Status Anxiety (NON-FICTION)

In 1800, 20 per cent of the American workforce was employed by another person; by 1900, the figure was 50 per cent; by 2000, 90 per cent. Employers were also taking on more people. In 1800, less than 1 per cent of the American workforce was employed in an organization with 500 or more employees; by 2000, the figure was 55 per cent.

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

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.

Philosophy introduced a new element to the relationship with external opinion, what one might visualize as a box into which all public perceptions, whether positive or negative, would first have to be directed in order to be assessed, and then sent on to the self with renewed force if they were true, or ejected harmlessly into the atmosphere to be

the predominant impulse behind our desire to succeed in the social hierarchy may lie not so much with the goods we can accrue or the power we can wield, as with the amount of love we stand to receive as a consequence of high status. Money, fame and influence may be valued more as tokens of – and as a means to – love rather than as ends in themselve

Rousseau’s argument hung on a thesis about wealth: that wealth does not involve having many things. It involves having what we long for. Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we seek something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as

The great ambition of modern societies has been to institute a comprehensive reversal of the equation, to strip away both inherited privilege and inherited under-privilege in order to make rank dependent on individual achievement – which has primarily come to mean financial achievement. Status now rarely depends on an unchangeable identity handed d

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?

Social Darwinists proposed that all humans began by facing a fair struggle over scarce resources: money, jobs, esteem. Some gained the upper hand in this contest, not because of improper advantages or luck but because they were intrinsically better than those they outpaced. The rich were not better from a moral point of view. They were, intimidatin