Bernard Mandeville

In this essay, I offer a vindication of pride. I start by presenting the Christian condemnation of pride as the cardinal sin. I subsequently examine Mandeville’s line of argument whereby pride is beneficial to society, although remaining a vice for the individual. Finally, I focus on, and endorse, the analysis of pride formulated by Hume, for whom pride qualifies instead as a virtue. This is because pride not only contributes to making society flourish but also stabilizes the virtuous agent by (...) creating a virtuous circle between our desire for self-appraisal and our aspiration to act morally. I conclude by underscoring the (virtuous) connection between pride and modesty, concomitantly arguing that humility should be discarded as vicious. (shrink)

Authors from Cicero to Smith held honor to be indispensable to make people see and do what is right. As they considered honor to be a social motive, they did not think this dependence on honor was a problem. Today, we tend to see honor as a self‐regarding motive, but do not see this as problematic because we stopped seeing it as a necessary incentive. Bernard Mandeville, however, agreed with the older authors that honor is indispensable, but agreed with us (...) moderns that it is a self‐interested motive. Honor might be necessary to keep society functioning, but that does not make it less self‐serving. Mandeville thus combined the classical preoccupation with honor and the modern view of man as self‐seeking. That our motivations are self‐serving is something we wish to hide from others and ourselves; society benefits because we generally behave well in order to live up to this inflated (self‐)image. Hypocrisy is the price we pay for living together peacefully. It is this sobering view on honor that sets Mandeville apart from later authors on the subject, particularly David Hume and Adam Smith. (shrink)

If one looks for the notion of conscience in Hume, there appears to be a contrast between the loose use of it that can be found in his History of England, and the stricter use of it Hume makes in his philosophical works. It is my belief that, notwithstanding the problems Hume’s philosophy raises for a notion such as conscience, it is possible to frame a positive Humean explanation of it. I want to suggest that, far from corresponding to a (...) mental power or to a faculty of some sort, conscience for Hume can be understood as a reflective form of self-surveying. This becomes apparent if the discussion about conscience as presented in A Treatise of Human Nature is integrated with other notions Hume introduces in An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals when discussing the case of the ‘sensible knave’, such as those of inward peace of mind, consciousness of integrity, and reflection on one’s own conduct. To further explicate my line of argument, I shall also contrast Hume’s conclusions with some arguments presented by other authors in this regard, such as Bernard Mandeville and Joseph Butler. (shrink)

This paper looks at two figures in the modern, European, eighteenth-century debate on luxury. It claims to better understand the differences between Francis Hutcheson and Bernard Mandeville by exploring how Hutcheson treated the topic of luxury as a distinction between two desires, thus differing from Mandeville's concept of luxury, and a concept of temperance based on moral sense. It explores why Hutcheson believed that luxury was a moral, social and political issue and particularly why he considered Mandeville the embodiment of (...) a threat that went beyond simple considerations of the content of The Fable of the Bees to touch on reflections on the equilibrium of a social and political system. It aims to show how the psychological and the moral dimension were connected to Hutcheson's political theory and how luxury was one of the key points of this connection. (shrink)

In this history of the development of ideas of honor in Western philosophy, Peter Olsthoorn examines what honor is, how its meaning has changed, and whether it can still be of use. Political and moral philosophers from Cicero to John Stuart Mill thought that a sense of honor and concern for our reputation could help us to determine the proper thing to do, and just as important, provide us with the much-needed motive to do it. Today, outside of the military (...) and some other pockets of resistance, the notion of honor has become seriously out of date, while the term itself has almost disappeared from our moral language. Most of us think that people ought to do what is right based on a love for justice rather than from a concern with how we are perceived by others. Wide-ranging and accessible, the book explores the role of honor in not only philosophy but also literature and war to make the case that honor can still play an important role in contemporary life. (shrink)

Locating the history of male honour in the perspective of his philosophical anthropology, Mandeville is able to show that the rituals of modern honour are an exemplary expression of that spontaneous, artificial order stemming out of a natural disposition of human passions. For Mandeville, duelling provides decisive evidence that the desire for approval from others, even at the cost of one's life, is a dominant motive in man's behaviour. The aim of this paper is to review selected Scottish responses to (...) the questions raised by Mandeville's views on ‘Modern Honour’ and his provocative defense of duelling. (shrink)

This paper discusses Bernard Mandeville's (1670–1733) conception of governability. It grounds his key distinction between a submissive and a governable subject in terms of his alternative account of human sociability to demonstrate the nature and structure of relationships that are necessary for upholding stable and flourishing societies. Using Sir William Temple as an interlocutor (1628–1699), it also explores the role played by the cultivation of reverence to authority in Mandeville's analysis of governability.

