Philosophy, art, politics, religion and bohemia have never sought to do away entirely with the status hierarchy; they have attempted, rather, to institute new kinds of hierarchies based on sets of values unrecognised by, and critical of, those of the majority. While maintaining a firm grip on the differences between success and failure, good and

Given the vast inequalities we are daily confronted with, the most notable feature of envy may be that we manage not to envy everyone. There are people whose enormous blessings leave us wholly untroubled, even as others’ negligible advantages become a source of relentless torment for us. We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like—we envy

In 1906, on entering Parliament, Britain’s first twenty-seven Labour MPs were asked what single book had most influenced them to pursue social justice through politics. Seventeen of them cited Unto This Last.

It is easy to understand the wish for some system, be it educational or economic, that will assure us of picking out the worthiest few from a classroom or in society and, in turn, passing over the least worthy—that is, the losers—in good conscience.

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. If

In some parts of Christendom, beginning in the sixteenth century, a new and very specific artistic genre emerged that would capture the imagination of the art-buying classes for the next two hundred years. Examples of “vanitas art,” so named in tribute to Ecclesiastes, were hung in domestic environments, most often studies and bedrooms. Each

Such destitution was, for a bohemian, vastly to be preferred to the horror of wasting his life on a job he despised.

for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.”

brutes. Baudelaire cursed the tenor of public opinion in democratic societies such as the United States, warning that no charity or indulgence could be expected from that quarter. Indeed, he asserted, poets “cannot hope to fit in, either in a democratic or an aristocratic society, in a republic or an absolute monarchy… . Illustrious unfortunates,