Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

EMPATHY IN THE REBEL 307
The society in which all are totally and mutually comparable cannot,
by definition, ever be a society devoid of envy and resentment. 34
What preserves modern democracies from anarchic resentment is not,
indeed, the degree of de jure or de facto equality achieved, but the
continued existence of institutions, of inherited patterns of experience,
of literary and religious ethical ideals, which permit a sufficient number
of citizens to remain aware of the limitations set upon mutual comparison,
and hence ensure social peace. It is only because a sufficient
number of our contemporaries are still able to concern themselves with,
and are trying to understand, their own personal fate, without at once
projecting it on to a 'collective fate,' orientated either in terms of class or
some other group, that we have fewer pre-revolutionary dynamisms in
society than might have been expected to arise from the concept of
equality.
34 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol.l,NewYork, 1949. The extent
to which factual attainment and rhetorical confirmation of 'equality' simply make men
sensitive to new 'inequalities' is demonstrated by the American' social historian David
M. Potter, in People of Plenty, Chicago, 1954.