Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

21
Social Revolutions
WHICH SOCIAL REVOLUTIONS and historical situations allow the
most play for envy? The possibilities are four in number:
1. Social revolution, including the pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary
phases, operates upon, and is supported by, the envy-motive.
2. Within a certain group, a sect, minority or group of workers, at
least within a social class, envy can assume considerable proportions
and lead to pronounced, envy-motivated social criticism over a period of
centuries without ever effecting a revolution in the true sense. Here the
appropriate word would be 'resentment, ' to which is added, according to
Max Scheler and Nietzsche, the impulse of long-felt impotence.
3. In the case of a socially critical group envy may playa demonstrably
important role, although the aim is not actual revolution, but gradual
reform.
4. Envy may playa part in economic political programmes having no
enduring and important structural reforms in view. In the 'equalization
of burdens law' after the Second World War in West Germany, one of the
determining factors was consideration of social envy in the victims. It
was not a question of the alleviation of need, or of compensation paid out
of taxes to which all alike contributed according to their income (as in
other countries that had to compensate war victims), but of direct
equalization between the better-off (the inhabitant who had escaped
damage) and the victim by means of the deliberate burdening of the
former, the fellow citizen whom luck or fate had favoured. But this type
of equalization, even if it goes on for decades, reminding the individual,
or even perhaps his heirs, that once upon a time in history he was more
fortunate than other people, does not represent structural social change
as seen from the perspective of envy. Quite the contrary. The period of
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