The Governance of Well-being: Towards a “Brave New World”?

Abstract

This article describes the phenomenon of the “governance of well-being,” which includes the use of happiness as a tool of power used by governmental, non-governmental, and public and private organizations around the world. Based on a chronological exploration of contemporary global policies and through the happiness practices that we can find in the different areas of daily life, it is explained that happiness is becoming a device of social control and that it is being institutionalized through its 1) universalization, 2) privatization, 3) scientification, and 4) blackboxing. Finally, the consequences of all this are exposed in order to prevent the imperative of happiness from governing us towards a Huxleyan “brave new world,” in which a “welfare regime” could prevail that seems less and less utopian.