on the search for meaning (Adler 2009b) also predated Viktor Frankl’s linkage of happiness and meaning; and Adler, more than Freud, established psychoanalysis as ‘the science of living’ (Adler 2013).

2.3 Erich Fromm: happiness as ‘being’ rather than ‘having’

Building on the theories of Freud and Adler, Erich Fromm was the psychoanalyst who theorized happiness most explicitly and extensively. Born into an Orthodox Jewish family in 1900 in Frankfurt, Germany, Fromm was better acquainted with the literary sources of Judaism than Freud and Adler were. In his teens, Fromm was tutored in Talmud, medieval philosophy, and Hasidism by Rabbi Salman Rabinkow (d. 1941) who was ‘a devout socialist from Russia, where he had studied at a yeshiva as an adherent of Habad Hasidism and then been ordained as a rabbi’ (Friedman 2013: 15). Through Rabinkow’s interpretation, Fromm absorbed the blend of Marxism, radical politics, and traditional Jewish pietism that was shared by other Jewish intellectuals in Frankfurt, among them Ernst Simon and Leo Löwenthal, Fromm’s friends. All three fell under the influence of Rabbi Nehemiah Anton Nobel (d. 1922), the charismatic leader of the Frankfurt’s Orthodox Jewish community who was ordained in the Berlin Hildesheimerchen Seminar and who studied in Marburg with the neo-Kantian and socialist Hermann Cohen. Following Cohen, Rabbi Nobel taught Fromm that ethics is a universal code that applies to all of humanity, and that the messianic ideas of the biblical prophets were compatible with Socialism. For Cohen (as well as for Rabinkow and Fromm and numerous other Jewish intellectuals in Central Europe), socialism was secularized Jewish messianism. What Fromm would later call ‘radical humanism’ or ‘socialist humanism’ was a humanism informed by the ideals of biblical prophets that resulted in revolutionary activity against capitalist society. Fromm’s mature theorizing on human happiness was intertwined with his critique of modern, capitalist, industrialized, technological society in which unhappiness is pervasive.

Fromm’s Social Psychology was a full-fledged theory about human functioning within social relations. At the University of Heidelberg (1918–1922) Fromm studied sociology with Alfred Weber, the brother of Max Weber, writing a dissertation titled ‘On Jewish Law: Contribution to the Sociology of Diaspora Judaism’ (1922). His socioreligious analysis was inspired by the sociology of culture, articulated by the Weber brothers, Karl Jaspers, and Heinrich Rickert, among others. Written while Fromm was still an observant Jew, this early work illustrates Fromm’s effort to understand all aspects of the human temporal experience (i.e. economic, social, cultural, psychical, and spiritual), generating his comprehensive Social Psychology that focused on the ‘social character’. Building on Adler (who, like Fromm, was a socialist), but going beyond him, Fromm attempted to understand the

intersubjective as well as material, structural and functional layers of social relations and sociality. It is this that gives causal power to social relations and makes them the primary object of critique and the aim of social transformation. (Thompson 2020: 25)

Fromm sought to understand how the forms of existential subjective being are shaped by the nature and structure of social relations, which over time are reified, giving society its permanence and coherence. Social relations can be evaluated in terms of the ends they promote. Defective relations reflect ends that are nonfulfilling in terms of human potential or power, whereas good social relations indicate the fulfilment of human potentialities, marking human flourishing and thriving. Fromm held that human flourishing can be experienced in this life if we understand the meaning of happiness: happiness does not depend on what one has but who one is, precisely as Aristotle already maintained.

During his years in Heidelberg, Fromm was introduced to psychoanalysis when he fell in love with Frieda Reichmann, eleven years his senior, who also came from an Orthodox Jewish family. She was a trained psychoanalyst who worked with wounded soldiers during and after the First World War. Reichmann psychoanalysed Fromm and in 1931 they married, although the marriage did not thrive; they separated within a few years and were formally divorced in 1942, when they were both settled in the United States where their careers as psychoanalysts blossomed. In 1923 Reichman and Fromm opened a therapeutic facility for Jewish patients in Heidelberg, which ‘integrated the basics of Jewish life—celebration of the Sabbath and other Holidays and rituals, kosher food, a steady diet of traditional Jewish literature, common prayers, and Fromm’s lectures on theology’ (Friedman 2013: 20). In what was basically a socialist Jewish commune, Reichmann and Fromm, who were friends of Martin Buber, ‘conceived of therapy as a close interpersonal “I–Thou” relationship as well as a method to alleviate deep psychic repression’ (Friedman 2013: 20). Alas, the therapeutic commune not only failed to reach its utopian aspirations it also contributed to Fromm’s and Reichman’s departure from Orthodox Jewish life; breaking their observance of kashrut was their typical first step in their process of becoming secularized Jews.

Fromm went on to complete his psychoanalytic training in Munich and Berlin, and through Reichmann became acquainted with the leaders of the psychoanalytic movement. His immersion in both psychoanalysis and Marxism recommended him to the leaders of the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who recruited him in 1929. First in Frankfurt, his home town, and later in the United States where he settled in 1934 and to which the Frankfurt Institute would relocate in 1936, Fromm developed his account of ‘social character’ that explains ‘the dynamic process whereby socially shaped needs and desires for characteristic human forms of relationship are fostered in a particular society (and for particular groups of that society in similar and different ways)’ (Durkin and Braune 2020: 11). Stressing deep, varied, and dynamic psychological processes that characterize social life, Fromm paid attention to the role of emotions and unconscious processes that interact with the process of socialization, but that cannot be reduced to it.

