This chapter explores how the three Middle English Otuel romances grapple with concerns about the power of non-Christian empires, Christian military vulnerability, and rash crusader conduct caused by the Mongol conquests, the Mamlūk recovery of Acre, and Ottoman victories at Nicopolis and Constantinople. The first part of the chapter reads the Otuel romances against the development of a dialectic of fear and hope in contemporary political discourse: fear about Christendom’s vulnerability and hope that a powerful non-Christian ally would infuse the Christian community with much-needed strength. The second part of the chapter discusses how these romances engage with and adapt what I call “reverse Orientalism”: a pan-European mode in which Muslim figures (real or imaginary) are made to look down on and offer damning critiques of Christians.

The modern challenges to social and political stability. The presentation of the book’s modest proposal.

Hatred for the rich, hatred for business activities, and hatred for entrepreneurs have been common throughout human history. Based on the existing literature, this chapter divides people’s prejudice and hostility towards entrepreneurs into two causes. One is psychological and the other is epistemological. Envy is the psychological cause. A misunderstanding of knowledge is the epistemological cause. Because most people do not understand the importance of soft knowledge, entrepreneurial money making appears to refer to getting “something from nothing.” By combining psychological envy with epistemological ignorance, we get a good understanding of intellectual prejudice towards entrepreneurs. In order to reduce hostility towards entrepreneurs, economists have a responsibility to establish a correct market theory.

Anyone who calls for higher taxes on wealth and criticizes excessive manager bonuses is often accused of speaking out of envy. Envy, in this very context, is considered an expression of greed, indulgence and jealousy towards top performers whose successes are revealed to be morally questionable. This chapter unearths how envy has been a motive behind many political campaigns, without it actually being described as such. Antisemites blamed ‘the Jews’ for everything bad and had no qualms about taking their possessions during the Nazi period. Social envy also existed in the ‘classless society’ of the GDR, and with the dramatic increase in the inequality of the distribution of income and wealth since the 1990s, it is an important issue in the united Germany: Many people are questioning the fairness of society and the economy; others simply dismiss this as envy.

The chapter investigates how youth respondents of higher- and lower-income levels negotiate and contest everyday citizenship. In examining citizenship-from-below, the economic precarity that lower-income respondents face leads them to stress citizen actions that foster reliance on others and collective activities. In contrast, higher-income youth stress productivity and self-reliance as citizenship components, and survey findings reveal their limited engagement in community groups (except in Uganda). Upon examining acts of citizenship-from-above such as paying taxes, higher-income youth are more concerned about the legal compliance of others, while lower-income youth are more concerned about being accused of legal violations. Surveys indicate more lower-income youth vote in Ghana and Uganda, but income differences on other acts of state-targeted participation are negligible. Our respondents do not explicitly link income or poverty to political engagement, but Tanzania and Zambia case studies demonstrate that paternalism, derision, and envy within and across income groups can shape citizenship identities.

Chapter 4 examines the relationship between individual, communal, and political contentment in Shakespeare’s plays. Shakespeare presents contentment as most successful when shared between selves, whereas an overly possessive attitude toward one’s contentment jeopardizes its existence. As You Like It depicts a commonwealth built upon the bonds between subjects and preserved through mutual contentment. By contrast, the malcontent Iago identifies vulnerabilities in Othello’s understanding of contentedness to destroy his relationships with Desdemona and Venetian society writ large. In As You Like It, communal contentment counteracts the social threat of envy, but in Othello jealousy distorts content beyond the point of recognition or redemption. Shakespeare does not shy away from the challenges to contentment, but he attempts to provide audiences with collective experiences of positive emotion and to unite them in the face of tragedy. Though recent critics have described the Renaissance theatre as an arena for emotional extremes, this chapter broadens our perspective of Shakespearean emotion to include a contentment that shares the stage with other affects.

We know a lot about Jack the Ripper’s crimes, but have no idea as to who he was. His crimes had a sexual character, and his dislike of women could be because he caught venereal disease from one. He targeted, amongst other regions, the women’s sex organs. We don’t know the identity of the Zodiac Killer, who targeted courting couples. It is likely that he felt envy towards them. Although Albert DeSalvo was widely believed to be the ‘Boston Strangler’, not everyone is in agreement about this and he was not found guilty of these crimes. However, his toxic upbringing and his characteristics of offending fit the pattern of other known serial killers. He showed evidence of dissociation. DNA evidence points to his involvement in at least one of the murders. A perspective of motivation might cast some light on these cases.

