Bernard Mandeville

The English satirist and moral philosopher Bernard Mandeville (ca. 1670-1733) is famous as the author of "The Fable of the Bees".

Bernard Mandeville was probably born in Rotterdam, Holland, the son of a prominent doctor. In 1685 he entered the University of Rotterdam and in 1689 went on to study medicine at the University of Leiden, where he received his medical degree in 1691. Afterward he went to England to "learn the language" and set up practice as a physician. However, he had very few patients and after a short time virtually gave up medicine to devote himself exclusively to his writings.

Mandeville's best-known work is The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Publick Benefits (1714), originally published as a poem, "The Grumbling Hive, or Knaves Turned Honest" (1705). This was intended at first to be a political satire on the state of England in 1705, when the Tories accused the ministry of favoring the French war for their own personal gains. In the later version, however, enlarged to two volumes, Mandeville, in agreement with T. Hobbes, declares that men act essentially in terms of egoistical interests, in contrast to the easy optimism and idealism of Shaftesbury. The material concerns of individuals are the basic force behind all social progress, while what rulers and clergymen call virtues are simply fictions that those in power employ to maintain their control. Francis Hutcheson and Bishop Berkeley wrote treatises opposing Mandeville's views. Others, including Adam Smith, as some interpreters claim, were affected in a more positive way by Mandeville's ideas.

In some of his other works Mandeville shows an intelligent and open interest in controversial and, for the time, scandalous subjects, such as whoring and the execution of criminals. On some issues, however, Mandeville seems strangely callous. In "An Essay on Charity and Charity Schools" he objects to educating the poor because the acquisition of knowledge has the effect of increasing desires and thereby making it more difficult to meet the needs of the poor. Moreover, he seems to regard even wars as valuable to the economic development of a nation since by destroying houses and property laborers are provided an opportunity to replace the destroyed goods.

On the basis of his views Mandeville is usually placed in the moral-sense school. Some interpreters insist that he is the forerunner of the doctrine of utilitarianism.

Further Reading

The most readily available edition of Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Publick Benefits, with a critical, historical, and explanatory commentary, is by F. B. Kaye (2 vols., 1714; repr. 1924). See also The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. 9 (1912), and Cecil A. Moore, Backgrounds of English Literature, 1700-1760 (1953).

(1670-1733) Social theorist, who practised medicine in London, although born and educated abroad. He provided important analyses relating individual activity to social outcomes. For example, he drew attention to the advantages which accrued from division of labour. He was also interested in the advantages to society of the pursuit of self-interest and profit, and provided an account of the sort of unintended consequences of individual action within a social process that was later associated particularly with Adam Smith's work. His notoriety amongst his contemporaries arose from his apparent denigration of dispositions or moral outlooks which encouraged the intentional promotion of that social benefit. He argued in The Fable of the Bees: or Private Vices, Public Benefits that the disappearance of what was conventionally regarded as vice would lead to impoverishment, because such ‘vices’, particularly those associated with acquisitiveness and jealous comparison with the lot of others, were engines of activity. The allegation that conventional virtues were destructive of the good at which they aimed was not well received.

— Andrew Reeve

Mandeville, Jean de (c.1300-1372). Travel writer. Although writing in French, the author claims, probably fictionally, to be English and to have started his journeys in 1322; some evidence suggests he may have lived in Liège. Except perhaps for his description of the Middle East, his Voyages (c.1356) are highly derivative; rather than a record, this is a summary of the known world, real and imaginary. Geography, fauna, and especially people and customs are described with real intellectual curiosity and remarkable tolerance; his contention that the earth is round may well have influenced Columbus. His style is lively and very readable, perhaps explaining his immense popularity: more than 300 manuscripts, 90 editions, and translations into 10 languages.

— Jane Taylor

Mandeville, Bernard (c. 1670-1733) Dutch doctor and moral philosopher. Born in Rotterdam of a distinguished medical family, Mandeville settled in Britain shortly after taking his degree in 1691. He is known for The Fable of the Bees; or Private Vices, Public Benefits (the work grew from a poem published in 1705, to its final form in the 6th edition of 1729). Mandeville analyses the way in which private vices, such as vanity, luxury, and desire for fashion and change, give rise to public benefits, such as industry and employment. Vice is the behaviour that alone promotes profitable economic activity. The sardonic or even cynical implications of this work called forth rebuttals from both Berkeley and Hutcheson, but the work clearly influenced Adam Smith, and anticipates the doctrine of conspicuous consumption made famous by Veblen.

