Bernard Mandeville - this masterpiece of 18th-century British satire sparked great social controversy by rejecting a positive view of human nature and arguing the necessity of vice as the foundation of an emerging capitalist economy

 

Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees: Or

Private Vices, Publick Benefits, Penguin

Classics, 1989. [1714.]

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Originally published in book form in 1714, this masterpiece of eighteenth-century British satire sparked great social controversy by rejecting a positive view of human nature and arguing the necessity of vice as the foundation of an emerging capitalist economy. Mandeville suggests many key principles of economic thought, including division of labor and the "invisible hand", seventy years before these concepts were more thoroughly elucidated by Adam Smith. Two centuries later, the noted economist John Maynard Keynes cited Mandeville to show that it was "no new thing ... to ascribe the evils of unemployment to ... the insufficiency of the propensity to consume", a condition also known as the paradox of thrift, which was central to his own theory of effective demand. At the time, however, it was considered scandalous.

It used to be that everyone read the “notorious” Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733). He was a great satirist and came to have a profound impact on economics, ethics, and social philosophy.

The Fable of the Bees begins with a poem and continues with a number of essays and dialogues. It is all tied together by the startling and original idea that “private vices” (self-interest) lead to “publick benefits” (the development and operation of society).

From that simple beginning, Mandeville saw that orderly social structures (such as law, language, the market, and even the growth of knowledge) were a spontaneous growth developing out of individual human actions.

The analogy of the Commonwealth with a Beehive first makes its appearance in the early 17th century, after the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and by the time of Mandeville's writing (1714) had become an established metaphore. Mandeville's book could loosely be described as the first polemic of Capitalism, long before Karl Marx's 'Das Capital'. Adam Smith's 'Theory of Moral Sentiments' (1759), which formulated the Moral Philosophy of Laissez faire Political-Economy, was in large part writen as a responce to Mandeville's pamphlet.

 The Fable of The Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits (1714) is a book by the Anglo-Dutch social philosopher Bernard Mandeville. It consists of the satirical poem The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves turn'd Honest, which was first published anonymously in 1705; a prose discussion of the poem, called "Remarks"; and an essay, An Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue. In 1723, a second edition was published with two new essays.

In The Grumbling Hive, Mandeville describes a bee community that thrives until the bees decide to live by honesty and virtue. As they abandon their desire for personal gain, the economy of their hive collapses, and they go on to live simple, "virtuous" lives in a hollow tree. Mandeville's implication—that private vices create social benefits—caused a scandal when public attention turned to the work, especially after its 1723 edition.

Mandeville's social theory and the thesis of the book, according to E. J. Hundert, is that "contemporary society is an aggregation of self-interested individuals necessarily bound to one another neither by their shared civic commitments nor their moral rectitude, but, paradoxically, by the tenuous bonds of envy, competition and exploitation".[1] Mandeville implied that people were hypocrites for espousing rigorous ideas about virtue and vice while they failed to act according to those beliefs in their private lives. He observed that those preaching against vice had no qualms about benefiting from it in the form of their society's overall wealth, which Mandeville saw as the cumulative result of individual vices (such as luxury, gambling, and crime, which benefited lawyers and the justice system).

Mandeville's challenge to the popular idea of virtue—in which only unselfish, Christian behaviour was virtuous—caused a controversy that lasted through the eighteenth century and influenced thinkers in moral philosophy and economics. The Fable influenced ideas about the division of labour and the free market (laissez-faire), and the philosophy of utilitarianism was advanced as Mandeville's critics, in defending their views of virtue, also altered them.[2] His work influenced Scottish Enlightenment thinkers such as Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith.[3] - Wikipedia  read more

excerpt:

 [T]hey that examine into the Nature of Man, abstract from Art and Education, may observe, that what renders him a Sociable Animal, consists not in his desire of Company, good Nature, Pity, Affability, and other Graces of a fair Outside; but that his vilest and most hateful Qualities are the most necessary Accomplishments to fit him for the largest, and according to the World, the happiest and most flourishing Societies.

[T]he main design of [the present work] ... is to shew the Impossibility of enjoying all the most elegant Comforts of Life that are to be met with in an industrious, welthy and powerful Nation, and at the same time be bless'd with all the Virtue and Innocence that can be wish'd for in a Golden Age; and ... to expose the Unreasonableness and Folly of those, that desirous of being an opulent and flourishing People, and wonderfully greedy after all the Benefits they can receive as such, are yet always murmuring at and exclaiming against those Vices and Inconveniencies, that from the beginning of the World to this present Day, have been inseparable from all Kingdoms and States that ever were fam'd for Strength, Riches and Politeness at the same time.