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.

Envy is a ubiquitous emotion which plays an important role in human life. This Introduction provides a brief overview of the taxonomy of envy and a chapter-by-chapter synopsis.

This chapter illustrates that envy’s ethical dimensions are varied and complex. A paradigmatic case of vicious (spiteful) envy that is both morally and prudentially bad is slowly altered. The details relevant for the normative assessment are changed, while the core psychological features are left untouched, so that in succession there is a case of envy that is morally bad but not prudentially bad (aggressive), a case of envy that is prudentially bad but not morally bad (inert), and finally a case of envy that is neither prudentially nor morally bad (emulative). Through the different variations, the emotional episode keeps satisfying all the conditions set out in the definition of envy, and thus should be recognized as such. The chapter ends by arguing that emulative envy can be a virtuous emotion, and highlighting the taxonomy’s implications for moral education.

Envy is often confused with jealousy, because they are both rivalrous painful emotions, which are directed at a competitor and are concerned with a good. But envy is about the potential or actual lack of the good, while jealousy is about the potential or actual loss of the good. This distinction is not always clear cut, as a section devoted to ambiguous, hybrid, and transitional cases shows. In the end, envy is defined as an aversive response to a perceived inferiority or disadvantage vis-à-vis a similar other, with regard to a good that is relevant to the sense of identity of the envier.

Envy can either motivate to push oneself up to the level of the envied, or to pull the envied down to one’s own level. This leveling orientation has been explained in two ways. The first explanation focuses on the role of perceived control over the outcome: when the envier thinks they can level up, they will feel benign envy; when they think they cannot can level up, they will feel malicious envy. The second explanation is grounded in the notion of focus of concern: when the envier is concerned about the envied good, they are motivated to get it, and thus to level up; when they are concerned about their inferiority with the envied rival, they are motivated to take them down, and thus to level down. This chapter shows that these models of explanation need not be incompatible. The variables at play are independent and their intersection is responsible for the existence of four kinds of envy. It illustrates a paradigmatic case for each, providing a detailed analysis of the phenomenology, situational determinants, motivational structure, and typical behavioral outputs, and explains how they differ from nearby emotions and attitudes such as admiration, covetousness, and spite.

The Conclusion sketches two notions: a metaphysical one – that much human goodness depends on implicit or explicit rankings and positionality; and an epistemic one – that we use implicit or explicit comparison to know what position we occupy in this continuum of goodness. Envy’s signaling value may be much more important than previously thought. If most of human goodness is relational, comparative, competitive, or positional, then it is not surprising that envy is a universal emotion. It safeguards our chance at happiness.

This chapter challenges the notion that love and envy are incompatible and argues that love and envy are compatible in at least two senses: first, they thrive in the same psychological conditions and thus are likely to occur together; second, love can benefit from emulative envy, and, when love is wise, it can tolerate some amount of inert, aggressive, and spiteful envy. The descriptive version of the incompatibility thesis (namely that love and envy never co-exist) is shown to be too strong and dismissed. The normative version of the incompatibility thesis (namely that love and envy ought not to co-exist) is refuted via an indirect argument, according to which we ought not to endorse an ideal of love free from envy, because that ideal is psychologically implausible. Finally, two cases studies from literature and TV are discussed in order to show that envying the beloved might be in some conditions a good thing.

Chapter 6 analyses and discusses the relation between the Verse chronicle, the novel Aristandros and Kallithea and the so-called Moral poem. These three works share not only a number of motifs and themes but also a fairly large number of verses. They contain motifs such as the instability of fortune and the dangers of envy, which appear also in other texts by Manasses. The investigation here aims at understanding the significance of authorial choices in the handling of slander and envy: the recycling of images and expressions that transgress genre boundaries and thus contribute to a characteristic authorial voice. The attribution of the Moral poem to Manasses has been questioned, but in view of its relevance for a better understanding of Manasses’ authorship and its reception, it is included in the analysis. Regardless of who composed the poem, it represents the Manassean voice and makes for a fruitful discussion of questions of authorship, attribution and tradition.