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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
§31. With the burgeoning of commercial activity, the concentration of land in the hands of a small number of people, the accumulation of capital by a few individuals, and, in short, the inequality of wealth, men developed a new way of utilising that wealth. For a large proportion of humankind drag out their wearisome life and keep their miserable family alive in humble obscurity, without the pangs of envy. Many can live more expansively and enjoy a certain ease and comfort; they can also show off to others and cut a figure with elegance and the trappings of power with which they tacitly intimidate those poorer than themselves and assert their dominance over them. Some few are so rich in the means for obtaining all the comforts and pleasures of life that, having come to the end of their inevitably limited capacity for pleasure and sensation, they are driven by vanity and ostentation to involve others in their power and their means for getting many pleasures. So the rich man's opulent and haughty liberality differs from a genuinely compassionate and discriminating charity only in its motives and in the carelessness with which the former distributes his gifts and throws his money around.
My aim in this description was to convey to you what luxury is, and show more or less what men mean by the word.
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