While he was associated with the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, Fromm conducted important sociological studies that critically engaged the social structures of modern society. However, by 1939, Fromm’s relationship with the leaders of the Frankfurt Institute soured, and his position was terminated mainly because Fromm deviated from Freudian orthodoxy. In the early 1940s, Fromm suffered two other public humiliations: in 1943, he was stripped of his privileges as a training analyst in the American Institute for Psychoanalysis (AIP), the training wing of the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis (AAP), which was founded by Karen Horney, who was Fromm’s lover since 1934. In this public scandal, the breakup of a romantic relationship was masqueraded as a professional dispute about Fromm’s credentials to train psychoanalysts, since he had a PhD in sociology rather than a medical degree. In 1946, Fromm’s position as a member of the International Psychological Association was also terminated, once again because of his departure of from Freud, especially in Fromm’s first bestseller, Escape from Freedom (1941). An exile once more, Fromm settled in Mexico City in 1947, where he helped found psychoanalytic training programs, societies, and clinics, emerging as an internationally renowned public intellectual who shaped public discourse through books addressed to non-specialists.

In the post-Second World War years, Fromm became one of the most penetrating philosophers of human flourishing, reflecting on the meaning of being human, a range of social ills (e.g. alienation; exploitation; poverty; injustice), and the threats to human survival (e.g. the Cold War, the danger of nuclear arms, the ecological crisis, and emerging technologies). Integrating psychology, sociology, philosophy, history, literature, religion, and wisdom traditions, Fromm became a celebrated author of bestsellers, most famously, Escape from Freedom, The Sane Society (1955), The Art of Loving (1956), The Revolution of Hope (1968), and To Have or to Be? (1976) – a sage whose wise advice was sought by statesmen, educators, and intellectuals. Fromm’s reflections on human happiness and unhappiness were inseparable from his Marxist critique of capitalist, consumerist, hedonistic, industrialized, and technologically saturated Western society of the post-Second World War era.

Written four years prior to his death, To Have or to Be? summarizes Fromm’s insightful reflections on human flourishing. The book opens with this charge:

The Great Promise of Unlimited Progress—the promise of domination of nature, of material abundance, of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, and of unimpeded personal freedom—has sustained the hopes and faith of generations since the beginning of the industrial age […]. The trinity of unlimited production, absolute freedom, and unrestricted happiness formed the nucleus of a new religion. Progress, and a new Earthly City of Progress was to replace the City of God. It is not at all astonishing that this new religion provided its believers with energy, vitality and hope. (Fromm 2013: 1, 2)

Admitting the ‘marvelous material and intellectual achievements’ of the industrial age, Fromm claimed that the industrial age failed to fulfil the Great Promise, and that people had finally become aware of the failure. Contrary to the utilitarian approach to happiness, Fromm charged that ‘unrestricted satisfaction of all desires is not conductive to well-being, nor is the way to happiness or even to maximum pleasure’ (Fromm 2013: 2). Fromm observes that the Great Promise was built on two psychological assumptions that

[1] the aim of life is happiness, that is, maximum pleasure, defined as the satisfaction of any desire or subjective needs a person may feel (radical hedonism); and (2) that egotism, selfishness, and greed, as the system needs to generate them in order to function, leads to harmony and peace. (Fromm 2013: 3)

Radical hedonism, he argues, cannot lead to happiness the so-called ‘“pursuit of happiness” does not produce well-being’. Even without theoretical analysis, so claimed Fromm, observable data documents that ‘we are a society of notoriously unhappy people: lonely, anxious, depressed, destructive, dependent—people who are glad when we have killed the time we are trying to save’ (Fromm 2013: 5–6). In modern, industrialized societies people fail to experience wellbeing even though ‘for the first time in history the satisfaction of the pleasure drive is not only the privilege of a minority but is possible for more than half the population’ (Fromm 2013: 6). Why is it the case that in modern societies people are ‘notoriously unhappy’? Because they focus on ‘having’ rather than on ‘being’. The obsession with ‘having’ in which the individual mistakenly believes that ‘the more I have, the more I am’ has not yielded wellbeing but rather its opposite: sick individuals and sick society. In contrast, by focusing on ‘being’ rather than ‘having’, people can flourish during their life on Earth, without speculating about the afterlife where God’s justice will be meted out.

For Fromm, human flourishing is ‘productive activity’ in which people develop their own potential and experience the fullness of life by becoming lovers: that is, lovers of life, lovers of persons, the lovers of ideas, or lovers of nature. ‘Activity’ does not mean ‘busyness’ (which is the foundation of ‘business’) but ‘activeness’, namely, an internal process of growth and development (Fromm 1973: 12). In his famous book, The Art of Loving, Fromm taught that ‘love is an art, just as living is an art’ (Fromm 2006: 5). To flourish we need to learn the art of love like any other art by mastering a body of theoretical knowledge and then undertake ‘a great deal of practice, until eventually the results of my theoretical knowledge and the results of my practice are blended into one—my intuition, the essence of the mastery of any art’ (Fromm 2006: 5). With a nod to the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, Fromm tells the reader that ‘the mastery of the art must be a matter of ultimate concern; there must be nothing else in the world more important than the art. This holds true for music, for medicine, for carpentry—and for love’ (2006: 5). For Fromm, love is not a theoretical abstraction or an emotion, but an activity; love is dynamic rather than static; it involves the process of becoming through interaction with the world; it is productive in the sense that it is creative and generative bringing new things to life. As a ‘productive activity’, love expresses ‘caring for, knowing, responding, affirming, enjoying: the person, the tree, the painting, the idea. It means bringing to life, increasing his/her/its aliveness. It is a process, self-renewing and self-increasing’ (Fromm 2006: 44). Human beings flourish when they become lovers of life and when they experience the joy that come with practicing ‘the art of loving’, ‘the art of living’, and ‘the art of being’, all titles of his bestselling books.

