Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

13
In Praise of Poverty:
from Sumptuary Laws to
Contempt for the Affluent
Society
FOR MORE THAN TEN YEARS social criticism in Western industrial
societies has been focused on their material achievements. Something
simply has to be wrong because the times are so good. The
suspicion that this criticism is neither profound nor well founded, but is
due rather to an absence of other legitimate targets, is confirmed when
we recall that in modern times social criticism has never yet commended
a society for obliging its members to lead a poor and wretched existence.
Praise of an inadequate economy never emanates from the critics of a
particular social system, but from the holders of power, the very people
who should be held responsible for the austerity of the people's life. And
they will invariably make out that their austere economy is only transitional.
There were clear and early indications of this 'new' social criticism
in the United States between 1950 and 1955. At first this was
confined to occasional veiled but scathing remarks in journals such as
the Nation, the New Republic and the Saturday Review of Literature,
gradually spreading to periodicals such as the Atlantic Monthly and
Harper's Magazine. So much was this tendency in evidence that as early
as 1956 I was able accurately to forecast the very thesis with which John
Kenneth Galbraith was to astonish the world in 1958. 1
1 J. K. Galbraith, The Affluent Society, Boston, 1958. See also my forecast ofthe 'new'
criticism in the study 'Das Problem des Neides in der Massendemokratie,' in Masse
undDemokratie, ed. A. Hunold, Zurich-Erlenbach, 1956, pp. 254ff.
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