Bernard Mandeville

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Bernard Mandeville
18th-century philosophy
RegionWestern philosophy
SchoolClassical economics
Main interests
Political philosophy, ethics, economics
Notable ideas
The unknowing co-operation of individuals, modern free market, division of labour
Signature

Bernard Mandeville, or Bernard de Mandeville (/ˈmændəˌvɪl/; 15 November 1670 – 21 January 1733), was an Anglo-Dutch philosopher, political economist, satirist, writer and physician. Born in Rotterdam, he lived most of his life in England and used English for most of his published works. He became famous for The Fable of the Bees.

Life

Mandeville was born on 15 November 1670, in

Cartesian theory of automatism among animals. In 1691 he took his medical degree, pronouncing an inaugural disputation, De chylosi vitiata. He moved to England to learn the language,[4] and succeeded so remarkably that many refused to believe he was a foreigner. His father had been banished from Rotterdam in 1693 for involvement in the Costerman tax riots on 5 October 1690; Bernard himself may well have been involved.[5]

As a physician Mandeville was well respected and his literary works were successful as well. His conversational abilities won him the friendship of Lord Macclesfield (chief justice 1710–1718), who introduced him to Joseph Addison, described by Mandeville as "a parson in a tye-wig." He died of influenza on 21 January 1733 at Hackney, aged 62.[6]

There is a surviving image of Mandeville but many details of his life still have to be researched. Although the name Mandeville attests a French

Huguenot origin, his ancestors had lived in the Netherlands since at least the 16th century.[5]

Works

The Fable of the Bees

Main article: The Fable of the Bees
The Fable of the Bees, 1924 edition

In 1705, Mandeville published a poem under the title The Grumbling Hive, or Knaves Turn'd Honest (two hundred doggerel couplets). In The Grumbling Hive Mandeville describes a bee community thriving until the bees are suddenly made honest and virtuous. Without their desire for personal gain their economy collapses and the remaining bees go to live simple lives in a hollow tree, thus implying that without private vices there exists no public benefit.[7]

In 1714, the poem was republished as an integral part of the Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Public Benefits, consisting of a prose commentary, called Remarks, and an essay, An Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue. The book was primarily written as a political satire on the state of England in 1705, when the Tories were accusing John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, and the ministry of advocating the War of the Spanish Succession for personal reasons.[6]

In 1723, a later edition appeared, including An Essay on Charity and Charity Schools, and A Search into the Nature of Society. The former essay criticised the charity schools, designed to educate the poor and, in doing so, instil virtue in them. Mandeville disagreed with the idea that education adds virtue because he did not believe that evil desires existed only in the poor, but rather he saw the educated and wealthy as much more crafty.

Bishop Berkeley and William Law, author of The Serious Call, and in 1729 was made the subject of a prosecution for its immoral tendency.[citation needed
]

Ideas

Mandeville's philosophy gave great offence at the time, and has always been stigmatised as false, cynical and degrading. His main thesis is that the actions of men cannot be divided into lower and higher. The higher life of man is a mere fiction introduced by philosophers and rulers to simplify government and the relations of society. In fact, virtue (which he defined 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") is actually detrimental to the state in its commercial and intellectual progress. This is because it is the vices (i.e., the self-regarding actions of men) which alone, by means of inventions and the circulation of capital (economics) in connection with luxurious living, stimulate society into action and progress.[6]

Private vice, public benefit

Mandeville concluded that vice, at variance with the "Christian virtues" of his time, was a necessary condition for economic prosperity. His viewpoint is more severe when juxtaposed to

Fable of the Bees that "Private Vices by the dextrous Management of a skilful Politician may be turned into Publick Benefits".[10]

In the Fable he shows a society possessed of all the virtues "blest with content and honesty," falling into apathy and utterly paralysed. The absence of self-love (cf. Hobbes) is the death of progress. The so-called higher virtues are mere hypocrisy, and arise from the selfish desire to be superior to the brutes. "The moral virtues are the political offspring which flattery begot upon pride." Similarly he arrives at the great paradox that "private vices are public benefits".[6]

Among other things, Mandeville argues that the basest and vilest behaviours produce positive economic effects. A

Restoration and Augustan satirists. A famous example is Mandeville's Modest Defence of Publick Stews, which argued for the introduction of public, state-controlled brothels. The 1726 paper acknowledges women's interests and mentions e.g. the clitoris as the centre of female sexual pleasure.[11] Jonathan Swift's 1729 satire A Modest Proposal is probably an allusion to Mandeville's title.[11][12]

Mandeville was an early describer of the division of labour, and Adam Smith makes use of some of his examples.

