The good society: defining and measuring wellbeing, between complexity and limits

Recently, the debate on new measures of wellbeing reached a wide audience especially thanks to the big media’s “ballyhoo”. That debate, very often accompanied by Robert Kennedy’s word (March 18, 1968, speech at Kansas University) has been urged also thanks to many prestigious initiatives, like the commission appointed by French President in 2008 and now known through the chairs’ names (Stiglitz, Sen e Fitoussi). What is never said is that since many years, many researchers all over the world are continuously working on defining concepts and measures of wellbeing. Looking at this movement’s outputs allows us to realize that what is reasserted by the last initiatives can be considered, in many respects, neither really original nor avant-garde (Maggino & Ruviglioni, 2010). In many cases, the debate has been trivialized to the simple concern “what indicator can replace GDP?” As we will see, actually defining what a good society is, and consequently its observation and monitoring, should take into account two important and interrelated concepts: complexity and limit. Concepts of good society: classification attempts. During the history of political philosophy, since Aristotle, the conceptual approaches trying to define what is good society were and are many. It is quite impossible to examine all those definitions and this work has no intention to do that exhaustively. This work aims at providing anyone with interpretative instruments allowing us to orient ourselves among all the emerging proposals and to distinguish between serious and propagandistic ones.