Public happiness, well-being, inclusion: the lesson of CLR James.

Abstract

The terms "happiness" and "well-being" are often considered synonyms and used as such in everyday language, but although they share common features, they refer to very different conceptions of life: not coincidentally, "happiness" generally means a positive and gratifying emotional/affective state for the subject while "well-being" alludes to a condition of affluence obtained through a wide availability of material and consumer goods. Starting from this consideration, however, the authors, taking as a background the issue of inclusion and the Disability Studies perspective as theoretical framework, argue that only the collective and shared enjoyment of well-being can give rise to a genuinely inclusive happiness and, to this end, they recover the lesson of C.R.L. James, the great Caribbean intellectual and activist author of The Black Jacobins, who in his writings placed precisely the "struggle for happiness" at the center of political action, in the wake of Saint Just and the ideals of the French Revolution but also of the great twentieth-century anticolonialist movements. In this way, in the conclusions, they update the discourse in the current debate on inclusive processes in school and in society.