Talk:Status Anxiety

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Lack of background

Latest comment: 6 months ago2 comments2 people in discussion

This article makes it sound as if "status anxiety" was a concept invented by writer Alain de Botton in 2004. However, the concept was minted already in 1954 by the German-American political scientist Franz Neumann, at a lecture he held before the Free University of Berlin: “Angst und Politik”. It was published later that year in the essay series Recht und Staat in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Law and the state in the past and the present), just before Neumann died in a car crash in Switzerland.

In 1957 Free Press published the speech in English as “Anxiety and Politics” in a collection of writings by Neumann called “The Democratic and the Authoritarian State: Essays in Political and Legal Theory”. In 2017, the “Anxiety and Politics” chapter was republished in English by Triple C and can be read in full here.

His idea about status anxiety influenced many thinkers since the 1950s, among them Neumann’s close friend Herbert Marcuse, Richard Hofstadter and French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. In his 1959 BBC radio lecture on "The American Right Wing and the Paranoid Style" (in 1964 published as The Paranoid Style in American Politics), Hofstadter argued that status anxiety and interest politics jointly created a form of paranoia that had taken over American right wing politics after Joseph McCarthy's downfall.

Neumann's concept, which has a political connection that is largely absent from de Botton's version (which seems to focus more on the "keeping up with the Joneses" issue) is still quoted and debated widely, which a search of the two expressions "Neumann" and "status anxiety" quickly reveals.

Perhaps this uncritical article about a rather unimportant and self-gratulatory book, should be repurposed and focus of the much wider subject of status anxiety instead? Thomas Blomberg (talk) 14:53, 24 April 2024 (UTC)Reply

This article makes it sound as if "status anxiety" was a concept invented by writer Alain de Botton in 2004. Came here because I noticed the same thing. Viriditas (talk) 20:26, 25 April 2024 (UTC)Reply

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