Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

278 THE SENSE OF JUSTICE AND THE IDEA OF EQUALITY
he is secure. In political terms envy thus has a positive and constructive
function as watchdog.
But the situation is changed if the same citizens who keep jealous
watch on the equality before the law, and from which they constantly
benefit, now approach the state with the demand that it infringe the
principle of equality before the law for those few citizens whom the state
has enabled to become economically (or perhaps only educationally)
unequal. Many of the advocates of equality, it would now seem, are in no
way anxious to secure genuine and lasting equality of opportunity. The
increasing revulsion of fanatical egalitarians in Britain towards the 1944
Education Act, once hailed as progressive and which promised real
equality of opportunity in education, proves to what extent the apostle of
equality disdains the consequences of his original demands.
A few years ago the Zurich professor of constitutional law, Werner
Kagi, basing himself on Fritz Fleiner's Bundesstaatsrecht, clearly
brought out the dangers of the shift from legal equality to envy. The word
'equality,' he believed, had been too long taboo, and criticism of egalitarianism
ought not to be restricted to fiscal legislation. The attainment of
'uniformity' was often equated with progress. But 'Far and away beyond
anything that justice demands by way of equal treatment for equals, what
is unequal is often rendered uniform by democratic legislation. And that
which is idealized in the form of a demand for equality more often than
not turns out to be merely the expression of that egalitarian endeavour,
with its mistrust of all autonomy, its resentment of any exceptional
position. . . .' There follows a quotation from Fleiner's Bundesstaatsrecht:
, "If equality before the law is essential to democracy, it can also be a
stumbling block. For it promotes that fanaticism and envy which seeks to
treat men in all fields of life as equals, and repudiates as undemocratic
the differences arising from higher education, upbringing, intelligence,
tradition etc. " ,1
George Caspar Romans, an American sociologist, was in command of
a small warship in the Pacific during the Second World War. Later he
tried to put this experience to good use in social science. One mistake he
1 W. Kiigi, 'Falsche und wahre Gleichheit im Staat der Gegenwart,' Universitas, 1953,
pp. 735 ff.