Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

364 IS OWNERSHIP THEFT?
itself out to be a 'progressive mental attitude' is no more than regression
to a kind of childhood stage of human economic thinking. Alexander
Riistow once made this implication clear though probably not realizing
how much it coincides with the custom among primitives:
Equality may be demanded at the beginning (initial equality) in the name
of justice, at the end only in the name of envy. To each his own, is the claim
of justice; the same for each, that of envy. A specially unequivocal and
crude form of envy is that directed against some innate or fortuitous
advantage in respect of which there can be no question of a just claim
(unless this were made upon nature or the Creator), as, for example, when a
girl throws vitriol or acid into her more attractive rival's face. But there are
other cases, less crude and not so generally censured, where envy is also
indubitably involved. When, for instance, respected political economists
unashamedly put forward, publicly and unequivocally, the thesis that a
lower but equitably distributed national income would be better than a
higher national income with a few very rich men: that all should be equally
poor rather than all rich and a few even richer. And this, evidently, even
when in the second case the absolute income of the relatively less well off
would be higher than it would in the first. Yet it is improbable that the
learned gentlemen in question are themselves motivated by envy; it is the
envy of the lower class which they regard as a sociological datum and
believe they have to take into account. Were such social-psychological
defeatism to prevail, it would mean nothing less than a catastrophe. This
fact alone is enough to demonstrate that a psychology and phenomenology
of envy is an undertaking as important and immediate as it is difficult. 2
2 A. Riistow, Ortsbestimmung der Gegenwart, Vol. 3: Herrschaft oder Freiheit?,
Erlenbach-Zurich, 1957, p. 90. Statements closely reminiscent of the conceptions of
the Dobu Islanders are found, for example, in L. R Post, Ethics of Democracy (3rd ed.,
Indianapolis, 1916, p. 82); also, reports on the British socialist programme (e.g.,
'Malice or Charity?' in The Economist, December 18,1954, pp. 973 f.); op. cit., July
1954, pp. 9 f. In 1956 British socialists, among them A. Lewis, published 1Wentieth­
Century Socialism, a book which was critically reviewed by C. Curran in The Spectator,
July 6, 1956, pp. 7-8: 'The innocence of all this turns into something uglier when
you come to consider the electoral aspects of classless egalitarianism. For, in a Britain
without poverty, who wants equality? Let us suppose-it is not a very large supposition-that
our national standard of life raises to the point where the luxuries of
1956 are available to everybody. Would it be a hardship, or an injustice, if, while
everybody had plenty, some people had more than plenty? If £3 ,000 a year, say, were