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The Oxford Handbook of Happiness , edited by Susan A. David , Ilona Boniwell and Amanda Conley Ayers . Oxford University Press , 2014, xi + 1097 pages.
Reviews
It is always difficult to review a Handbook. The difficulty increases when the Handbook is 1127 pages long. The task becomes extremely arduous when, as is the case with the Oxford Handbook of Happiness, it has more than one hundred contributors, and even embarrassing when the reviewer is an economist trained as a historian of thought, given the very narrow space assigned to the 'economics of happiness' and to the history of the concept of happiness. The editors state the aim of the Handbook in the first lines of their (very short!) introduction: 'In the opening speech to the first World Congress of Positive Psychology held in Philadelphia, USA, in 2009, the founder of the positive psychology field Professor Martin Seligman called for the discipline to expand its boundaries and transform into a "positive social science", uniting psychologists, economists, sociologists, policy-makers, philosophers, educators, health and business researches and practitioners, and thinkers in the fields of religion and spirituality' (1). This is a stark methodological declaration, both for Oxford University Press and for the editors. The decision to make this peculiar and controversial approach to psychology (let alone to all social sciences) the vantage point for the Handbook is the major weakness of the volume. Instead of being 'a coherent, multidisciplinary, accessible text on the current state-of-the-art in happiness research and evidence-based practice' (4), it is a sort of manual for the spread of the term Positive Psychology. On the Oxford Handbooks website, we find that a Handbook 'brings together the world's leading scholars to write review essays that evaluate the current thinking on a field or topic, and make an original argument about the future direction of the debate'. The present Handbook of Happiness does not match this description very well, because the 'world's leading scholars' of happiness are very few among the authors, and fewer are the chapters that can be considered to present an 'original argument'. Nevertheless, this volume deserves the attention of scholars, also from disciplines other than psychology or positive psychology, interested in happiness, social...