Like Bernard Mandeville, Archibald Campbell develops a profoundly egoistic conception of human psychology. However, Campbell attacks numerous points in Mandeville’s moral philosophy, in particular Mandeville’s treatment of self-love, the desire for esteem, and human nature in general as corrupt. He also criticises Mandeville’s corresponding insistence on self-denial and his rigorist conception of luxury. Campbell himself is subsequently attacked by Scottish orthodox Calvinists - not for his egoism, but for his optimism regarding postlapsarian human nature and self-love. This episode demonstrates that (...) the debates on egoism in Mandeville should be seen in the context of the debates on postlapsarian human nature. (shrink)

Hume’s writings, taken as a whole, address a dazzlingly broad range of topics. I argue that they do so as part of a coherent and interesting philosophical programme. While Hume’s doctrine of the general point of view provides an attractive way of understanding the process of moral judgement, it raises the threat of parochialism – that is, it potentially makes us prey to the limitations and prejudices of our society. I show that Hume endorses what I call “engaged cosmopolitanism”, which (...) provides the resources to explain how we can, under certain circumstances, escape such parochialism. Engaged cosmopolitanism is the product of a particular sort of society – one that is open and commercial, and that governed by a system of equitable laws. Like Mandeville, Hume rejects the suspicion of commerce and “luxury” that was prevalent during his time. But he provides supporters of commercial society with a justification that does not, in contrast to Mandeville’s writings, abandon notions of morality altogether. On the contrary, he makes commerce a precondition to a society’s moral development. And he further links this development to a certain type of liberal political institutions, thus giving such institutions a moral basis. (shrink)

(2013). ‘Damn'd to Sythes and Spades’: Labour and Wealth Creation in the Writing of Bernard Mandeville. Intellectual History Review: Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 187-205. doi: 10.1080/17496977.2012.731142.

The chapter analyses the debates on the relation between self-interest and sociability in eighteenth-century British moral philosophy. It focuses on the selfish hypothesis, i.e. on the egoistic theory that we are only motivated by self-interest or self-love, and that our sociability is not based on disinterested affections, such as benevolence. The selfish hypothesis is much debated especially in the early eighteenth century (Mandeville, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Butler, Clarke, Campbell, Gay), and then rather tacitly accepted (Hartley, Tucker, Paley) or rejected (Hume, Smith, (...) Reid). It is asserted for example by philosophers with an Augustinian and Epicurean background and by the associationists, yet rejected especially by thinkers inspired by Stoic ideas. In particular for these latter authors, who emphasise the disinterested aspects of moral motivation, the debates on the selfish hypothesis have an important moral dimension. Others again argue that specific kinds of self-interest motivate virtuous actions. (shrink)

Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733) Bernard Mandeville is primarily remembered for his impact on discussions of morality and economic theory in the early eighteenth century. His most noteworthy and notorious work is The Fable of the Bees, which triggered immense public criticism at the time. He had a particular influence on philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, most […].

Prompted by Derrida's work on the animal-fable in eighteenth-century debates about political power, this article examines the role played by the fiction of the animal in thinking of pity as either a natural virtue (in Rousseau's Second Discourse) or as a natural passion (in Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees). The war of fables between Rousseau and Mandeville – and their hostile reception by Samuel Johnson and Adam Smith – reinforce that the animal-fable illustrates not so much the proper of (...) man as the possibilities and limitations of a moral philosophy that is unable to address the political realities of the state. (shrink)

Summary In about 1735, Emilie Du Châtelet began to translate Mandeville's Fable of the Bees. Her work, which is largely ignored by scholars, did, as this article demonstrates, turn out to be one of transformation rather than of translation and came at a crucial moment in the emerging French luxury debate. So far commercial society and luxury had been defended in purely economic terms, for instance in Melon's Essai politique, or as an aspect of divine providence for fallen man, by (...) Pierre Nicole amongst others. There was as yet no coherent defence on the level of secular ethics. As this article shows, Du Châtelet set out to remedy this. In co-operation with Voltaire, with whose recent praise of English society in the Lettres philosophiques she strongly identified, she rewrote the Fable to offer a defence of modern commercial society as both natural and moral. The article argues that she was able to do so by taking recourse to classic Epicureanism in the guise of Lucretius' De rerum natura, as an alternative to the Neo-Epicureanism, with its Augustinian overtones, as espoused by Mandeville. Voltaire in turn used her translation to lay the foundations for his defence of commercial society and progress in his Traité de métaphysique in which he uses the precise passages she had inserted into Mandeville's original. This article analyses the further aspects Voltaire adds to her arguments. Taken together, Du Châtelet's ?translation? and Voltaire's Traité offer a coherent defence of bourgeois society that would underlie Voltaire's later historiographical and philosophical works and which were crucial to his concept of ?Enlightenment? and ?progress? (shrink)

Después de un breve excursus histórico, absolutamente no exhaustivo, pero dirigido a entender el significado del término hipocresía dentro de algunos autores, me concentro en su defensa paradójica. Paradójica porque, a pesar de ser moralmente reprochable, la actitud hipócrita preserva la integridad ..

