My research analyzes the way in which Ludovico Antonio Muratori portrayed marginal peoples of the New World in his Il Cristianesimo Felice nelle Missioni De' Padri della Compagnia di Gesù nel Paraguai, published in 1743. I argue that Muratori used his portrayal of the native people of Paraguay as a means to express his ideas of how to reform the Catholic Church, at a time when Catholicism was just experiencing the first waves of enlightened influence from the north. I engage with scholarship on the Enlightenment that has addressed specifically the cultural impact of what has been called the Catholic Enlightenment in Italy. In this scholarship Il Cristianesimo Felice has been virtually unrepresented, and I argue that it is a valuable resource in gaining a better understanding the reform agendas of Muratori and the Catholic Enlightenment movement in Italy. I center my analysis on two specific elements in Il Cristianesimo Felice. First, I address Muratori's assessment of the four political systems administered simultaneously by the native population, the Spaniards, the Mamelusses, and the Jesuits. Through my analysis of Muratori's representation of these systems, I situate him in the politically conservative Catholic Enlightenment and establish his commitment to the paternalistic social order prevailing in Europe in the eighteenth century. Second, I show that Muratori reveals broader ideas about religion and superstition as conceived by the Catholic Enlightenment movement in his account of the interaction between the Jesuit missionaries and the Paraguayans in the reductions. In conclusion, this study shows that Il Cristianesimo Felice is a source that historians of the Catholic Enlightenment movement should revisit, as it represents Ludivico Antonio Muratori's Pubblica Felicita in the flesh.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-29T13:32:32Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Antonio Jose Rollas de Brito.pdf: 428891 bytes, checksum: d03fad27f0bbe80f0b1353cbab7c00d3 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2010-06-18 / Based on Hannah Arendt s thoughts, this thesis aims to reflect about how the idea of public happiness an expression that is used in the author s main works may contribute for the contemporary debates involving the theme of happiness. In the present days, happiness is often thought only in terms of biological life or man s vital process. The obligation of being happy is the culmination of the modern Project and the consolidation of production, labor force s reproduction and consumption of goods under the sign of private property, wealth accumulation, individualism and hyperconsumption. Our problem is not to examine actual policies of happiness but to take public happiness as an analytical perspective, for its ability to empower the critics of these policies of happiness in contemporary societies. With this work we intend to contribute with the present Social Psychology studies of happiness, especially for the opening of a new field of studies and research, articulated within the concept of public happiness / A partir do pensamento de Hannah Arendt, essa tese objetiva refletir sobre como a felicidade pública, expressão presente nos principais trabalhos da autora, pode contribuir para os debates contemporâneos que envolvem o tema da felicidade, que têm privilegiado uma única dimensão da felicidade, relacionada à vida biológica ou ao processo vital do homem. O dever de sermos felizes se apresenta como ponto de chegada do projeto inaugurado na era Moderna, em que a produção, a reprodução da força do trabalho e o consumo de bens voltados para a satisfação e o bem estar pessoal se consolidaram na sociedade contemporânea sob a forma da propriedade privada, do acúmulo da riqueza, do individualismo e do hiperconsumo. Nosso problema não é examinar as políticas da felicidade na atualidade, mas tomar a perspectiva da felicidade pública como lugar analítico, que torna fecundas as críticas às políticas da felicidade nas sociedades contemporâneas. Com este trabalho pretendemos contribuir para os estudos da felicidade na Psicologia Social Contemporânea, particularmente para a abertura de um novo campo de estudos e pesquisas em torno do conceito de felicidade pública

Bentham’s 1832 Greatest Happiness Principle states that the greatest happiness for the greatest amount of people should be the goal of public policy. When people are asked what they wish for in life, health and happiness are consistently mentioned. This thesis examines the relationship between health and happiness. However, as happiness is difficult to consistently operationalize across different studies and scientific disciplines, life satisfaction is used as a proxy for happiness. This thesis studies the relationship between health and life satisfaction with a particular focus on the directionality of the relationship and the tentative processes indicated to be involved with this process. This study is accomplished through a literary review of the scientific literature related to life satisfaction, its neural correlates and their relationship with physical health. This study is modelled on the top-down, bottom-up and bidirectional debate within the larger Subjective Well-Being (SWB) literature. The results indicate that the correlation between life satisfaction and health appears to be robust, but the exact directionality and causality is unclear and difficult to establish with a literary review, with only predictive ability of life satisfaction on later physical health or vice versa established. Furthermore, the results appear to indicate that the central process linking this relationship is resilience - the ability to adaptively respond to stressors. Enhancing resiliency through psychological interventions may be a method to promote happiness and health in individuals as well as in society as a whole.