Bernard Mandeville
by
Alex Voorhoeve
Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733) was a doctor and pamphleteer, whose works had a large impact
on the course of eighteenth century social philosophy. Mandeville was born and educated in the
Dutch Republic. After being implicated in a popular uprising in his native city of Rotterdam, he
travelled Europe and settled in London.
Mandeville started a practice as a doctor and soon began to write. In 1705, he published a
poem, The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves Turn'd Honest. It tells of a wealthy and powerful beehive
whose inhabitants act only in pursuit of gain and esteem. Nevertheless, they espouse an ethic
that condemns this behaviour and frequently lament that their society is full of sin. Irritated by
their constant complaining, their god decides to make them all virtuous. In a flash, their society
comes to a stop: commerce and industry are abandoned, and the bees leave their once
flourishing hive and withdraw to live simply in the hollow of a tree. The moral is that virtue can
only lead to a poor, ascetic society, whereas the vices are the necessary engines of a wealthy
and powerful nation.
In 1714, the poem reappeared as part of The Fable of the Bees, or: Private Vices, Publick
Benefits, in which Mandeville explains and defends the claim that private vices lead to public
benefits. Mandeville does so by examining human nature in the same meticulous way "a surgeon
studies a carcass". This uncompromising examination leads him to conclude that man is "a
compound of various Passions, that all of them, as they are provoked, come uppermost, and
govern him whether he will or no." The gratification of these passions, Mandeville writes, is
wholly selfish. Mandeville defines vice as "every thing, which […] Man should commit to gratify
any of his Appetites," and virtue as "every Performance, by which Man, contrary to the impulse
of Nature, should endeavour the Benefit of others, or the Conquest of his own Passions out of a
Rational Ambition of Being good." But, since on Mandeville's view of human nature, man is a
selfish creature, wholly governed by his passions, people's behaviour will always be vicious, and
true virtue can have no role in managing people's destructive desires. Should people become
virtuous through divine grace, no one would pursue temporal success and society would go the
way of the bees. Thus, virtue has no connection with maintaining society or worldly success.
Mandeville also explains why vice is the key to sociability and material progress. In a state of
nature, people pursue only their own desires, without thinking of the consequences for others.
Happily, however, people have a characteristic that makes them fit for society. This
characteristic is the value they place on themselves, and their wish to see this high opinion of
themselves affirmed by others. Realising this, leaders of small bands of men construct an image
of a praiseworthy person who controls his passions in the interest of others. These "skilful
Politicians" then encourage people to conform to this image by heaping praise on all that act in
accordance with it. And, since it is to everyone's benefit to "preach up Publick-spiritedness,
that they might reap the Fruits of the Self-denial of others," everyone readily joins in. Thus, as
Mandeville puts it, for the effort of controlling his destructive appetites, man is paid by his
fellows in the "Aerial Coin of Praise".
Thus, through flattery, people are instilled with a sense of pride and shame, the two emotions
that ready us for society. Once part of society, people's desire to see themselves admired and
their inexhaustible desires for goods spur industry and the division of labour, through which
wealth increases. Therefore, it is vanity and all its attendant vices that, when properly
managed, make a society function and prosper. As Mandeville puts it: "what we call Evil in this
World […] is the Grand Principle that makes us sociable Creatures."
Like Mandeville's earlier writing, which he admitted "went down with the public like chopt Hay",
the Fable initially generated little interest. However, after it was presented to the Court of the
King's Bench as a public nuisance on account of its tendency "to Corrupt all Morals", the Fable
became immensely popular. As new editions rolled off the printing press, Mandeville produced
several new provocative works, and joined the debate on his book with gusto.
The Fable proved more than the subject of a temporary scandal. Mandeville's idea that the
pursuit of self-interest, when properly managed, can have good consequences, and his insights
into the way in which vanity makes people conform to social norms were put to good use by the
principal philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume and Adam Smith. Moreover,
the tension Mandeville exposed between the standards of Christian virtue and the beneficial
outcomes due to the pursuit of self-interest provided an impetus to develop a new moral idiom
that could accord some value to the tamed forms of self-interest that have beneficial
consequences. But old habits of moral thought die hard, and it is still good to have Dr
Mandeville's prescription at hand to deal with rigoristic pundits.
Suggested reading
The Fable of the Bees, ed. F B Kaye (Liberty Fund)
Bernard Mandeville
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