Envy, Justice, and Democracy

Envy, Justice, and Democracy 嫉妬・正義・民主主義 Written by Yamamoto Kei Translation by Robin Herzeg, Matsumoto Momo, and Manuel Steiner This paper is framed within the broader context of the analytic-continental divide in political philosophy, a topic that has recently gained unexpected amounts of attention (Chin/Thomassen 2016). On the one hand, the questions posed, methodological discussions put forth, and arguments made in John Rawl’s “A Theory of Justice”, a seminal work in the analytic current of political philosophy, challenged conventional debates in mainstream conceptualizations of political thought and political philosophy (continental or not), especially in Japan. Rawls' work prompted methodological self-reflection within political science and a large-scale repositioning with or against the analytic tradition[1]. On the other hand, in continental political philosophy, there has been a growing interest toward a political science that considers the role of feelings and emotions and critically engages with the rationalist paradigm. Notably, there is Chantal Mouffe's critique of deliberative democracy based on the political significance of passion, Martha Nussbaum's more recent discussion on the role of emotions in politics (Nussbaum 2013), as well as Yannis Stavrakakis' attempt to introduce the concept of jouissance (enjoyment) into political theory from a standpoint of Lacanian psychoanalysis (Stavrakakis 2011). Currently, efforts to re-evaluate the relationship between the two (or possibly more) independently developed schools of thought and to establish a framework for dialogue between them are only in their initial stages. Between these two traditions, so to speak, the question of “envy”[2] appears vaguely as a middle ground. Hence, this essay is not only an attempt to examine a concrete dimension of the “politics of emotion,” which has often been discussed in very general terms, but it is also a suitable topic for both analytic and continental political philosophy, to make them sit down at the same table, so to speak. In addition, this emotion might have decisive implications for the consideration of our current democratic moment, and the recent dominance of populism in Europe and the United States may be examined differently if we can gain a new perspective on this issue. Further, the emotion of envy has not yet garnered an extensive amount of attention within the field of political science. In fact, the situation has not changed much since the time Helmut Schoeck remarked in his extensive book on envy that „[i]t is most curious to note that at the beginning of this century, authors began to show an increasing tendency, above all in the social sciences and moral philosophy, to repress the concept of envy” (Schoeck 1987, 12). Or, in the words of Joan Copjec, “social and political theorists […] have given no serious consideration to this vice and its injurious contributions to social relations” (Copjec 2002, 162). The significant exception to this fallacy, on which Copjec is also building, is John Rawls. This paper aims to examine Rawls' arguments on envy, testing them against critiques stemming primarily from outside the analytic tradition, and to explore points of friction between these arguments. Given its ambiguity, the role played by this emotion in a democratic society is also to be examined.