Fromm’s humanistic approach integrates elements from other philosophies and religions, including German Lebensphilosophie, Buddhism, Christianity, Marxism, and, most relevantly here, Judaism. Fromm renounced Jewish observance in 1926, but his knowledge of Jewish religious sources is on display in his writings. Indeed, Fromm’s first academic publication was the essay ‘Der Sabbath’, published in Freud’s journal Imago (Fromm 1927), and the Sabbath is presented as the paradigm of this-worldly human flourishing in his last publication, To Have Or to Be (1976; see Fromm 2013). In between these two texts he published You Shall Be as Gods: A Radical Interpretation of the Old Testament and Its Tradition (1966), in which his command of biblical, Rabbinic, philosophic and Hasidic texts is on full display. Thus, although he had already renounced traditional Jewish life decades earlier. In his last book To Have Or to Be, Fromm stated that ‘[i]t can hardly be doubted that the Shabbat was the fountain of life for the Jews, who, scattered, powerless, and often despised and persecuted, renewed their pride and dignity when like kings they celebrated the Shabbat’ (2013: 50). The Shabbat is a day of

rest in the sense of the re-establishment of complete harmony between human beings and between them and nature. Nothing must be destroyed, and nothing be built. Shabbat is a day of truce in the human battle with the world. (Fromm 2013: 51)

For that reason,

the Shabbat is a day of joy because on that day one is fully oneself. This is the reason the Talmud calls a Shabbat the anticipation of the Messianic Time, and the Messianic Time the unending of Shabbat: the day on which property and money as well as mourning and sadness are tabu; a day on which time is defeated and pure being rules. (Fromm 2013: 51)

What Jews experience on Shabbat is a joy of love and the fullness of being, and this is precisely what other ‘Great Masters’, as Fromm calls them, taught – referring to Jesus, Meister Eckhart, Buddha, Baruch Spinoza, and Karl Marx, who were revolutionaries that cultivated deep love for life by going beyond platitudes, demagoguery, social conventions, or passion for control. In the love of life human beings find their flourishing and joy, and Jews who celebrate Shabbat experience this every week, at least ideally. In his The Revolution of Hope (1968), Fromm remarkably noted:

We would do better to think of joy and intense aliveness instead of happiness […]. Happiness in its present meaning usually implies a superficial, contented state of satiation, rather that condition accompanying the fullness of human experience; ‘happiness’ may be said to be the alienated form of joy. (Fromm 1973: 127)

Fromm’s deep insights, which fused elements from Hasidism (i.e. joy, including joy induced by hard liquor) and from Marxism (i.e. the critique of alienation in industrial society) would be expressed in a religious idiom by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (d. 2022) for whom too happiness is about ‘being’ rather than about ‘having’ (Tirosh-Samuelson 2026c).

2.4 Jews and psychotherapy as happiness for all

Erich Fromm was not the only Jewish intellectual who understood happiness as life-affirming love and who argued that Judaism embodies that positive attitude. Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman (d. 1948), a Reform Rabbi in Chicago and later in Boston, was the author of the bestselling and highly influential book, Peace of Mind: Insights on Human Nature that Can Change Your Life (1946), in which he ‘characterized Judaism as an affirmative, indomitable religion of love and criticized traditionalist Christianity for burdening the human psyche with excessive and improper guilt’ (Heinze 2004: 222). Whereas classical Christianity, as Liebman interpreted it, caused neuroses because of its repression and misplaced guilt, Judaism’s love of the material world ‘contained an antidote to the illness of self-condemnation’ (Heinze 2004: 222).

For Rabbi Liebman, psychoanalysis was not a replacement for religion but a practice that is entirely compatible with the ethical teachings of Judaism. An admirer of Adler, Liebman echoed his observation that the biblical maxim, ‘Love your neighbour as thyself’, demonstrates that Judaism was a religion of brotherly love, rooted in human mutuality and relatedness. The biblical command, so he believed, ‘is the strongest defense against human hatred’ (Liebman 1994: 67), as much as it is ‘the true answer to all cynics and pessimists who maintain that man is total selfishness’ (1994: 71). As Liebman saw it, both Judaism and psychoanalysis are concerned about the wellbeing of individuals within society and psychoanalysis is the process that leads the individual toward self-acceptance, without which ‘society was doomed to be little more than a collection of neurotically selfish and self-destructive individuals’ (Heinze 2004: 226). Judaism and psychoanalysis enhance ‘community feeling’ and facilitate self-realization through relatedness. Thus, the ‘love of self’ and the ‘love of neighbour’ are two sides of the same coin. Like Fromm, Rabbi Liebman resonated with Buber’s philosophy of dialogue that became exceedingly popular in the post-Second World War years. Humans flourish when they experience the unmediated ‘I–Thou’ relations.

