“Sometimes, the strength we gain from moments of joyful solidarity lasts a very long time,” writes Lynne Segal towards the end of Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy, which unpicks what she acknowledges is the “intangible” notion of joy. Segal’s thesis is that in losing one’s sense of self and self-consciousness, becoming part of bigger political and societal movements, one can achieve both personal joy and hopeful belief in the possibility of changing the world. Subsequent events in 2017, such as the #MeToo movement, suggest that she has a good point.

Segal, a professor of psychology and gender studies at Birkbeck College, London, recounts her own experience as a leftwing feminist and activist to back up her wider point about the power of mass movements — which in this book means gatherings of real people. Little space is devoted to social media-driven activism. It feels like an omission but she is perhaps right: young feminist activist thinkers such as Zeynep Tufekci are better placed to offer techno-sociological analysis.

Segal focuses instead on lessons of the past: the British women’s liberation movement of the 1970s, she writes, offered “experiments in collective living and the establishment of many other spaces for everyday resistance such as communes for shared child-raising, women’s centres, squatting advice centres and numerous other collective community spaces, many of which I participated in”.

This collectivist mindset was once far more prevalent than it is now. Segal reminds us how things have changed by examining the focus on individualism in western societies, and the “markets of misery”, which leave many feeling isolated and left behind among all the consumerism and commodification.

Meanwhile, efforts to measure and promote “wellbeing” — something that David Cameron’s coalition government made British government policy — are focused on inward-facing “mindfulness” and other practices that put the onus on the individual in private spaces. She also laments the loss of street fairs, feasting and dancing, although one might dispute this: there are many organisations fostering community bonds through local events.

Segal extends her exploration of joy to cover love and desire as well as the long history of utopian movements and all their attendant disappointments. On the latter, she takes an optimistic, pragmatic view. Modern utopian theorists, for example, are not offering us a magic prescription for the future. Instead, she says, they are concerned with rather fuzzier ideas: “The collective longing for ‘the improvement of the human condition’ as well as the opening up of spaces ‘for public debate and democratic decision’.”

Radical Happiness is an engaging, enlightening read for anyone who wants to ponder the links between personal dissatisfaction and political disengagement — and possible remedies. The idea of collective happiness as the root of much satisfaction is simple, but deceptively hard to write about, let alone achieve. Segal succeeds in inspiring on many levels, and while she is writing from the political left, and from a feminist point of view, her sources range far beyond her personal history and feminist and Marxist theorists to include citations and references to many writers and thinkers on utopias and on the nature of democracy.

Ultimately our political dreams, Segal acknowledges, “can end in disappointment, but are likely nevertheless, to make us feel more alive, and hence happier, along the way, at least when they help to connect us to, and express concern for those around us”. This is an uplifting thought, whatever one’s political persuasion.