Mandeville says:

But if one will wholly apply himself to the making of Bows and Arrows, whilst another provides Food, a third builds Huts, a fourth makes Garments, and a fifth Utensils, they not only become useful to one another, but the Callings and Employments themselves will in the same Number of Years receive much greater Improvements, than if all had been promiscuously follow'd by every one of the Five...

In Watch-making, which is come to a higher degree of Perfection, than it would have been arrived at yet, if the whole had always remain'd the Employment of one Person; and I am persuaded, that even the Plenty we have of Clocks and Watches, as well as the Exactness and Beauty they may be made of, are chiefly owing to the Division that has been made of that Art into many Branches. (The Fable of the Bees, Volume two)

— Adam Smith.[13]

Vegetarianism

Mandeville was a lifelong

Animals' Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress, included the Fable of the Bees in the chapter, a "Bibliography of the Rights of Animals".[16] The Fable of the Bees also inspired the early vegetarianism activist Joseph Ritson to become a vegetarian.[17]

Influence

While the author probably had no intention of subverting

Henry Maine's historical inquiries (Ancient Law). He endeavours to show that all social laws are the crystallised results of selfish aggrandizement and protective alliances among the weak. Denying any form of moral sense or conscience, he regards all the social virtues as evolved from the instinct for self-preservation, the give-and-take arrangements between the partners in a defensive and offensive alliance, and the feelings of pride and vanity artificially fed by politicians, as an antidote to dissension and chaos.[citation needed
]

Mandeville's ironic paradoxes are a criticism of the "amiable" idealism of the

Earl of Shaftesbury; their irony contrasts with the serious egoistic systems of Hobbes and Helvétius.[6]

Mandeville's ideas about society and politics were praised by

Keynes who put it back in the spotlight in his Essay on Malthus and in the General Theory. Keynes considers Mandeville as a precursor of the foundation of his own theory of insufficient effective demand.[citation needed
]

Karl Marx, in his seminal work Capital, praised Mandeville as "an honest man with a clear mind" for his conclusion that the wealth of society depended on the relative poverty of workers.[citation needed]

Bibliography

Renatus Willemsen, Bernard Mandeville : een ondeugende denker?, Noordboek, 2022.Other works attributed, wrongly, to him are The World Unmasked (1736) and Zoologia medicinalis hibernica (1744).

See also

Notes

  1. ^ "Mandeville's portrait". bernard-mandeville.nl. Retrieved 21 January 2024.
  2. ^ Project Bernard Mandeville
  3. ISBN 9781498294072
    .
  4. ^ [1] Britannica Student Encyclopedia Archived 8 August 2006 at the Wayback Machine
  5. ^ a b The Literary Encyclopedia
  6. ^ a b c d e Mitchell 1911.
  7. ^ a b Cook 1999.
  8. ^ The Fable of the Bees, 5 edn, London, 1728, remarks, pp. 212–213, 328, quoted in Marx 1990 [1867], Capital Vol. 1, Chapter 25, The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation, p. 765, Penguin Classics.
  9. ISBN 0-415-18322-7
    .
  10. ^ Mandeville, p. 369.
  11. ^ a b Eine Streitschrift…, Essay von Ursula Pia Jauch. Carl Hanser Verlag, München 2001.
  12. ISBN 9781403984609
    .
  13. ^ Smith 1982, p. 27, section I.ii.3.
  14. ISBN 978-1-137-35436-5
    , retrieved 21 January 2024
  15. ^ Williams, Howard (1883). "Bernard de MANDEVILLE 1670-1733". The Ethics of Diet (1st ed.).
  16. ^ Salt, Henry Stephens; Leffingwell, Albert (1894). Animals' Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress. New York, London: Macmillan & Co. pp. 105–106.
  17. ISBN 1-56858-238-2
  18. ^ See also Hayek, F. A. (1967). Dr. Bernard Mandeville: Lecture on a Master Mind. Proceedings of the British Academy. London. pp. 125–141.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  19. Hayek, F.A. (1978). "Dr. Bernard Mandeville". New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and History of Ideas. London and Chicago: Routledge and University of Chicago Press. pp. 249-266
    .

References

Further reading

in Project Gutenberg

External links

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