Liebman’s popular book played an important role in the spread of therapeutic culture in the US in which the psychologist functioned as a teacher of right living and in which ‘human growth […] promises happiness, contentment, or some kind of this-worldly redemption’ (Heinze 2004: 94). If in the first half of the twentieth century, Jewish popularizers of psychoanalysis, psychology, and psychotherapy explicated and implemented the theories of Freud and Adler, established hospitals and clinics for mental health, and wrote popular treatises about the meaning of being human; in the post-war decades, dozens of Jewish men and women ‘created innovative approaches and schools of human psychology’, and a few thinkers, such as Buber, Fromm, Abraham Maslow (d. 1970), and Erik Erikson (d. 1994) ‘stood out as guiding starts of the humanist enterprise’ (Heinze 2004: 261). Despite their differences, these influential thinkers greatly contributed to the perception of human flourishing means ‘self-actualization’, ‘self-fulfilment’, or ‘self-affirmation’ – for the good of the community.

The therapeutic culture that secularized Jews helped articulate did not venerate selfish hedonism, even though it recognized the value of embodied pleasures (derived from food, sex, and material goods) as part of the flourishing life. The prominence of Jews in certain domains of modern life, especially economics, the sciences, and the arts, has been explained in many ways. Recently, the historian of Jewish philosophy, Robert Eisen (2023), has argued that Jews were especially able to address the lure and the challenges of modern life because they inherited a positive attitude toward the physical world that is characteristic of Rabbinic Judaism, in contrast to the ascetic tendencies of Christianity. Thus, the affirmation of the present world along with the focus on human autonomy, on the freedom of thought, and on education brought about the unprecedented worldly success of Jews in the modern world (Eisen 2023). Although success or prominence, which are the focus of Eisen’s study, is not the same as happiness, Eisen shows that it was precisely the worldliness of Rabbinic Judaism that enabled Jews to adapt to modern secular life and seek their happiness in it (cf. Happiness and Jewish Modernization). Psychotherapy, in which Jews were highly represented, was to enable all people to find happiness in their short time on earth, with no need to wait for the afterlife.

3.1 Positive psychology and happiness

Martin E. P. Seligman (b. 1942), a secular Jew who defines himself as ‘a child of the Great Depression and the Holocaust’ (Seligman 2011: 181), is a typical example of the Jewish success story in America. He is credited with the transformation of psychology by launching positive psychology, an approach that focuses on happiness and human flourishing (Seligman 1993). Beginning his academic career in the 1960s as a student of philosophy, Seligman became frustrated when he realized that philosophy as taught in American universities was divorced from the life of real people. In the 1970s he switched to psychology, undertaking his initial work on ‘learned helplessness’ that leads to depression (Seligman 1975), and then on ‘learned optimism’ through character cultivation (Seligman 1991; Peterson, Maier and Seligman 1993).

Seligman argued that psychology also had lost its way because it focuses on diagnosing mental illnesses and behavioural aberrations rather than on human health, talent, and possibility. Against Freud’s psychoanalysis and Skinner’s behaviorism, Seligman insisted that psychology should focus not on neuroses and pathologies but on the cultivation of character and on the strength of character that assures healthy functioning and resilience to the vicissitudes of life. In his focus on the positive rather than the negative aspects of human personality, Seligman was indebted Abraham Maslow (d. 1970), another influential Jewish exponent of humanistic psychology, whose famous hierarchy of needs culminates in ‘self-actualization’, his term for human flourishing (Maslow 1943). In 1998, as the incoming President of the American Psychological Association, Seligman urged his colleagues to make the exploration of ‘what makes life worth living’ as ‘the new goal of the discipline’ along with ‘building the enabling conditions of a life worth living’ (Seligman 2011: 1–2). Contrary to the prevailing ethos of postmodern relativism, Seligman defended universality of moral values and the objectivity of happiness. His research on happiness argued that across all cultures there are six main virtues – ‘wisdom and knowledge; courage; love and humanity; justice; temperance; and spirituality and transcendence’ (Seligman 2002: 133) – whose cultivation constitutes human flourishing. The six virtues can be attained by cultivating twenty-four ‘strengths of character’, which are defined as ‘the routes by which we achieve the virtues’ (Seligman 2002: 133). With his research collaborator, Christopher Peterson, Seligman provided the scientific data for these objective ‘strengths of character’ that make us virtuous and able to flourish (Peterson and Seligman 2004).

