I find it interesting, but not surprising, that Gonzalo Fernandez de la Mora, in Egalitarian Envy, is sharp as a razor on a psychological problem - envy - with profound political and social consequences, but dull as a spoon on its application to American democracy. He has much to tell us about the role of envy in the human condition generally and its place in societies like his own. But I think he has seriously misunderstood the liberal tradition of the Founding Fathers of the United States.
De la Mora is a Spaniard, and, as he readily concedes, his is a nation in which the infection of envy has been deep and pervasive. It is a theme frequently encountered in Spanish literature; you have but to read one of twentieth-century Spain's greatest writers, Miguel de Unamuno (particularly his brilliant and somber masterpiece, the novel Abel Sanchez), to understand the rot de la Mora is referring to.
De la Mora makes an interesting observation about envy and economic development. Undoubtedly thinking of his own national experience, he posits that poor societies are conducive to envy than rich ones. It's good idea, but I think what he really wants to say is that static societies are going to produce more envious people than dynamic ones are. Now there is, of course, a certain correlation between dynamism and wealth. George Gilder has pointed out, for example, that Saudi Arabia, which is not, by the nature of its political institutions, an especially dynamic place, is not a wealthy place either. It is surely a rich place. But wealth, when you are talking about a society, is all in people. Switzerland and Singapore are not as richly endowed as many other parts of our earth; they are wealthy places, though, and their people are wealthy.
The Spanish Disease
Spain was once a rich place, with gold and silver from the New World and such. To have "all the gold of Peru" (the most "Spanish" of the New World viceroyalties), to be "rich as a Spanish nobleman" - these were once common idioms. Today we would laugh at them. Spanish America failed, according to such astute observers of their own societies as Octavio Paz in Mexico and Carlos Rangel in Venezuela, because of its political shortcomings. It could have been just as wealthy as English (or North) America. But its political institutions, inherited from Spain, were stultifying. As anyone who has encountered South politicians and intellectuals knows, envy of the United States is a very common attitude down there.
There's no mechanical correlation between dynamic social and political institutions and wealth. When we say dynamic institutions, we are of course thinking of the condition of liberty, and this condition is experienced differently in various places. I don't know exactly how wealthy Spain has become recently, in the ten years since the end of the Franco dictatorship, but it's certainly become a place of considerably more mobility, of considerably more opportunity, than it was then. Certainly, by comparison with the Spain I knew as a child (and that de la Mora experienced most of his life) - proud and isolated from Europe, stagnant and poor - Spain now is booming.
Now while de la Mora is right to say that envy was, and probably still is (national traits don't disappear just like that), a pervasive disease in his country, I would add that it was especially a disease of the
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