Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

THE APPEAL OF ENVY IN POLITICS
envy and hate. They are the product of an underlying population that, out of
its anger at being denied the amenities of civilization, is willing to destroy
the structure of civilization itself. No doubt some such envy, some such
desire to increase one's stature, enters into all bids for power .... But to
think of the common man as motivated wholly by this envy ... is a sign of
the arid imagination of the elite. 6
The British socialist C. A. R. Crosland defends himself thus against
allegations of envy:
It is sometimes said that one is doing something disgraceful, and merely
pandering to the selfish clamour of the mob, by taking account of social
envy and resentment. This is not so .... It is no more disgraceful to take
them into account than many other facts that the politician must attend
to-such as the greed of the richer classes, who claim they must have higher
monetary rewards and reduced taxation as an incentive to greater effort,
patriotism being evidently not enough .... The Socialist seeks a distribution
of rewards, status, and privileges egalitarian enough to minimize social
resentments, to secure justice between individuals, and to equalize opportunities;
and he seeks to weaken the existing deepseated class stratification,
with its concomitant feelings of envy and inferiority, and its barriers to
uninhibited mingling between the classes. 7
There is no intrinsic, scientific objection to a social movement, a
political party or a sect basing its tenets on the motive of envy, or using it
as an inducement to its followers and to gain new adherents. The envy
latent in man is no less socially legitimate in this capacity than is, say,
love, the urge for freedom, national pride, homesickness, nostalgia or
any other emotion that can be used to inspire collective political action.
As long ago as the last century the British writer W. H. Mallock
emphasized that even though envy may be shown to be the motive
behind radical, socialist and other movements, this is no argument
against them. 8 There could be situations in which the only possible
6 Max Lerner, It Is Later Than You Think, New York, 1938, pp. 249 ff.
7 C. A. R. Crosland, The FutureojSocialism, London, 1956, pp. 203 ff.
8 W. H. Mallock, Social Equality, Labour and the Popular Welfare, London, 1894. R.
Kirk in The Conservative Mind, 1953, points out this insight on the part of Mallock.
German authors such as von Treitschke, writing at the same time, oversimplified their
antisocialist polemic by merely stating, with much indignation, the existence of the
motive of envy.
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