Seligman’s ‘authentic happiness’ undoubtedly echoes Aristotle, and Seligman reminds the reader that the ancient philosopher ‘asked the right question: “What is the good life”’? (Seligman 2002: 121). However, Seligman is critical of Aristotle because his concept of eudaimonia (human flourishing) was ‘monistic’, focusing on one factor, the intellect’s judgement about one’s life. Positive psychology was Seligman’s attempt to overcome the presumed limitations of Aristotle’s theory, but in truth Seligman did not do justice to it. Seligman did not delve into the intricacies of Aristotle’s analysis of happiness nor into the reception of Aristotle’s theory in Western philosophy. More surprisingly, Seligman made no mention of the revival of Aristotle’s virtue ethics in contemporary moral philosophy. That development began when the British philosopher G. E. M. Anscombe argued that modern moral philosophy is overly preoccupied with a law conception of ethics that deals exclusively with obligation and duty (Anscombe 1958). Both John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism and Kant’s deontology focus on rules of morality that were claimed to be applicable to any moral situation, an approach that relies on universal principles and which results in a rigid moral code (Tirosh-Samuelson 2026b). In a modern secular society, so Anscombe claimed, such rigid rules make no sense unless we assume the existence of a lawgiver, but that is precisely the view that secular moderns no longer hold. Therefore, she called for the recovery of ancient philosophy and its focus on character, virtue, and flourishing. Anscombe also emphasized the importance of emotions and understanding of moral psychology, since (as Aristotle already showed) virtue requires feeling rightly, and not just acting rightly. Many philosophers followed her call (e.g. Foot 2002; Slote 1992; Hursthouse 1999) and gradually virtue ethics has emerged as the third main moral theory in contemporary ethics (Van Hooft 2014; Snow 2018). Thus, positive psychology’s studies of happiness and human flourishing developed independently of the philosophic discourse of virtue ethics, each discipline following its own methodology and posing distinctive questions.

In Authentic Happiness, Seligman asserted that ‘happiness and well-being are the desired outcomes of Positive Psychology’ (Seligman 2002: 263). For the following decade his work with other colleagues produced a substantial body of empirical evidence to flesh out that statement in regards to individuals and social collectives (e.g. Diener 2000; 2009; Peterson and Seligman 2004; Huppert, Baylis and Keverne 2006). Positive psychology aspired to teach people how to build a ‘meaningful life’ or a ‘full life’ in which one ‘experiences positive emotions about the past and future, [savours] positive feelings from the pleasures, derive abundant gratification from [one’s] signature strength, and [uses] these strengths in the service of something larger to obtain meaning’ (Seligman 2002: 263). In his later book, Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well Being (2011), Seligman further nuanced his theories by differentiating between ‘happiness’ and ‘wellbeing’. He clarified his position as follows:

I used to think that topic of positive psychology was happiness, the gold standard for measuring happiness was life satisfaction, and that the goal of positive psychology was to increase life satisfaction. I now think that the topic of positive psychology is well-being, that the gold standard for measuring well-being is flourishing, and that the goal of positive psychology is to increase flourishing. (Seligman 2011: 13)

And what is the difference between happiness and wellbeing? Seligman answers that ‘well-being is a construct, and happiness is a thing’ (Seligman 2011: 14). Happiness is measurable by focusing on ‘life satisfaction’ whereas wellbeing is not, although the elements of wellbeing which can be identified; when all are present, human beings flourish; hence, the title of the book.

Seligman identifies five ‘elements’ of wellbeing that result in human flourishing: Positive emotions, Engagement, Relationship, Meaning, and Accomplishment, summarized by the acronym PERMA (Seligman 2011: 16–26). The book outlines the strategies that enhance each of these components of flourishing and how they can be applied to various domains of life. The PERMA programme helps develop the right outlook on life (past, present, and future); identifies the skills, strengths, and attention that one needs in order to accomplish a challenging task; spells out enjoyable activities that serve as their own rewards because one is fully absorbed in them; engages mental attitudes, emotions, and actions that are cultivated in human relationships; imparts a sense of meaning, purpose, and belonging that serve something bigger than the self; and encourages the mastery of specific skills, accomplishments, and achievements. Each of the five building blocks of PERMA is pursued for its own sake and not as means to an end, and each is defined and measured independently of the other elements. Seligman’s PERMA approach reduced the lofty ‘pursuit of happiness’ to acquisition of ‘skills of wellbeing’ that are cultivated by practices, such as a daily ‘gratitude letter’ or daily journalling of positive events and the reasons for them. The message of the book is that wellbeing can be taught and should become the goal of education and that if we all say ‘yes’ to wellbeing (Seligman 2011: 241), we will live in a much better world because we will all flourish.

3.2 Positive psychology, religion, and human flourishing

As a social science, positive psychology is a secular, empirical, scientific endeavour in the psychology of happiness (e.g. Argyle 1987; Diener and Suh 2003; Diener and Biswas-Diener 2008). But contrary to Freud’s hostility towards religion, and closer to Adler’s and Fromm’s deeper understanding of religion as a force in human socialization, positive psychology recognizes that religion plays an important role in human flourishing because ‘religion instills hope for the future and creates meaning in life’ (Seligman 2002: 61).

That humans seek meaning was the message of yet another world-renowned Jewish psychoanalyst, Viktor B. Frankl (d. 1997), who survived Auschwitz and whose Man in Search for Meaning (1959) was an international bestseller. Educated in Vienna, where he practiced psychoanalysis prior to the rise of Nazism and to which he returned after WWII, Frankl developed logotherapy as a therapeutic approach as well as a philosophy of life designed to help people in answering questions about their identity, purpose, and direction. Echoing Adler, Frankl held that there is no one meaning that all human beings share or seek to comprehend; rather, ‘each person is a unique individual going through a sequence of unrepeatable moments, each offering a specific meaning to be recognized and to which a response must be made’ (Fabry 2013: xv). Logotherapy is a psychology and psychotherapy of meaning that enables one to understand one’s choices and the meanings they convey, and to assume responsibility for these choices. Joseph Fabry, Frankl’s disciple, explains that for Frankl, ‘mental health does not come to those who demand happiness but to those who find meanings; to them happiness comes as a side product’. In Frankl’s own language, ‘it [i.e. happiness] must ensue, it cannot be pursued’ (Fabry 2013: xix, original emphasis). Seligman’s notion of ‘flourishing’ captures Frankl’s insight.

