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Helmut Schoeck (Graz, 3 July 1922 – 2 February 1993) was an Austrian-German sociologist and writer best known for his work Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior (Der Neid: Eine Theorie der Gesellschaft).
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Helmut Schoeck (Graz, 3 July 1922 – 2 February 1993) was an Austrian-German sociologist and writer best known for his work Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior (Der Neid: Eine Theorie der Gesellschaft).
Schoeck, born in Graz, spent his early years in Baden-Württemberg, finishing high school in Ludwigsburg. He then studied medicine, philosophy and psychology at the universities of Munich and Tübingen. With a dissertation on Karl Mannheim, Schoeck would obtain his doctorate under Eduard Spranger.
For fifteen years, starting in 1950, Schoeck would work as a professor at various U.S. universities. In 1953, he taught philosophy at Fairmont State College, followed by a two-year stint at Yale. At Emory University he was awarded a full professorship in sociology. During the 1950s, Schoeck published some works in German, and translated Joachim Wach's Sociology of Religion into German.
In 1965, Schoeck returned to Germany, where he obtained a chair in sociology at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, which he would occupy until his retirement in 1990.
Schoeck, who was also a columnist of the Welt am Sonntag for twenty years, died of cancer in 1993.
Schoeck gained international fame with his book Der Neid: Eine Theorie der Gesellschaft (Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior), published in 1966, with the first English translation appearing in 1969. Written without much technical jargon, the book would receive widespread appreciation, even outside the academic community. The book became somewhat of a bestseller, and was translated into more than ten languages.[citation needed]
Paul Dumouchel said in the book Schoeck speaks about "the origin of envy,...its cause and function within society" and also "documents the importance of envy in literature, philosophy, and in many social sciences". He went on to say that Schoeck puts forward two propositions - first, that envy has played a large part in forming human society, and that, secondly, the role of envy often remains hidden.[1]
Schoeck also argued that as envy was a natural part of human evolution and could not be suppressed, it was important to channel the emotion. He also suggested that socialism and democracy were put forward as ideas by members of society who were not able "to deal with their own envy",[2] and Karl Marx's idea of primitive communism was "entirely mistaken".[3]
A polemicist against the New Left movements of the 1960s, Schoeck criticized their ideas from a conservative-liberal viewpoint. The egalitarian and anticapitalist mentality of the leftish generation was the particular target of Schoeck's ire.
