Chapter 5 - Political Envy

Summary

This chapter argues that the approach to envy in political philosophy should radically shift. Envy has been taken to be a vice that should not motivate political ideals, and thus by implication should not motivate justice ideals. The post-Rawlsian discussion of envy in distributive justice, both in ideal and non-ideal theory, is influenced by too narrow a conception of envy and, more generally, by too abstract an approach to the political sphere. Thus, the chapter considers the role of political envy in all its varieties with regard to a central political issue of our times: racism and racial tensions. It argues that those who are racialized as “Asian” have been subjected to a special kind of racism, namely one that is colored by envy more than any other negative emotion. Both applications and limitations of the taxonomy of envy defended in the book are further explored with regard to such a political context. In the end, political envy might be harder to differentiate from political jealousy, which complicates even further the division between these emotions with which the book started.