That flourishing is the goal of positive psychology was stated in 2003 by two of Seligman’s students, Corey L. M. Keyes and Jonathan Haidt, who published Flourishing: Positive Psychology and the Life Well-Lived with an introduction by Seligman. They defined positive psychology as ‘a science that assists people in their pursuit of better, healthier, and more meaningful lives’ (Keyes and Haidt 2003: 6), a definition that coheres with Frankl’s focus on meaning. More than Seligman, Keyes and Haidt acknowledged that humanistic psychology, primarily that of Abraham Maslow and Viktor Frankl, was ‘a forerunner of Positive Psychology’, and they clarified that ‘flourishing exemplifies mental health’ because

flourishing individuals are free of mental illness; they are filled with emotional vitality, and they are functioning positively in the private and social realms of their lives […]. Flourishing individuals are truly living rather than merely existing. (Keyes and Haidt 2003: 6)

Since the task of positive psychology is ‘to better understand how individuals can negotiate, resolve, and grow in the face of life’s stressors and challenges’ (Keyes and Haidt 2003: 6), the essays in the volume discuss personal growth, optimism, goal setting, social relationships, fulfilment in daily life, volunteering, and the ‘new moral emotion: elevation’, which is ‘triggered by witnessing displays of compassion, courage, loyalty and almost any other moral virtue’ (Keyes and Haidt 2003: 10). The volume makes clear that positive psychology is an inherently interdisciplinary inquiry that integrates objective analysis of empirical data with the deep insights of the humanities, the disciplines of history, philosophy, religious studies, literature, and art.

Jonathan Haidt, perhaps Seligman’s most influential disciple, is the social psychologist and public intellectual who explained the importance of religion in the flourishing life. Identifying himself as a person who ‘grew up Jewish in a devoutly Christian country’ (Haidt 2006: 199), Haidt’s bestselling book, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (2006), claims that contemporary happiness research, including positive psychology, reaffirms the ancient wisdom traditions through empirical data. Summarizing the findings of positive psychology, Haidt confirms that most environmental and demographic factors influence happiness very little; that happy people marry sooner and stay married longer than people with a lower happiness set point; that religious people are happier, on average, than nonreligious people; men are not on average happier than women; the old are happier than the young; rich people are on average happier than the middle class, but only by a little; happy people grow rich faster because they are more appealing to others, but wealth itself has only a small direct effect on happiness, because it so effectively speeds up the ‘hedonic treadmill’ (Haidt 2006: 87–101). The extensive empirical evidence is summarized by the ‘Happiness Formula’, already worked out by Seligman (2002: 45–61), according to which the level of happiness that one actually experiences (H) is determined by one’s biological set point (S) plus conditions of one’s life (C) plus the voluntary activities that one does (V). Positive psychology provides the scientific data that define with some precision ‘what kinds of C and V can push H up to the top of your potential range’ (Haidt 2006: 91). Religion is most relevant to human flourishing because it captures the search meaning, namely, the effort to go beyond the self by linking to something larger than the self.

Haidt concludes his crosscultural analysis of happiness by saying:

Happiness is not something that you can find, acquire, or achieve directly. You have to get the conditions right and then wait. Some of the conditions are within you, such as coherence among the parts and levels of your personality. Other conditions require relationships to things beyond you. Just as plants need sun, water, and good soil to thrive, people need love, work, and connection to something larger. It is worth striving to get the right relationship between yourself, and others, between yourself and your work, and between yourself and something larger than yourself. If you get these relationships right, a sense of purpose and meaning will emerge. (Haidt 2006: 238–239)

This conclusion is precisely the way that Viktor Frankl understood happiness, whose influential work is indeed cited and acknowledged by Haidt. Haidt does not tell the reader what ‘something larger than yourself’ stands for, leaving it for each reader to define it for him/herself. Yet, Haidt who uses the methods and vocabulary of comparative religious studies, differentiates between the ‘ethics of autonomy’, the ‘ethics of community’, and the ‘ethics of divinity’ to explain how people find meaning in life by searching for ‘the third dimension’ (Haidt 2006: 209). Accordingly, the ‘ethics of community’ which stresses the importance of the group (i.e. the ‘we’) over that of the individual (i.e. the ‘I’) tends to be allied with the ‘ethics of divinity’ (i.e. God-by-whatever-name).

As a student of world religions and wisdom traditions, Haidt laments (as did Max Weber a century earlier) ‘the flattening of life in the West over the last few hundred years’, that is, the process of secularization (Haidt 2006: 210). During his two years as a researcher in India, Haidt learned to appreciate and even experience how religious practitioners experience ‘the third dimension’, namely, the sacred that generates awe, wonder, and reverence. As a social psychologist and a psychologist of religion, Haidt argues that it is necessary to believe in ‘the third dimension’ to experience happiness, but each person, as Frankl already understood, must invest that elusive ‘third dimension’ with his or her own meaning. Following Seligman and Haidt, other social psychologists and psychologists of religion went on to launch comparative studies of the role of religion in human flourishing (e.g. Cohen 2020), work funded by the various foundations of the philanthropist, John Templeton (d. 2008). With consistent funding, research into religion and human flourishing has indeed flourished in the past decade not only among social psychologists (e.g. Cohen 2002; Krause, Hill and Ironson 2019) but also among theologians and historians (e.g. Naugle 2008; Volf 2016; Volf and Crisp 2015; Volf and Croasmun 2019).

