Status Anxiety (NON-FICTION)

The attentions of others might be said to matter to us principally because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value – as a result of which what others think of us comes to play a determining role in how we are able to view ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.

In England, the transition from a nation of small agricultural producers to one of wage earners was accelerated by a scarcity of commonly owned land, which had in the past enabled a portion of the population to survive by growing food for themselves and letting their animals, a cow or a goose, roam free. From the eighteenth century onwards, the maj

Napoleon shared Paine’s stance and, early on in his rule, was the first Western leader openly to begin instituting what he was to term a system of ‘carrières ouvertes aux talents’, ‘careers open to talent’. ‘I made most of my generals de la boue,’ he proudly remarked on St Helena at the end of his life. ‘Whenever I found talent, I rewarded it.’ The

The new ideology of meritocracy competed with two alternative notions of social organization: the egalitarian principle, with its call for complete equality in the distribution of goods between humans; and the hereditary principle, with its belief that titles and posts (and partridge shoots) should be automatically transferred to the children of th

The rigid hierarchical system that had held in place in almost every Western society until the eighteenth century, and had denied all hope of social movement except in rare cases, the system glorified by John of Salisbury and John Fortescue, was unjust in a thousand all too obvious ways, but it offered those on the lowest rungs one notable freedom:

Second Story Low Status Has No Moral Connotations There was another useful story at large, this one derived more directly from scripture. From a Christian perspective, neither wealth nor poverty was an accurate guide to moral worth. Jesus was the highest man, the most blessed, and yet on earth he had been poor, ruling out any simple equation betwee

Like many nineteenth-century reformers, what Carlyle wanted was not a world in which everyone was financially equal, but one in which both the elite and the poor would merit their inequalities. ‘Europe requires a real aristocracy,’ he wrote, ‘only it must be an aristocracy of talent. False aristocracies are insupportable.’ What Carlyle wanted – tho

For James, satisfaction with ourselves does not require us to succeed in every area of endeavour. We are not always humiliated by failing at things; we are humiliated only if we first invest our pride and sense of worth in a given achievement, and then do not reach it. Our goals determine what we will interpret as a triumph and what must count as a

Rousseau in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754), that it might in fact be the savage and not – as everyone had grown used to thinking – the modern worker who was the better off of the pair?

Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first – the story of our quest for sexual love – is well known and well charted, its vagaries form the staple of music and literature, it is socially accepted and celebrated. The second – the story of our quest for love from the world – is a more secret and shameful tale.