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

They oriented the less fortunate towards three sustaining ideas: that they were the true wealth creators in society and were therefore worthy of respect; that earthly status had no moral value in the eyes of God; and that the rich were in any case not worth honouring, for they were both unscrupulous and destined to meet a bad end in a set of immine

Rousseau’s comparison of the levels of happiness of primitive and modern man returns us to William James’s emphasis on the role of expectations in determining levels of happiness. We may be happy with little when we have come to expect little. And we may be miserable with much when we have been taught to expect everything.

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?

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:

Poor citizens observed rich ones at close quarters and trusted that they too would one day follow in their footsteps. They were not always wrong. A number of fortunes were made by people from humble backgrounds. However, exceptions did not make a rule. America still had an underclass. It was just that, unlike the poor of aristocratic societies, the

‘We will gradually become indifferent to what goes on in the minds of other people when we acquire an adequate knowledge of the superficial and futile nature of their thoughts, of the narrowness of their views, of the paltriness of their sentiments, of the perversity of their opinions, and of the number of their errors … We shall then see that whoe

The approval of others could be said to matter to us for two reasons: materially, because the neglect of the community can bring with it physical discomfort and danger; and psychologically, because it can prove impossible to retain confidence in ourselves once others have ceased to accord us respect.