The Spirit of Capitalism and Other Essays (Lo spirito del capitalismo e altri saggi) – Max Scheler

Ressentiment, Value Hierarchy, and the Moral Diagnosis of Modern Culture

What the Work Is

The Spirit of Capitalism and Other Essays is an English-language collection of writings by the German philosopher Max Scheler (1874–1928), a central figure in the phenomenological movement and one of the most prominent German philosophers of his lifetime. The volume takes its title from Scheler’s essay on the capitalist mentality, and gathers other essays alongside it, most notably his extended study of ressentiment. The collection’s best-documented component is the book-length essay Ressentiment, originally published in German in 1912 under the title Über Ressentiment und moralisches Werturteil (On Ressentiment and Moral Value Judgment). Scheler’s work belongs to ethics, phenomenology, and philosophical anthropology, and the essays collected here show him working simultaneously as a moral philosopher, a psychologist of the emotions, and a critic of modern civilization.

What the Book Is About

At the center of the collection stands Scheler’s analysis of ressentiment — a concept he borrowed from Friedrich Nietzsche but fundamentally reworked. Scheler defines ressentiment as a self-poisoning of the mind: a lasting mental attitude produced when certain normal human emotions — revenge, hatred, malice, envy, the impulse to detract, and spite — are systematically repressed rather than expressed. When such feelings cannot be acted out against the persons or groups that provoke them, and when they are re-experienced over and over, they do not simply fade. They fester, and they gradually distort the way a person perceives and judges value itself.

Scheler’s central claim is that ressentiment is not merely a psychological ailment but a moral and spiritual one. It corrupts the objective order of values by which human beings orient their lives, and it does so in a way that the resentful person cannot see. The essay on capitalism extends this diagnosis to a whole civilization: Scheler treats the modern capitalist mentality as a symptom of a broader inversion in which utility and material acquisition are elevated above the vital, intellectual, and spiritual values that should rank higher. The book’s aim is therefore both descriptive and diagnostic — to explain how ressentiment works, and to use it as a lens for assessing the spiritual and cultural health of individuals and of society at large.

Key Ideas and Themes

The hierarchy of values. Scheler’s account of ressentiment rests on his conviction that values are not arbitrary preferences but form an objective, universal, and unchanging hierarchy, experienced emotionally rather than constructed by the mind. From lowest to highest, this hierarchy runs: the sensual values of the agreeable and the disagreeable; the vital values of the noble and the vulgar; the mental or psychic values of beauty and ugliness, right and wrong, truth and falsehood; and finally the values of the Holy and the Unholy, the Divine and idols. Ressentiment is the dark underside of this vision — a movement toward negative and lower values where ethical life should move toward positive and higher ones.

The genesis of ressentiment. Ressentiment begins in ordinary, even normal, reactive feelings: envy, jealousy, anger, hatred, spite, malice, and joy at another’s misfortune. What matters ethically and psychologically is how the energy of these feelings is channeled. When a person can act on them directly, no ressentiment results. Ressentiment arises when such feelings cannot be released, when they are continuously re-experienced over time, and when a sense of impotence takes hold.

Comparison and the inferiority complex. Ressentiment is highly situational: it always involves mental comparisons with others who appear to possess genuinely positive values — beauty, intelligence, charm, education, talent, possessions, or status. What may begin as admiration or respect ends in a coveting of another’s qualities and goods. Scheler notes that this early stage resembles what is today called an inferiority complex, and he extends the point to consumer culture’s endless comparisons of status symbols — the impulse captured in the colloquialism of “keeping up with the Joneses.”

Social roles and the Master–Slave dynamic. Ressentiment also attaches to social roles that involve dominant and submissive positions, echoing Nietzsche’s Master–Slave dichotomy. Scheler’s analysis ranges across gender roles, generational divides, blended-family tensions, and the classic adversarial relationship between employee and employer. In each case, the structural inequality of the relationship provides the conditions in which repressed feeling can curdle into ressentiment.

Moral weakness and surrogate satisfactions. Scheler describes an inherent fundamental moral weakness in human beings: when progress toward higher values is frustrated, there is a tendency to regress toward lower surrogates as a source of solace — traditional vices, addictions, and self-destructive behavior. This tendency feeds directly into consumerist materialism, an insatiable and self-defeating need to have more in order to fill a spiritual void.

