Status Anxiety (NON-FICTION)

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

the great political and consumer revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries led to psychological anguish even as they vastly improved the material lot of mankind, it is because of an extraordinary new ideal around which they were founded: a practical belief in the innate equality of all humans and in the unlimited power of anyone to ach

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

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

Mandeville’s thesis shocked his initial audience (as he intended it to), but it went on to convince almost all the great economists and political thinkers of the eighteenth century and beyond. In his essay Of Luxury (1752), Hume repeated the Mandevilleian argument in favour of the pursuit of riches and of expenditure on superfluous goods on the gro

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

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

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 whole of civilization, and the welfare of all societies, depended on people’s desire and ability to accumulate unnecessary capital and show off their wealth. It was this ‘which first prompted men to cultivate the ground, to build houses, to found cities and commonwealths and to invent all the sciences and arts which ennoble and embellish human