Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

232 ENVY AS THE SUBJECT OF PHILOSOPHY
bility of self-protection against the envious man by means of deliberate
envy-avoidance. Francis Bacon had already remarked upon the extent to
which the envious man is enraged by any attempt to deprive him of the
stimulus.
Raiga was a highly educated Parisian of the thirties, well versed in
modern literature and the classics and familiar with French political
intrigues of his day. The urbanity and courtesy of his culture may have
concealed from him certain extreme forms of envious manifestation.
Envious crime, for instance, is mentioned only casually. If, like his
contemporary Jose Ortega y Gasset, he warns against the revolt of the
envious masses and sees a society determined by envy hurtling towards
its doom, the basic tenor of his work is confident-somehow man will
succeed in dealing with envy. Raiga remains untouched by the metaphysical
horror induced by envy in Herman Melville, which haunted him
when he was writing Billy Budd. -
He is far removed from the penetrating, flexible and brilliantly perceptive
analysis to which Max Scheler subjected the phenomenon of
resentment, and consequently that of envy. Nor can Raiga's essay be
compared with Svend Ranulf's imposing study, which, while taking
account of Scheler's work, methodically exploited with rare and scrupulous
exactitude a comprehensive and homogeneous body of data. We
have considered Raiga's book in some detail, however, because it is the
only one we know that has envy as such for its subject and deals with
jealousy only as a peripheral phenomenon. Strange to say, resentment as
a special phenomenon hardly comes within Raiga's field of vision. Thus
L' Envie is an example of the kinds of observation and discovery made
about forty years ago, when it occurred to a clever French writer to
devote a monograph to envy.