Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

ENVIOUS INTRIGUE AMONG LITERATI 193
Envy is also seen as the inevitable accompaniment of fame other than
literary. For instance, Zilsel tells us that about the middle of the fifteenth
century, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini mentions as perfectly natural the
fact that the condottiere Picinino should forthwith begin to envy his
celebrated confrere Sforza. Zilsel also recalls the role of envious intrigue
as encountered in Cellini's autobiography or Bramante's intrigues against
Michelangelo. This Zilsel sees as in part a consequence of the institution
of patronage. It seems perfectly clear that competitors dependent on
capriciously distributed and limited patronage are subject to particularly
intense envy. For they do indeed experience the prototype of a closed
economy, as understood by socialism in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, where envy was invoked as a principle of distribution. Socialists
were unable to believe in the possibility of a steadily rising national
income that would eliminate poverty, and therefore laid emphasis on
redistribution: increasing taxation of the prosperous would put money
into the pockets of the poor-a method which, had it been logically
applied, would have made impossible the improvement that has taken
place during the last hundred years in the standard of living. But within a
group dependent on a few patrons, the most gifted man who attracts the
patron's favour, and hence his commissions, does in fact deprive all the
less gifted artists and writers of real assets. Their envy is objective and
rationally justified. With the rise of institutionalized patronage in the
twentieth century, specifically, the foundations in the United States and
more recently in some European countries, envy would appear once
again to have been provoked among similarly situated groups of potential
beneficiaries.