A Contribution to the History of Happinessin Western Europe (1700–1900):Perspectives from New Theoretical Researchafter the 1980s

<jats:p>The paper presents a contribution to the understanding of happiness in the 18th and 19th centuries in Western Europe, from the perspective of the history of hap-piness as a historical discipline, primarily based on the interpretations of authors who have been active in this field since the 1980s. Anthropological theories of emotions, as well as an interdisciplinary approach, can serve as a rationale and explanation for certain phenomena in a historical context. This contribution is based on the views of thinkers, writers and other intellectuals of the 18th and 19th centuries, as well as contem-porary authors who analyze these views, with a focus on the expression of happiness in art and the development of popular and mass culture, as a reflection of the general public’s orientation to worldly pleasures. The introductory part presents an overview of the historical development of the historiography of happiness, i.e. the history of men-tality, as well as more recent anthropological and understanding of emotions in other social and humanistic sciences, which aim to explain historiographical positions. The author then moves on to key positions on the course and shaping of the history of hap-piness, which modern scholars, mostly historians, have reached, with an emphasis on the period from the 16th/17th to the beginning of the 19th century, so that the focus of the article is on the period indicated in the title.</jats:p>