Pathological ressentiment. Scheler distinguishes ordinary ressentiment from what he calls ressentiment proper, or pathological ressentiment, which he links to what would today be called personality disorders. Crucially, it is not confined to the poor or the oppressed; it cuts across all socioeconomic strata, including the most powerful. Its defining feature is a self-inflicted sense of inadequacy in the face of positive value attainment — the “other” only occasions what the self already feels. Over time, these re-experienced feelings of impotence are rationalized on a subconscious level into prejudices, bias, bigotry, cynicism, and closed-mindedness.

The abstraction of hatred. A striking feature of pathological ressentiment is that specific individuals are no longer required for it to operate. One needs only a representative member of the resented class. Members of a group can become random targets of a hate born of impotence that seeks to level the group — an insight Scheler’s analysis offers toward understanding hate crimes, genocide, and the framing of enemies in faceless, non-human terms. A psychic distancing, a de-personalization between self and other, is required for ressentiment to function effectively.

Value delusion. Pathological ressentiment produces what Scheler calls value delusion: a tendency to belittle, degrade, dismiss, or reduce genuine values and those who bear them. Its distinctive mark is that it is non-productive — the resentful person secretly craves the very values they publicly denounce. What was once loved or thought good is devalued as “sour grapes,” while what was previously lacking in value is elevated to acceptability. Scheler insists that the true objective order of values remains transparent in the background even as the resentful person overturns it, which is why value delusion manifests as a superiority complex: arrogance, hubris, hypocrisy, double standards, denial, and the projection of one’s own negative qualities onto the opposition. Emotionally, it turns happiness to sadness, compassion to hate, hope to despair, self-respect to shame, and love to rejection or competition.

Metaphysical confusion. Where value delusion shifts judgment horizontally, metaphysical confusion is a vertical inversion of the value hierarchy: higher values are viewed as lower and lower as higher. Scheler’s prime illustration is Western civilization’s humanistic, materialistic, and capitalistic tendency to elevate utility values above vital ones. Carried to its extreme, ressentiment achieves its most important result when it determines an entire morality, perverting the rules of preference until what was evil appears good.

The hardening of the heart. Ressentiment ultimately deadens normal sympathetic feeling and all higher psychic and spiritual feeling. Against the well-ordered emotive life — the ordo amoris, the heart’s proper order of love — ressentiment produces a disordered heart, a “hardened heart.” Scheler argues that morality finds expression in response to the call of the hour, in the exercise of personal conscience grounded in the heart’s right order of love. The failure to feel for and identify with one’s victims — even to the point of deriving sadistic pleasure — is the common denominator of the sociopath, the psychopath, the serial killer, the dictator, the bully, and the ruthless profiteer. What common law calls “cold-blooded,” Scheler understands as the deadening of higher feeling states.

Psychic contagion and the socio-political realm. Finally, Scheler relates pathological ressentiment to what he considers the lowest form of social togetherness: psychic contagion, the phenomenon of uncritically following the crowd — mob mentality. Positive examples include good-natured crowds at a pub or a sporting event; a negative example is violent rioting. When the politically powerful stir up collective animosities through psychic contagion, they advance their own objectives. The methods are familiar: incendiary rhetoric, scapegoating, class warfare, partisan politics, propaganda, excessive secrecy, closed-minded ideology, jingoism, misguided nationalism, violence, and unjust war.

Structure and Approach

The collection brings together essays that operate at the intersection of philosophy, psychology, and sociology. Scheler’s method is phenomenological and descriptive: he proceeds by carefully distinguishing the features of ressentiment, refining the concept step by step, and illustrating it with concrete social examples — from gender and generational relations to consumer habits and political movements. His approach is also explicitly evaluative. He does not merely describe how people feel; he measures those feelings against an objective hierarchy of values and judges the distortions that result. The essay on capitalism applies the same diagnostic method to an entire economic and cultural order, treating the elevation of utility over higher values as a form of collective value inversion.

