Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

EUGENE RAIGA 225
chapters. First, he seeks its origins, shows how it is linked with jealousy,
discusses the phenomenon of 'envious indignation,' and considers envy
and admiration. Two chapters are devoted to various forms of general
and sexual jealousy. There follows the geography of envy: in the family,
among friends, in the small town, and again in circles in the big city, such
as those of lawyers, doctors and surgeons, officials, the military, poets
and writers, painters and sculptors, thence to the role of envy in art
criticism (already incisively described by Schopenhauer), envy in the
world of scholarship and between victorious generals.
Three chapters are concerned with envy in democracy, particularly
the envy of the masses and its function in socialist aspirations. Finally he
investigates envy in religious life and on the international plane. The
concluding chapter examines the social function of envy.
Like others, Raiga sees the distinction between jealousy and envy in
the fact that jealousy postulates genuine expropriation of an asset hitherto
possessed. He demonstrates the difference between envy and
admiration with the example of antagonists in a competition, and disinterested
strangers watching a tournament: the latter are able to admire
the antagonists without envy. Raiga agrees with many other writers in
regarding envy as a vice, a negative and destructive characteristic. It
gives rise to only one virtue, that of modesty. Although Raiga can see no
extenuating factor in envy or its subject, although all that the typically
envious man achieves by his envy is that he never becomes or obtains
that which he envies, yet the modesty evoked by his fear of envy, which is
so obligatory in social life, is of social importance: even though such
modesty is often simulated and insincere, it still makes co-existence
possible. It gives those whose situation is lower, socially, the illusion that
they have not been forced into that position. Essentially Raiga's treatment
of envy resembles our own. He demonstrates its ubiquity and
inevitability, and the part it plays in twentieth-century politics, and he
indicates the reactions to that ubiquity which help to make social existence
possible. Raiga seems not to have been aware of Max Scheler's
great study of resentment, nor does he mention Nietzsche. The literature
to which he refers consists for the most part of a few late nineteenth-century
French psychologists and historians. Theodule Ribot is very often
quoted, as are some French moralists, among them Diderot, La Bruyere
and La Rochefoucauld, whose views he discusses. Schopenhauer is cited