Mandeville, Bernard (1670–1733), satirical writer and medical doctor. A specialist in nervous disorders, Bernard Mandeville was a Dutchman whose family had included physicians for generations. He received a classical education at the Erasmian school in Rotterdam. At the University of Leiden he studied medicine but also wrote a philosophical treatise on the ancient question of whether or not animals had souls. His cosmopolitan background led to a close knowledge of French skeptical literature and particularly the writings of Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), which influenced him considerably. Mandeville emigrated to London around 1691, possibly because of his involvement in local political disturbances, known as the Costerman Tax Riots, in Rotterdam in 1690. He settled down to a successful medical practice and married an Englishwoman, Ruth Elizabeth Laurence. Mandeville counted among his friends the eminent physician Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753).

Mandeville's literary career began with the publication of a Hudibrastic poem entitled The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turned Honest (1705), in which he began a satirical attack on Puritan asceticism that lasted his whole life. With the addition of prose essays, the poem grew into the first part of The Fable of the Bees (1714). A second part appeared in 1729. One of the appended essays dealt with the subject of charity schools, which, Mandeville controversially argued, would create discontent among the poor by overqualifying them for the (menial) tasks that they needed to do to make a living and that society needed them to do for its survival. The polemical subtitle, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, pithily encapsulated what later became known as the Mandevillean paradox, a questioning of the effects of adhering to an ascetic morality in a materialistic society.

The addition of the essay on charity schools to The Fable of the Bees led to a sometimes bitter public controversy engaging clerics and theologians like William Law (1686–1761), Joseph Butler (1692–1752), and Bishop George Berkeley (1685–1753), who all attacked Mandeville's work as morally corrupting. The Grand Jury of Middlesex condemned The Fable of the Bees to be burned by the public hangman, which added to Mandeville's notoriety and reputation as a freethinker. But the Mandevillean paradox became a focal discussion of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. Adam Ferguson (1723–1816), David Hume (1711–1776), and Adam Smith (1723–1790) in Britain and Voltaire (1694–1778) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) on the Continent felt the need to examine Mandeville's assertion that luxury, far from being harmful, was the foundation of a flourishing, commercial society.

Mandeville wrote a number of other works, including one on nervous disorders and several on the subject of religion and its effects upon war. He also wrote pamphlets on important and topical social subjects, such as prostitution (A Modest Defence of Publick Stews; 1724) and hanging (An Enquiry into the Causes of the Frequent Executions at Tyburn; 1725). On these social questions his views, expressed journalistically, could be radical, in the English context, suggesting, for example, that prostitution should be regulated by the state. But his lasting fame and the critical attention he has received is primarily based on the ideas expounded in his Fable of the Bees.

Bibliography

Primary Source

Mandeville, Bernard. The Fable of the Bees; or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits. 2 vols. Edited by F. B. Kaye. Oxford, 1924.

Secondary Sources

Jack, Malcolm. Corruption and Progress: The Eighteenth-Century Debate. New York, 1989.

Prior, Charles W. A. Mandeville and Augustan Ideas: New Essays. Victoria, B.C., 2000.

—MALCOLM JACK

Quotes:

"The multitude will hardly believe the excessive force of education, and in the difference of modesty between men and women, ascribe that to nature, which is altogether owing to early instruction: Miss is scarce three years old, but she's spoke to every day to hide her leg, and rebuked in good earnest if she shows it; whilst little Master at the same age is bid to take up his coats, and piss like a man."

"The only thing of weight that can be said against modern honor is that it is directly opposite to religion. The one bids you bear injuries with patience, the other tells you if you don't resent them, you are not fit to live."

"No habit or quality is more easily acquired than hypocrisy, nor any thing sooner learned than to deny the sentiments of our hearts and the principle we act from: but the seeds of every passion are innate to us, and nobody comes into the world without them."

"We seldom call anybody lazy, but such as we reckon inferior to us, and of whom we expect some service."

"Because impudence is a vice, it does not follow that modesty is a virtue; it is built upon shame, a passion in our nature, and may be either good or bad according to the actions performed from that motive."

"There is no intrinsic worth in money but what is alterable with the times, and whether a guinea goes for twenty pounds or for a shilling, it is the labor of the poor and not the high and low value that is set on gold or silver, which all the comforts of life must arise from."

See more famous quotes by Bernard Mandeville