Liberty, Life, and Happiness for All: The Ideals and Legacies of the Enlightenment in Modern Societies Revisited

Abstract

Most people in modern Western and other democratic societies take the latter’s constitutive values and institutions as parametric, namely given or granted. This applies to such values and institutions as liberty, equality, justice, democracy, inclusion, human rights, dignity, well-being and happiness, humane life, civil liberties, scientific rationalism, technological and social progress and optimism, economic prosperity, free markets, secularism, pluralism and diversity, individualism, universalism, humanism, and the like. For instance, in modern democratic societies most people, with certain exceptions, consider social, including political, ideological, and increasingly cultural, pluralism or diversity as “a given” (Dombrowski 2001) and the necessary condition of individual and other freedom (Habermas 2001; Hirschman 1982; Van Dyke 1995). This also holds true for the concept and pursuit of individual happiness, well-being, and humane life in society (Artz 1998; Lane 2000) considered almost universally a given value or incontestable, inalienable human right of individuals solely for being humans (Cole 2005) within modern democratic societies. Overall, most people regard these and related foundational values and institutions of modern democratic society as if they were somehow preexisting, present, and unproblematic, simply always being “out there.”