3.3 Universal happiness through economics and politics

While positive psychology is a social science informed by the humanities, the science of happiness also consists of a different strand promoted by economists who held that the science of happiness could finally realize the utilitarian principle of ‘happiness to the greatest number’. As Sir Richard Layard (b. 1934), the influential British economist put it, the Happiness Principle means that ‘each of us should aim to create the most happiness in the world that we can and the least misery’ (Layard 2020: 5; cf. Layard 2011; Bruni and Porta 2005). Committed to the secular ethics of the British utilitarian philosophers, Layard does not focus on the pleasure of individuals, as did Mill, but on public policy, as did Bentham, and his goal is to affect a ‘happiness revolution’ based on ‘real evidence how to create a happier society’ (Layard 2020: 6). For Layard, the science of Subjective Wellbeing and positive psychology have decidedly shown that cooperation, altruism, and care are deeply ingrained in human nature, contrary to the neoliberal conception of the human as autonomous, selfish, greedy individual.

Layard is not Jewish, but he belongs in this entry precisely because in the late twentieth century the science of happiness was thoroughly secularized, in part because of the work of Jews discussed in this article. Moreover, the full integration of Jews into Western society means that Jewish creativity can only be understood through the interaction of Jews and non-Jews. A close friend of Seligman, Layard is among the leaders of a world happiness movement and one of the co-editors of the World Happiness Reports (published in 2012, 2015, 2018) that measure, rank, and account for the happiness levels of nations worldwide. For Layard, if we properly understand the data about human nature and human happiness, we can devise practices that support a contented way of life. This way of life will consist of counselling and coaching, self-help societies, higher education courses on the skills of living, and companies who focus on the wellbeing of their workers rather than mere profit.

Known as ‘Happiness in Action’, the world happiness movement promotes three principles: the progress principle, ‘judging the state of the world by the amount of happiness there is, especially those who are least happy, […] since everybody’s happiness matters equally’; the ethical principle, according to which ‘each of us should aim […] to create the most happiness we can in the world around us, especially among those who are least happy’; and the policy principle, according to which ‘policymakers should choose policies which create the greatest possible happiness, especially among those who are least happy; they should focus on the common good, namely the happiness of the people’ (Layard 2020: 21–22). If happiness is indeed the goal of human life, justice demands that happiness be equally distributed among people, societies, and nations. Summarizing a massive amount of data on the flourishing of individuals, communities, and nations, Layard explains how happiness is measured, how societies can be compared in terms of their relative happiness, which policies enhance happiness, and which practices diminish it.

If happiness is the duty of governments, political scientists had to get involved in happiness studies, applying the observation of science of Subjective Well-Being (SWB), namely ‘people’s cognitive and affective evaluations of their life’ (Diener 2000: 34), to various pressing political and social issues. Derek Bok, a former president of Harvard University, is an example of political scientists who have argued for making the science of happiness the basis of public policy and public education. In his The Politics of Happiness: What Governments Can Learn from the New Research on Well-Being (2010), Bok (like Layard) revived Jeremy Bentham’s view that happiness is the goal of good government. For Bok, the nascent science of happiness will eventually be able to generate the ‘felicity calculus’ that Bentham sought to find. Identifying happiness with ‘life satisfaction’, Bok claims that people attain life satisfaction when they have ‘strong marriages, close friendships, acts of charity and community, feeling of good health, religious faith, and stable democracy with a response, effective, and accountable government’ (Bok 2010: 30). The key question of the book is ‘how can public policy create the conditions and encourage the behavior that will bring their constituents greater happiness’ (Bok 2010: 31). Bok is not Jewish, but he too belongs in this article because his policy recommendations – reforming the pension laws, the health care system, and the labour market – cohere with the approach of many Progressive Jews, especially those who define themselves as Spiritual Progressives and commit themselves to Tikkun Olam (repair of the world) (Lerner 1994). According to Bok, to increase the level of national happiness, governments need to spend more on social welfare to reduce factors that contribute to unhappiness (e.g. discrimination against mental illness) and institute policies that strengthen social institutions such as marriage and the family to make them more endurable. Most importantly, governmental policies should strengthen the link between education and wellbeing by teaching the Great Books of Western civilization and helping ‘young people in their search for a truly satisfying life’ (Bok 2010: 177). As it was for Aristotle, the core of ethics is the search of happiness and ethics is part of the science of politics, since human beings are not only social animals, as Adler and Fromm emphasized, they are also political animals; their flourishing can only take place within certain political arrangements.

