Excerpts
from an interview by the regional United Nations Information Centre (UNRIC)
with Prof Luigino Bruni, coordinator of the Economy of Communion Project
On
July 12, 2012, the 66th Session of the United Nations General Assembly
proclaimed March 20th as International
Happiness Day. UNRIC Italy has decided to bring this to the public’s
attention with the help of Professor Luigino Bruni, Professor of Political
Economy at the LUMSA University of Rome, and global coordinator of the Economy
of Communion project which was launched by Chiara Lubich in Brazil (1991). The
project currently includes over 1000 businesses worldwide. The Economy of
Communion proposes that entrepreneurs share business profits with development
projects in different parts of the world, which is based on a model of
reciprocity and gift.
Professor Bruni,
you were one of the first to re-launch an Italian rendition of happiness that
is different from the one that comes from the United States. Can you explain
more about what lies beneath this vision of happiness?
“The
most distant origins of the notion of happiness are found in the ancient Greek
and Roman culture, especially in Aristotle who had linked happiness to the
virtues and had distinguished it from pleasure. It was a concept which today we
would have to translate as “human blossoming” because it goes back to the idea
that happiness is a general state of existence. The Greeks had understood that
only the virtuous man could become happy by cultivating the virtues, even in
the face of bad luck. This is where our responsibility begins, because it is
possible to say that the main protagonist of my happiness (and unhappiness) is
me, and not the external events which certainly are a burden on my wellbeing,
but never decisive in determining my happiness.”
Where does the
idea of happiness in economic science come from?
“Italian
economists and philosophers from the 1700s placed happiness at the centre of
their reflections on economy and civil life. They were thinking in Roman and
Medieval terms of public happiness and then the common good. Throughout the
1800s the Italian school of economy was known for its focus on happiness as the
main object of its study. Therefore, it is not surprising that Italian
economists today are among the protagonists of the new movement on Economy and
Happiness, which was re-launched in the 1970s. It mostly focused on the link
between happiness and social relations, an obvious reference to the ancient
tradition of felicitas publica.”
Which aspects
would you say are most relevant for civil and economic life today?
“The
first element that seems of particular relevance to the state of the economy
and the society today is the profound relationship between happiness and
virtue. In a culture that underscores hedonistic pleasure and recreation as the
values matched with happiness, the ancient Italian tradition of the felicitas
publica invites us to keep in mind that no good individual nor social life
exist without the cultivation of excellence and therefore the commitment to
sacrifice. Secondly, in a phase of the West in which narcissism is becoming an
actual pandemic, the tradition of public happiness reminds us of the
unavoidable link between the good life and social relations. You can never be truly
happy alone, because happiness at its roots is something relational.”
Source:
www.unric.org
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