Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

ENVY IN FRANCE 229
of Raiga's observations cast light on political life in Paris, making
comprehensible much of what occurred in France after 1945. By nature
the Frenchman is a passionate leveller, an anarchist. Raiga mentions the
institution of ostracism in Athens and is faintly disapproving of Montesquieu,
for viewing it as a very minor evil. The fear of the truly great,
prevalent among French lower-middle-class people and the newly rich,
has, it seems, given rise to the belief that the principles are all that count
while individuals count for nothing. Raiga is very critical of electioneering
in the twentieth century, but assumes that there are, from time
to time, candidates with a sincere concern for the public weal. The
hierarchy of the various ministries to be shared out by the prime minister
among his followers was responsible for irreconcilable envy, particularly
among politicians' wives.
Raiga is concerned about the systematic fomentation of envy and
greed in the masses, but he also has hard things to say about the naive
stupidity of those who ostentatiously dissipate their inherited wealth
with a complete disregard for the envy of the lower classes. He recognizes
envy as a phenomenon of social proximity; a grocer will hardly
ever compare himself with a millionaire. But Raiga's age-the age of
socialist egalitarianism-is one in which ever wider circles harbour at
least the illusion that everyone is comparable with everyone else.
Raiga then returns to the distinction already made between simple,
vulgar envy and envy-indignation or legitimate envy. He admits the
possibility that oppressed, underprivileged classes, when a genuine
injustice is involved, may be provoked to action by envy. But, he asks,
who can and may decide when envy is legitimate? And what politician,
when he incites the masses to envy, asks himself whether his object is
power and its concomitant privileges, or whether his aim is to eliminate
the injustice suffered by others?
Raiga has a low opinion of the utopian promises and ideas of socialists
who use envy as a tool with which to build a society of people liberated
from envy. He is scathing about the methods of a socialism vested in
envy, and employing the hatred and vindictiveness of the envious to
destroy a social system while having nothing to put in its place. Yet it is
precisely the constancy of envy, a factor that can always be relied on, that
explains the great success of socialist movements. 75 A social revolution,
75 Op. cit., pp. 233 ff.