Envy is almost universally condemned. But is its reputation warranted? Sara Protasi argues envy is multifaceted and sometimes even virtuous.

Envy was first published in German in 1966, then in an English translation in 1970. This classic study is one of the few books to explore extensively the many facets of envy--"a drive which lies at the core of man's life as a social being." Ranging widely over literature, philosophy, psychology, and the social sciences, Professor Schoeck--a distinguished sociologist and anthropologist--elucidates both the constructive and destructive consequences of envy in social life. Perhaps most importantly he demonstrates that not only the impetus toward a totalitarian regime but also the egalitarian impulse in democratic societies are alike in being rooted in envy.

Malice that cannot speak its name, cold-blooded but secret hostility, impotent desire, hidden rancor and spite--all cluster at the center of envy. Envy clouds thought, writes Joseph Epstein, clobbers generosity, precludes any hope of serenity, and ends in shriveling the heart. Of the seven deadly sins, he concludes, only envy is no fun at all.Writing in a conversational, erudite, self-deprecating style that wears its learning lightly, Epstein takes us on a stimulating tour of the many faces of envy. He considers what great thinkers--such as John Rawls, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche--have written about envy; distinguishes between envy, yearning, jealousy, resentment, and schadenfreude ("a hardy perennial in the weedy garden of sour emotions"); and catalogs the many things that are enviable, including wealth, beauty, power, talent, knowledge and wisdom, extraordinary good luck, and youth (or as the title of Epstein's chapter on youth has it, "The Young, God Damn Them"). He looks at resentment in academia, where envy is mixed with snobbery, stirred by impotence, and played out against a background of cosmic injustice; and he offers a brilliant reading of Othello as a play more driven by Iago's envy than Othello's jealousy. He reveals that envy has a strong touch of malice behind it--the envious want to destroy the happiness of others. He suggests that envy of the astonishing success of Jews in Germany and Austria may have lurked behind the virulent anti-Semitism of the Nazis.As he proved in his best-selling Snobbery, Joseph Epstein has an unmatched ability to highlight our failings in a way that is thoughtful, provocative, and entertaining. If envy is no fun, Epstein's Envy is truly a joy to read.

From one artist to another, a helpful guide and a meditation on the nature of the ego and its toxic effects on the creative process Life Without Envy by Camille DeAngelis is a game-changer for artists of all stripes: a practical guide for navigating the feelings of jealousy, frustration, and inadequacy we all experience to create a happy life regardless of how your career is (or isn’t) going. In these pages you'll find strategies for escaping the negative feedback loop you get stuck in whenever you compare yourself to your fellow artists. You'll begin to resolve your hunger for recognition, shifting your mindset from “proving yourself” to making a contribution and becoming part of a supportive creative community. Best of all, you'll come to understand that your worth—as an artist and a human being—has nothing to do with how your work is received in the wider world. Life Without Envy offers a blueprint for real and lasting contentment no matter what setback you’re weathering in your creative life.

Many people are drawn towards virtue ethics because of the central place it gives to emotions in the good life. Yet it may seem odd to evaluate emotions as virtuous or non-virtuous, for how can we be held responsible for those powerful feelings that simply engulf us? And how can education help us to manage our emotional lives? The aim of this book is to offer readers a new Aristotelian analysis and moral justification of a number of emotions that Aristotle did not mention (awe, grief, and jealousy), or relegated, at best, to the level of the semi-virtuous (shame), or made disparaging remarks about (gratitude), or rejected explicitly (pity, understood as pain at another person's deserved bad fortune). Kristján Kristjánsson argues that there are good Aristotelian reasons for understanding those emotions either as virtuous or as indirectly conducive to virtue. Virtuous Emotions begins with an overview of Aristotle's ideas on the nature of emotions and of emotional value, and concludes with an account of Aristotelian emotion education.

The author applies to Athenian culture and literature insights on the contexts, conscious and subconscious motivations, subjective manifestations, and indicative behaviours of envy, jealousy, and related emotions, derived from modern (post-1950) philosophical, psychological, psychoanalytical, sociological, and anthropological scholarship. This enables an exploration of both the explicit theorization and evaluation of envy and jealousy in ancient Greek texts, and also the more oblique ways in which they find expression across a variety of genres - in particular philosophy, oratory, comedy and tragedy.

For centuries, scholars have argued that envy is the source of much aggressive behavior as well as the root cause of much unhappiness, but it is only recently that there have been attempts to examine the emotion from an empirical perspective. This book is the first of its kind to offer a comprehensive summary of current theoretical and empirical work on envy provided by scholars from a range of disciplines. The first section of the book focuses on the rich theological, philosophical, and evolutionary foundations of scholarly thinking on envy. The second section covers the social psychological work on envy and includes chapters on social comparison processes, definitional challenges, the link between envy and schadenfreude, intergroup envy, and fear of envy. The third section covers research on envy from organizational psychology, experimental economics, marketing, neuroscience, and anthropology. The fourth section focuses on the implications of understanding envy for physical and mental health with chapters on psychoanalytic conceptions of envy, health psychology, and the challenges of coping with envy. A final chapter consists of reflective comments on all the chapters and brings together recurring themes and makes suggestions for future research on envy.