Bernard Mandeville

Mandeville, Bernard (1670–1733)

Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (1714) scandalized contemporaries by arguing that the flourishing commercial society they valued depended on vices they denounced. It resulted not only from the complementary satisfaction of appetites but was also based upon pride, envy and shame, which Mandeville traced to ‘self-liking’. Numerous individuals, driven by their own desires, acted independently to produce goods which required extensive, cooperative operations – an idea central to the economic concept of a market.

Mandeville initially appeared to credit ‘skilful politicians’ with originating morality and society. However, in defending and expounding his views, he set out ‘conjectural histories’ of the gradual development of many complex social activities and institutions, including language and society itself, thereby denying that they had been invented by public spirited heroes. Throughout his works, Mandeville adopted a strict criterion of virtue, repeatedly denying that he was advocating, rather than exposing, the vices he identified as inherent in human society.

1 Early writings

Bernard Mandeville studied philosophy and medicine at Leiden, qualifying in 1691. In the mid-1690s he settled in England, specializing in nervous and digestive disorders. His early verse works included Some Fables after the Easie and Familiar Method of Monsieur de la Fontaine (1703; enlarged into Aesop Dress’d, 1704), two tales from which were by Mandeville himself. In 1705 he published a longer original verse fable, The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves Turn’d Honest, whose bees continually complain of the vices and faults of their society, despite its power and prosperity. Granted virtue and honesty by Jove, they decline into contented, impoverished simplicity.

Mandeville then turned to female dialogues. In The Virgin Unmask’d (1709) ‘an elderly maiden lady’ advises her niece against the servility of marriage and lectures about the danger to Europe posed by Louis XIV. In the period 1709–10, Mandeville wrote thirty-two ‘Lucinda’ and ‘Artesia’ papers for the Female Tatler, an imitator of Richard Steele’s Tatler. Mandeville ridiculed Steele’s encomiums on the dignity of human nature and his advocacy of quasi-aristocratic ‘politeness’; his ‘Oxford gentleman’ maintained that both sociability and prosperity were based on vice – on pride, flattery and the invention and satisfaction of luxurious desires. His ‘sisters’ debated honour, the advisability of military service in Marlborough’s wars and the possibility of living to make money. Eight papers contended that women are fully capable of all the traditional male virtues, giving numerous historical, biblical and mythical examples (Goldsmith 1985).

2 Human nature and morality

The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits (1714), Mandeville’s best-known work, reprinted The Grumbling Hive, adding extensive remarks and essays which analysed human conduct, finding it motivated by avarice, prodigality, envy, pride, honour, shame and luxury – with contrary passions balancing each other. ‘Skilful politicians’, moralists and lawgivers had socialized human beings by persuading them to restrain their immediate self-interested desires in return for the praise accorded to their noble self-sacrifice, thereby gratifying their desires to think well of themselves and be admired by others (see Self-interest).

Much of this account of human nature was derived from the French moralistes and Pierre Bayle (see Bayle, P. §1; Mandeville 1714; Horne 1978; Hundert 1994), who had also pointed out the worldly benefits of unregenerate human conduct. Defining virtue as requiring self-denial for the good of others or one’s own rational improvement enabled Mandeville to claim that he condemned the vicious passions to which he traced all human conduct, including apparently religious or virtuous conduct. Contemporary critics (for example, William Law and George Berkeley) accused Mandeville of advocating vice and subverting the standards of right conduct; Adam Smith, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759, part VII, sect. ii, ch. 4), calls Mandeville’s a ‘licentious system’ because it removes the distinction between vice and virtue. Kaye (Mandeville 1714) argued that Mandeville tended towards a consequentialist acceptance of the benefits of vice thereby implying a reductio of his professed strict (or ‘rigourist’) standard of virtue. None the less some commentators have accepted Mandeville’s claim, reiterated in his last work A Letter to Dion (1732), that Dion’s book Alciphron so misrepresented the Fable of the Bees that Berkeley could not have read that work (Monro 1975). Mandeville’s satiric analysis of human nature along with his scorn for reformers and standards of ‘politeness’ and virtue have puzzled subsequent commentators as well as his contemporaries (Castiglione 1986).

Originally aimed at Steele (in the Female Tatler papers and the first edition of the Fable) and at the proselytizing Societies for the Reformation of Manners, ‘A Search into the Nature of Society’, added to the second edition of the Fable (1723), extended the attack to the Third Earl of Shaftesbury. Also added to that edition was the ‘Essay on Charity and Charity-Schools’, which resulted in the Fable’s notoriety. In it Mandeville distinguished true charity from natural pity or compassion, discovered pride behind magnificent charitable bequests, asserted that charity schools were promoted by parish busybodies to confirm their sense of self-importance, and denied that the schools were socially beneficial in decreasing irreligion and crime, claiming rather that they were harmful in providing poor children with education and aspirations incompatible with the life of drudgery required of them by a prosperous commercial society. This provoked the Fable’s being presented as a public nuisance by a Middlesex Grand Jury and incited numerous refutations, most notably William Law and Francis Hutcheson (see Hutcheson, F. §§2–3).

