Why is mandeville a forerunner to Adam smith?

Answer 1

Bernard Mandeville wrote a paper called The Fable of the Bees in 1714, more than 60 years before Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations. The Fable of the Bees describes a society of bees who live like people. They are immoral and selfish, but surprisingly this leads them to create a happy society. While Mandeville's worked failed to describe markets as accurately or as thoroughly as Smith later would, he did illustrate the idea that individuals, acting purely in self-interest, could inadvertently end up providing for one another's well-being. Mandeville correctly attributed this at least in part to trade in the market place, however, he incorrectly described several economic principles relating to trade. For example, he celebrated the way that self-interest lead people to buy goods rather than the way it incentivized them to work, in order to make money, and he describes advances that allowed less people to perform the same task as bad because they mean less jobs, and could lead to the economy being "O'er-stock'd." Smith did not agree with Mandeville, and wrote a direct rebutall of his ideas in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Nonetheless, Mandeville's work was insightful and important in its time, and is correctly identified as a precursor to Adam Smith.