The purpose of this text is to analyze the debate between Berkeley’s Alciphron and Mandeville’s The fable of the bees and Letter to Dion, focusing on the questions indirectly raised by Berkeley to his opponent: Would there be a place for religion in Mandeville’s society or in his social, political and economic system? If so, what role would it play? Without religion, on what foundations would morality in social life be based? Key words: Berkeley, Mandeville, morality.

At the end of Matters of Exchange , Harold Cook's major revisionist account of the early modern scientific revolution, he locates the political and economic writings of Bernard Mandeville within the practices and values of contemporaneous Dutch observational medicine. Like Mandeville, Cook describes the potency of early modern capitalism and its attendant value system in generating industry and knowledge; like Mandeville, Cook finds coercive systems of moral regulation to be mistaken in their estimation of human capacities; and like Mandeville, Cook (...) does not shy away from the violence that often made the worldwide commerce in matters of fact possible. “Every Part was full of Vice,” famously rhymed Mandeville, “Yet the whole Mass a Paradise.” The practices and values of science, this book suggests, stemmed from the vices of the merchant and the consumer, not the sprezzatura of the baroque courtier, the asceticism of the Christian gentleman, the speculation of the university philosopher, or the dour appraisal of the theologian. Interest, not claims to disinterest, made modern science and its attendant values possible. Scrupulous attention to goods from around the world and right at home created the conditions for natural knowledge. (shrink)

Studies of Bernard Mandeville by economists and historians ofeconomic thought have focused overwhelmingly on the problem ofsituating his work within the development of the theory of laissez-faireand evaluating his influence on major figures in the ScottishEnlightenment, especially Adam Smith. This paper explores Mandeville’seconomic thought through the lens of a very different transition:England’s rapid growth following the Glorious Revolution and itsgradual eclipse of Dutch economic hegemony. By situating Mandevillewithin an Anglo-Dutch context and carefully examining his commentson the Dutch in Remark Q (...) of The fable of the bees, the paper shows themanner in which Mandeville’s ideas both appropriated lessons fromDutch history and sought to revise ideas about the Dutch current amonghis English contemporaries. The paper thus sheds new light on coreconcepts in Mandeville’s economic thought and permits exploration ofan important moment in the development of political economy. (shrink)

Until fairly recently it was not uncommon for political theorists to hold the view that people cannot be expected to act in accordance with the public interest without some incentive. Authors such as Marcus Tullius Cicero, John Locke, David Hume and Adam Smith, for instance, held that people often act in accordance with the public interest, but more from a concern for their honour and reputation than from a concern for the greater good. Today, most authors take a more demanding (...) view, maintaining that people are to be just solely from a love for justice, not from a fear of losing face. In this article today's prevailing view, which sees honour as something obsolete and archaic and not as a legitimate motive, is contrasted with the older view that honour is important for both knowing what moral is and acting on it. Subsequently, it is argued that the ethics of honour, especially in the form it took in the works of Hume and Smith, can still be of value, exactly because it is less demanding. (shrink)

A short discussion of the emergence of the self-interest axiom during the classical phase of political economy, its roots in the previous discussion on self-love in early modern ethics and its development in the following formulation of the notion of 'homo economicus' and the definition of the agent's rationality.

This paper contrasts Frankfurt’s characterisation of self-love as disinterested with the predominant 18th-century view on self-love as interested. Two senses of the term ‘interest’ are distinguished to discuss two fundamentally different readings of the claim that self-love promotes the agent’s interest. This allows characterising two approaches to self-love, which are found in Hutcheson’s and in Butler’s writings. Hutcheson sees self-love as a source of hedonistic motives, which can be calm or passionate. Butler sees it as a general affection of rational (...) beings in the sense of a kind of love of one’s real nature. (shrink)