Significance and Influence

Scheler’s study of ressentiment is widely regarded as his darkest, most psychological, and most sociological work, and it foreshadowed many later findings in the social sciences. It stands as a major reworking of Nietzsche’s concept: where Nietzsche treated ressentiment as the engine of a “slave morality” rooted in the weak, Scheler relocated it in the distortion of an objective realm of values, the self-poisoning of moral character, and personality disorder — and insisted that it cuts across every social class. Scheler’s broader philosophical achievement was acknowledged by Martin Heidegger, who with Ortega y Gasset affirmed that the philosophers of the century were indebted to him, praising him as the strongest philosophical force in modern Germany and in contemporary European philosophy. Scheler died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 1928, leaving a large body of unfinished work; his writings were later placed on the Nazi book-burn list. The concept of ressentiment he developed remains a durable tool for thinking about resentment, value distortion, and the moral health of cultures.

The source material situates Scheler’s Ressentiment against the intellectual backdrop of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when Western civilization was drifting away from old-guard monarchical and hierarchical societal structures — in which one’s station in life was determined primarily by birth — toward the relative uncertainty and instability embodied in Enlightenment-era ideals such as democracy, nationhood, class struggle, human equality, humanism, egalitarianism, and utilitarianism. Ressentiment was first viewed as a pseudo-ethically based political force enabling the lower classes to rise at the perceived expense of the higher or more inherently “noble” classes. It thus first emerged as what some might view as a reactionary and elitist concept by today’s democratic standards, while others of a more conservative mind-set might view it as liberalism disguised as a socialist attempt at usurping the role of individual responsibility and self-determination.

Friedrich Nietzsche used the term to explain an emerging degenerative morality issuing from an underlying existential distinction between two basic character options available to the individual: the Strong (the “Master”) or the Weak (the “Slave”). The Master-type fully accepts the burdens of freedom and decides a path of self-determination. The Slave, rather than deciding to be the authentic author of their own destiny, chooses a repressed, unsatisfying mode of life, blaming by projection his submissiveness, loss of self-esteem, and pitiful lot in life upon the dominant Master figure and their entire social class, who by contrast seem to flourish at every moment. Economic exploitation always seems to lie at the heart of any intrinsic Master/Slave social arrangement, along with the Master class “washing their hands” of the burdens of social responsibility. This underlying ressentiment forms the rationale for a code of conduct belonging to the Slave-type — passive acceptance of abuse, fear of reprisal for asserting personal rights due to implied intimidation, or inability to enjoy life — the “Slave Morality.”

Nietzsche was an atheist and harbored a particular disdain for Christianity, which he viewed as playing a key role in supporting Slave Morality: in supporting the Weak and disadvantaged of humanity, Christianity undermined the authority, social position, and cultural progress of the Strong. He viewed the progress of such Slave Morality as a violation of the natural order and a thwarting of the authentic advancements of civilization available only through the Strong — a view of a “natural order” typical of nineteenth-century Europe and expressed in his principle of Will to Power. Scheler, by comparison, ultimately viewed the universal salvific nature of Christian love as contradicting Nietzsche’s assessments, and in later life developed an alternative metaphysical dualism of Vital Urge and Spirit: Vital Urge as closely allied to Will to Power, and Spirit as dependent yet truly distinct in character. Contrary to Nietzsche’s ultimate intent, much of his legacy led to an implosion of objectivity in which truth became relative to individual perspective, “might ultimately made right” (Social Darwinism), and ethics would become subjective and solipsistic. Scheler, who was also skeptical over the historically emerging unchecked power of mass culture and the prevalence and leveling power of mediocrity upon ethical standards and upon the individual human person as a unique sacred value, was nonetheless a theistic ethical objectivist. For Scheler, the phenomenon of ressentiment principally involved Spirit — as opposed to Will to Power, Drives, or Vital Urge — entailing deeper personal issues involving distortion of the objective realm of values, the self-poisoning of moral character, and personality disorder.

Ressentiment as the Antithesis of a Non-Formal Ethics of Values

As a concept belonging to the study of ethics, ressentiment represents the antithetical process of Scheler’s emotively informed non-formal ethics of values. Folk wisdom comes closest to Scheler’s meaning by recognizing ressentiment as a self-defeating turn of mind which is non-productive and ultimately a waste of time and energy. Maturity informs most of us that sustained hatred hurts the hater far more than the object of our hate. Sustained hatred enslaves by preventing emotional growth from progressing beyond the sense of pain having been precipitated, in some way, by whom or what is hated — another person, group, or class of persons.