It seems likely that a materialist and naturalist theory underlay Mandeville’s ridicule of the dignity of human nature. The Fable treats humans as similar to other mammals in their anatomy, feelings, motives and behaviour – a rejection of the Cartesianism Mandeville learned at university. Its discussion of the slaughter and eating of higher animals and the debate between a lion and a man about superiority support that hypothesis, as do the methodological views expressed in Mandeville’s Treatise of the Hypocondriack and Hysterick Passions (1711, 1730). This Treatise is a set of medical dialogues in which the doctor (clearly Mandeville) talks his patients into cures based on simpler diets, more exercise and fewer, milder medicines; he advocates the empirical study of diseases, sceptically rejecting fashionable and fanciful medical theories.

3 Economics

The paradox of private vices creating public benefits was illustrated by showing how natural and moral evils, such as disasters like the Great Fire of London, crimes like theft, vices like prostitution and harmful activities like the liquor trade, benefited society by providing work, circulating wealth, preserving chastity and, through taxes, by supporting the state. Thus Mandeville extended his ‘selfish’ conception of human nature, which has reminded commentators of Hobbes (see Hobbes, T. §6), into the thesis that human needs and vices produce social wellbeing. By serving the desires of others in order to satisfy their own desires, individuals acting independently produce complex social processes and institutions (including brewing, baking and, in 1723, the worldwide activity necessary to provide the luxury of scarlet coats for common soldiers). Hayek (1966) therefore credited Mandeville with the basic insight involved in the theory of the free market; namely, the social importance of the unintended consequences of individual actions. But claims that Mandeville was a conscious precursor of classical economics are exaggerated (Goldsmith 1985). Despite some passages advocating free trade, rejecting sumptuary laws, defending luxury, accepting the export of specie (gold and silver) and insisting that a nation must buy foreign goods if it expects to sell its goods abroad, Mandeville also states typically mercantilist views without expounding a clear economic theory (Horne 1978). Government must maintain a system of justice, provide defence and also regulate internal and external trade. Only A Modest Defence of Public Stews (1724), usually attributed (without definite proof) to Mandeville, provides a clear example of a self-regulating system of supply and demand – a scheme for a system of public houses of prostitution.

4 Later writings

In 1720, before the Fable’s notoriety, Mandeville published the moderate, whiggish Free Thoughts on Religion. Relying on Bayle to the point of plagiarism, Mandeville sceptically advocated irenic tolerance while expressing anticlerical views (also found in the Fable). Free Thoughts supported the Protestant succession, the Hanoverian dynasty and the British mixed constitution.

In two later works, signed ‘by the author of the Fable of the Bees’, Mandeville supplemented and defended his views. Both were dialogues between the same principal interlocutors: Cleomenes, who combines Christianity with advocacy of Mandeville’s doctrines, and the worldly, sceptical Horatio. The Fable of the Bees. Part II (1729) explicitly distinguishes between two types of self-gratification: self-love (satisfying self-preservatory desires) and self-liking (satisfying the desires for superiority, admiration and one’s good opinion of oneself). (Rousseau later used the same distinction.) An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour and the Usefulness of Christianity in War (1732) not only pursues Mandeville’s discussion of honour and contrasts true with nominal religion, but also further refines the analysis of self-liking in showing that it causes both shame and pride. The Fable Part II is especially notable for elaborating the historical thesis suggested in Mandeville’s earlier remarks on the development of artefacts, processes and institutions (Goldsmith 1985). The designs of ships and clocks are the result of the labour and experience of many ages. So too are the elaborate laws and the complex institutions of government which – contrary to some previous views – have not been invented by heroic individual benefactors and lawgivers. The conjectural history of the stages of human development from animal existence through savagery to commercial society, already indicated as early as the Female Tatler, shows that the Fable’s story of the civilizing of humans by skilful politicians and moralists is not to be taken literally. In holding that the development of language itself must have taken many ages, Mandeville implicitly rejected literal, biblical chronology.

Mandeville’s views were widely known and extensively used and commented on in the eighteenth century, by thinkers such as Hutcheson, Voltaire and Rousseau among others; David Hume and Adam Smith clearly knew Mandeville’s discussion of human nature, the utility of vice and the beneficial results of complex social interaction (Goldsmith 1988; Hundert 1994).