9 Darwin’s Changing Expression and the Making of the Modern State Rhodri Hayward One of the more depressing political developments in twenty-irst century Britain has been the government’s embrace of a happiness agenda. From the beginning of the new century there has been a rhetorical consensus be- tween leaders of the Labour and Conservative parties that the state’s pursuit of ‘gross domestic product’ should be supplemented by a search for ‘gross national happiness’. 1 In 1999, the prime minister, Tony Blair promised a new era of ‘lifestyle politics’ arguing that health and education policy would now be benchmarked against ‘quality of life indicators’. He noted ‘that money isn’t everything but in the past, governments have seemed to forget this’. 2 In 2006, David Cameron, the newly elected leader of the Conservative party, warmly embraced this philosophy. In an interview with the BBC he claimed that any future government must concentrate on ‘not just what is good for putting money in people’s pockets but what is good for putting joy in peo- ple’s hearts’. 3 Four years later, as prime minister of the coalition government, Cameron formally commissioned the creation of a happiness index by the Ofice of National Statistics. 4 These schemes of psychological state building must seem far distant from the anthropological and biological speculations Darwin engaged in when he wrote The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals in 1872. Darwin’s work largely eschews reference to politics or morality and instead presents a natural history of the passions in which universal forms of emo- tional expression are identiied and attributed to evolutionary accidents and adaptions. Yet it is this work, I will argue, that has provided the basis for our current political programmes. Darwin’s arguments and their subsequent reconstruction in the writings of a wide range of thinkers including Wal- ter Cannon, Konrad Lorenz, Silvan Tomkins, John Bowlby and Paul Ekman have made possible a kind of ‘prehistoric utopianism’ in which political deci-