The Confinement of Ressentiment and Its Contagion

Scheler wrote that through its very origin, ressentiment is chiefly confined to those who serve and are dominated at the moment, who fruitlessly resent the sting of authority. When it occurs elsewhere, it is either due to psychological contagion — and the spiritual venom of ressentiment is extremely contagious — or to the violent suppression of an impulse which subsequently revolts by “embittering” and “poisoning” the personality. Originally understood, ressentiment is defused whenever one has the power and ability to physically retaliate, or act out, against an oppressor: an ancient Roman citizen, as Master, could be expected to take revenge straightaway upon his Slave, while the reverse would be unthinkable.

The Unattainability of Satisfaction and the Numbing of Feeling

The ressentiment-imbued person exercises such a pronounced psychic distance from his victims so as never fully to achieve the desired lasting satisfaction produced through their own unethical actions. Retaliation of this sort no longer yields any good, and expression of this sort lacks all possibility of positive results; in true ressentiment there is no emotive satisfaction but only a life-long anger and anguish in feelings that are compared with others. The source material further observes that our particular era suffers from a pronounced inability to feel higher levels of vital, psychic (intellectual and sympathetic), and spiritual feeling states — for example, the process of our legal system tends to convert the absolute character of moral sentiments to a “blameless” game of negotiation of cost versus benefits. It asks whether we can even imagine the moral education furnished by such archaic practices as the stockade or tar and feathering so as to invoke real public humiliation for crimes, and notes that we as a culture have become so desensitized to feelings of outrage over public persons of power and stature lacking all feelings of shame over their wrongdoings that our greatest moral problem becomes one of complacency.

Ressentiment, Class, and the Assessment of Cultural Health

The source material cautions that it is a mistake to assess Scheler’s concept of ressentiment as chiefly a theory of psychological pathology, though surely it is that in part. Ressentiment is also a philosophical and ethical concept from which to assess the spiritual and cultural health both of individual persons and of society as a whole — a task all the more urgent given economic globalization, with its tendency toward carte blanche predatory capitalism. It is entirely acceptable to view human ethical transcendence as complementary and commensurate with a bottom-up psychology of needs and drives so long as the arch of that qualitative direction is positive in nature; the reverse, however, is false. Negative parallel aspects are irreducible to Scheler’s top-down metaphysical principle of good as emanating from our personal development as spiritual beings. This distinction is illustrated by the many cases in which negative role models can, and do, emerge as highly self-actualized economically powerful individuals from a psychological standpoint — clearly “Superman” type persons — but who are entirely lacking from an ethical, social, and spiritual standpoint: the drug kingpin or pimp as a person young boys admire and look up to, or the corrupt CEO who absconds with obscene bonuses while his company goes bankrupt and the employee pension fund disintegrates. These negative manifestations of values and value inversions demonstrate how the philosophical conception of ressentiment rests upon qualitatively different grounds transcending science and pure economics.

For Scheler, ressentiment is essentially a matter of self in relation to values, and only proximately an issue of social conflict over resources, power, and the like (Master/Slave, or dominant/submissive relationships). What we call “having class” is not something as one-dimensional as power, money, or goods and services readily sold or purchased; rather, like the array of the a priori hierarchy of value modalities, “class” has to do with who you make of yourself as a person, which involves a whole range of factors, including moral character, integrity, talents, aptitudes, achievements, education, virtues (e.g., generosity), reciprocal respect among diverse individuals (active citizenship), and the like. Since society must be guided by the rule of law above power, we must promote government which relies upon fairness (see John Rawls) and egalitarian principles in terms of channeling our national economic forces. Self-interest (as in Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”) is humanity’s — and nature’s — most highly efficient means of positively converting a Vital Urge into human economic benefits, the point at which “the rubber hits the road,” but it is also a force highly susceptible to greed. Governments must therefore ensure that such raw pursuit of utility value is not purely an end in itself, but must serve primarily to form an economic base upon which genuine value strata and culture can take root and flourish for the common good as well as everyone’s respective individual needs. We should realize that living with less materially does not diminish in any way our access to greater emotional, intellectual, artistic, and spiritual fulfilment; only in such ways can virtue truly become its own reward.