Comments Elsewhere

Matt,

Let me try to put the point in a less “arid” way by not mentioning the word “philosophical.”

Enmity towards people who are wealthy and opposition to wealth as such are two different things and need to be distinguished if you want to offer any kind of useful characterization of people’s reasons for action.

There are lots of reasons that you might feel enmity towards people who are wealthy today. It might be because you have some kind of problem with wealth itself. On the other hand, it might be because you think there’s nothing wrong with wealth but there is something wrong with the way most people come by it. You may remember that Adam Smith, just to take one example, often wrote quite harshly of the wealthy people of his own day, because he thought that many of them came by their wealth dishonestly (through feudal privilege and mercantilist political patronage). It is perfectly possible, and probably even wise, to criticize how many people in our current state-dominated, cartelized, subsidized, hyperregulated business environment come by their wealth, without having any problem with wealth itself or the idea of people having it. If that makes you “anti-wealth,” in the sense you’re trying to push, well, then what’s wrong with being “anti-wealth?”

Matt: A related test might be to ask whether they basically see all of society as “in this together” or if they frame everything in terms of oppressors vs oppressed.

Are you claiming here that any claim to the effect that one social class oppresses another reflects “resentment” of the people identified as oppressors? Or do you mean to make some more limited claim?

Matt: … this was composed with modern political landscapes in mind, so applying it to past eras may not yield coherent mapping.

Any “mapping” that doesn’t count Marx or Proudhon as a leftist is, I’d submit, a bad mapping, regardless of what you were aiming at. The term has a perfectly good meaning already, which includes a bunch of people from the past couple centuries in addition to OCAP or some dude writing comments on Arianna Huffington’s website, and if you meant to specifically gripe about ascetics or the envious or player-haters or whatever then you should probably find a term that better matches what it is you want to discuss.