Recent corporate scandals raise an old question anew: is capitalism fundamentally infected by immorality? A now almost forgotten answer to this question was advanced at the dawn of capitalism, an answer that students of business ethics would find profit in considering. In the early eighteenth century, Bernard Mandeville authored The Fable of the Bees, which became notorious in its day for arguing that capitalism created wealth while necessarily relying on vicious impulses. The fundamental dilemma is that morality requires self-denial while (...) capitalism runs on self-interest. As such, Mandeville claims that business and ethics are essentially separate.While this would appear to align him with skeptics of business ethics, Mandeville does suggest a role for moral theorists in dealing with the challenges of commercial societies. The Mandevillean business ethicist proceeds by separating the public and private spheres. In the former, where government policy toward business is at issue, the Mandevillean ethicist applies a market-friendly utilitarianism. In the latter, where individual conduct is at issue, the Mandevillean gently articulates a market-critical ethic predicated on self-restraint. (shrink)

Recent corporate scandals raise an old question anew: is capitalism fundamentally infected by immorality? A now almost forgotten answer to this question was advanced at the dawn of capitalism, an answer that students of business ethics would find profit in considering. In the early eighteenth century, Bernard Mandeville authored The Fable of the Bees, which became notorious in its day for arguing that capitalism created wealth while necessarily relying on vicious impulses. The fundamental dilemma is that morality requires self-denial while (...) capitalism runs on self-interest. As such, Mandeville claims that business and ethics are essentially separate.While this would appear to align him with skeptics of business ethics, Mandeville does suggest a role for moral theorists in dealing with the challenges of commercial societies. The Mandevillean business ethicist proceeds by separating the public and private spheres. In the former, where government policy toward business is at issue, the Mandevillean ethicist applies a market-friendly utilitarianism. In the latter, where individual conduct is at issue, the Mandevillean gently articulates a market-critical ethic predicated on self-restraint. (shrink)

Arguably, the tradition of democratic republican theory which arose in the Dutch Republic in the years around 1660 in the writings of Johan and Pieter de la Court, Franciscus van den Enden and Spinoza played a decisively important role in the development of modern democratic political theory. The tradition did not end with Spinoza but continued to develop in the United Provinces and–in the work of Bernard Mandeville, who seemingly belongs more to the Dutch than the British republican tradition–in London, (...) down to the early 18th century. The failure in most histories of republicanism to appreciate how strikingly different intellectually, and as an ideology, the Dutch tradition was from the Anglo-American republican tradition, has had the effect of obscuring its central importance in the development of radical republicanism in mid- and late 18th-century France. (shrink)

John Trenchard's and Thomas Gordon's ‘Cato’ has generally been seen by historians as the embodiment of neo-Harringtonianism and the polar opposite of Bernard Mandeville's thought. This paper addresses that misreading and places Trenchard and Gordon within a tradition of liberal republican political thought, rather than a civic humanist or neo-roman tradition. It examines the relationship between the political, philosophical and religious beliefs of Trenchard and Gordon and those of Mandeville, arguing that they shared a common framework with respect to the (...) problems of politics. (shrink)

A short account of the philosopher Bernard Mandeville's key ideas.

Some years before the Scriblerians brought a comic realism to bear on the themes of prophecy and apocalypse, Mandeville gave millenarians a taste of their own medicine by showing – in the conclusion to The Grumbling Hive – that a land free of the offences decried by the pious would indeed prove to be ruinous. In so doing he inaugurated a tradition of secularised apocalypse that finds one of its most famous expressions in the Dunciad. Both Pope and Mandeville make (...) use of the millenarian motifs of Elkanah Settle’s pageants for Lord Mayor’s day, and though the Williamite politics of The Fable of the Bees was deeply inimical to the Tory wits (as appears in the satires of the Scriblerians), time has exposed a paradoxical congruence between Pope and Mandeville that underlies their official enmity. (shrink)

Of those philosophers that Hume credits with having "begun to put the science of man on a new footing", Bernard Mandeville has received relatively little attention from contemporary philosophers and Hume scholars. In contrast, Mandeville was not so neglected in his own age, a point well-chronicled in F. B. Kaye's introduction to The Fable of the Bees, and substantiated, tangibly, by this collection of writings excellently assembled and edited by J. Martin Stafford. In the eighteenth century and, more particularly, in (...) the decade between the publication of the 1723 edition of the Fable and Mandeville's death, numerous sermons, essays, letters, and books were published with the single intent of refuting what one eighteenth-century critic considered "so monstrous an Opinion", namely, that private vice might render a benefit to the public. What one discovers on reading these early critics is that it is not so much Mandeville's opinion that is monstrous as it is the incessant misinterpretations that are so often used against him. (shrink)

A short discussion of the notions of self-love and self-interest in early modern ethics and the shaping of political economy.