DE CÓMO EL 'IMAGINARIO SOCIAL' DE LA FELICIDAD SE HA ADUEÑADO DE LA COTIDIANIDAD: UNA RECONSTRUCCIÓN HISTÓRICO-CONCEPTUAL

Broadly speaking, the content of this paper seeks to highlight the explanatory clues of the significance given to happiness in the context of advanced modern societies. In order to do so, it adopts as a presupposition the epistemological guidelines established following the consideration of reality as something socially constructed, and, more specifically, the implications in this direction encouraged by the notion of "social imaginary". Firstly, it explores the obstacles to a social implantation of the discursive characterizations around happiness during antiquity and the Middle Ages. He then reveals how, as a result of modernity, happiness will come to be conceived as the ultimate goal that, in its longed for historical realization, will promote a programmatic cast of discourses driven, as a whole, by the category of Progress. Finally, he shows the turning point in the consideration of happiness in advanced modernity, emphasizing its intimate relationship with the construction of social subjectivities framed in the logic of production/consumption.