Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

POWER DOMESTICATED BY ENVY 415
thing new, and the gloating, spiteful envy with which revolutionaries
seek to tear down the existing order and its symbols of success.
Anyone who inveighs against innovation in the name of tradition
because he is unable to tolerate the individual success of the innovator, or
anyone who rages, in the name of the downfall of all tradition, against its
upholders and representatives, is likely to be impelled by an identical,
basic motive. Both are enraged at another's having, knowing, believing,
valuing, possessing, or being able to do, something which they themselves
do not have, and could not imagine having.
In cultural history, the envious constitute a double threat to the works
of man: in the first case, a jealous tradition endeavours to fend off any
new creation. Should the latter succeed, however, and become a powerful
institution, its beneficiaries may well arouse the envy of a younger or
subordinate class. Thus private enterprise was at first compelled to
defend itself against and evade princely envy until, once successful, it
became the target of every unprincely critic: though, indeed, aristocratic
envy of later private enterprise and its owners in the nineteenth century
was not infrequently the ally of the early socialists. 2
This poses a crucial question: Should man's capacity to envy be
regarded as an entirely negative impulse, capable only of inhibiting or
suppressing innovation and more advanced economic and technological
development? Are the opponents of envy, who succeed in domesticating
it within the framework of a culture, the only institutions and forces that
promote culture? Or does a positive role in cultural change and the
progress of civilization devolve indirectly upon envy as such?
Power domesticated by envy
Envy is a drive and a mental attitude so inevitable, and so deeply rooted
in man's biological and existential situation, that no scientific consideration
of this phenomenon ought to start from the postulate that its
consequences in the process of social change and the differentiation of
social forms were exclusively negative. May it not rather be supposed
2 There are various examples of this in CapitaJism and the Historians, with contributions
by T. S. Ashton, L. M. Hacker, W. H. Hutt and B. de Jouvenel, ed. R A.
Hayek, Chicago, 1954.