3.4 The commodification of happiness

Since 2000, happiness studies has emerged as an interdisciplinarity inquiry that integrates the social sciences, humanities, biological sciences, neurosciences, business and finance, health sciences, religious studies, and education (e.g. Badhwar 2014; Bates 2021; Cahn and Vitrano 2015; Graham 2011; Kristjánsson 2020; Las Heras, Grau and Rofcanin 2023; McMahon 2023; Miner, Dowson and Devenish 2012; Schinkel 2020; Stuhr 2023). Helped by the communication revolution and new social media, happiness has been commodified and popularized, sold to millions of consumers through ‘how-to’ books, TED talks, websites, podcasts, university-level courses, and tracking apps.

Behavioural psychologists in business schools greatly contributed to the commodification of happiness and the global happiness revolution. Tal Ben-Shahar, an Israeli researcher, taught courses on happiness at the Harvard Business School; their popularity illustrates the growing success of happiness studies, whose goal is a global happiness revolution. In his Happiness Studies: An Introduction (2021c) Ben-Shahar surveys the relevant professional literature, articulates the twelve principles of happiness, and demonstrates their relevance to three main domains of life: home, school, and workplace. Defining happiness originally as ‘the overall experience of pleasure and meaning’ (Ben-Shahar 2007: 33; cf. Ben-Shahar 2002), in the more recent book, Ben-Shahar presents happiness as ‘Wholebeing’ (2021c: 15), namely, a holistic conception that includes: Spiritual wellbeing; Physical wellbeing; Intellectual wellbeing; Relational wellbeing; and Emotional wellbeing, summarized by the acronym SPIRE. Like other positive psychology researchers, most notably Sonja Lyubomirksy (2007; 2014), Ben-Shahar (2007; 2010; 2021a; 2021b) translates his knowledge of the science of happiness into very popular self-help books. According to Ben-Shahar,

the promise of the field of happiness studies is to support a world-wide happiness revolution. This revolution can liberate billions of people from the shackles of material perception and guide them toward a place where they can find more meaning and enjoy better health, where learning and loving freely flow, where sadness and joy peacefully coexist. (Ben-Shahar 2021c: 106)

That an Israeli became a world-renowned researcher of happiness is not irrelevant to the discussion of Jews and happiness, since Zionism itself was a modernist interpretation of the Jewish pursuit of happiness. Through self-determination, Zionism committed itself to creating a haven for Jews where they could escape anti-Semitism, live with dignity, and devote themselves to plethora of creative endeavours. The State of Israel itself was to foster collective happiness and flourishing of the Jewish people because the state itself provides a powerful sense of meaning and purpose which are crucial to happy life. Zionism proclaimed self-actualization (hagshamah atzmit) as one of its goals, to be accomplished not through the study of Torah and Talmud but through worldly activities that the ‘New Jews’ undertook as they attempted to build the ideal society in the Land of Israel (Shimoni 1995). Interestingly, many of the psychological insights of Adler, Fromm, Frankl, Maslow, and Seligman have been borne out in Israel, so it is no surprise that Israel scores very high in global studies of national happiness. Even after the trauma of 7 October 2023, in the World Happiness Report of 2024, Israel ranked eighth; prior to October 7, Israel ranked fifth. Why this is the case requires a separate essay, but it is very possible that clarity about the meaning of the national project, a sense of belonging and high degree of ‘social interest’ (as Adler called it), learned optimism and self-reliance (as Seligman counselled), life-long friendships that Israelis tend to form, especially among those who were born in Kibbutzim, and the encouragement of self-expression through innovation (Senor and Singer 2009; Arieli 2019) account for Israel’s high ranking in the World Happiness Reports.

The popularization of the science of happiness has generated criticism, directed especially toward the linkage of happiness and economics which gave rise to the ‘happiness industry’ (Davies 2016). Co-opted by corporations, the science of happiness has led to the hiring of ‘chief happiness officers’ and ‘happiness consultants’ who teach techniques to reduce stress, misery, and illness among workers, consult for employers how to cheer up their employees, or advise them how to restore the enthusiasm of the workers who have been laid off. Using neuroscientific information about mental wellbeing, ‘happiness economics’ generated ‘the quantified self’ whose feelings, emotions, behaviour, and aspirations can all be measured, compared, and managed. While happiness has been marketed to billions of consumers, there has been no evidence that people today are indeed happier or function better socially. In today’s technologically saturated society, loneliness, suicides, despair, aggressiveness, bullying, shaming, and harassment are even more widespread than they were in the mid-twentieth century, when Fromm critiqued modern industrialized society.

French Leftist social theorists such as Pascal Bruckner, a Catholic, and Eva Illouz, an Israeli sociologist, have sharply critiqued the contemporary obsession with happiness. In Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy, Bruckner argued that the Western discourse on happiness is ‘nothing but the history of contradictory and successive meanings’ (Bruckner 2010: 3) and exposed the paradoxes of the desire to be happy. Because happiness is such an imprecise construct, as soon as we begin to reflect whether we are happy, we are no longer happy. Moreover, the preoccupation with happiness is peculiar to modern secular life, in which the elimination of the belief in God led to either banality or victory of the bourgeois order with its characteristic mediocrity, platitude, and vulgarity; once the desire for happiness is realized, it only leads to boredom or apathy. Third, the contemporary obsession with happiness not only avoids facing the ubiquity of suffering, it also makes us feel bad when we fail to be happy. Similarly, Eva Illouz has critiqued the trivialization, vulgarization, and commodification of happiness that, instead of allowing people to thrive, only increase the control of human life by transnational corporations who sell the illusions of happiness and profit from them (Cabanas and Illouz 2018).