SOURCE: Hundert, E. G. “A World of Goods.” In The Enlightenment's Fable: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society, pp. 175-218. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

[In the following essay, Hundert examines Mandeville's “unsettling observation” throughout his satires “that the technical operations of the market could be seen to govern even the most intimate aspects of civilized living.”]

When, early in his literary career, Mandeville wrote The Grumbling Hive, he satirized his contemporaries for trumpeting their commitment to classical or Christian ideals of virtue while glorying in recent English prosperity. Employing the beehive as a symbol of productive activity for his own satiric purposes, he divided the poem into two parts. The first part stresses the economic benefits that follow when a society can accommodate a certain amount of (relatively unselfconscious) moral corruption amongst its members. In the second part, Mandeville contrasts this public felicity with an imagined society in which disastrous economic consequences follow when the lives of citizens are purged of immoral and immoderate behavior. Yet even in the wealthy hive, the “knaves” populating it are hypocrites who “boast … of their honesty” while engaging in duplicitous social practices. Mandeville's obvious and intentionally transgressive point in the poem is that commercial societies seem naturally to entail forms of artifice and imposture which should be understood as the moral price of commercial prosperity. As we have seen, he gave theoretical expression to this common concern amongst observers of British public life in the early eighteenth century, that, as one of them noted, “Greatness is so Theatrical, and the actors change so often that really I was at a loss where to fix.”¹ Mandeville later put the point starkly in the body of The Fable: “it is impossible we could be socialized creatures without hypocrisy,” the necessary ingredient of all “civil commerce” (I, 349).

FROM HYPOCRISY TO EMULATION

In the 1723, and even more pointedly in the 1728 volume of The Fable, however, Mandeville altered some of his original views about moral evil. Vice he now most often associated with pride and envy rather than with avarice and greed. This shift to emphasis probably resulted from his having to defend The Fable's dominant assertion of irreducible egoism by answering critics like Butler, Hutcheson and Law, who claimed to defeat Mandeville's arguments by explaining social actions through an appeal to the natural benevolence of mankind. Mandeville's critics also argued, as we have seen, that no peaceful and prosperous society could possibly be sustained by pure egoists competing for scarce satisfactions; they argued, indeed, that Mandeville could only make such an absurd claim by perversely suspecting the most obviously innocent and benevolent actors of hidden and vicious intentions. “It is a suspicion,” William Law wished to convince his readers, “thus founded against all the appearances of truth, and is forced to make those the proofs of the absence of a thing, which are the natural signs of its presence.”² Assaults like these had an immediate rhetorical design. They were meant to blunt The Fable's force amongst the educated public by treating Mandeville as little more than a minor Hobbesian acolyte with a Grub Street talent for churning out conceptually nonsensical satirical wit. Hutcheson's first attacks on Mandeville, which appeared in the pages of The Dublin Journal in 1725, were brought together and posthumously published in 1750 under the title Reflections on Laughter for this polemical purpose,³ expressing a collective hope nearly twenty years after his death that Mandeville finally could be dismissed as a wicked but ultimately risible author whose pernicious doctrines were philosophically vacuous. Hutcheson's Scots colleague, Adam Ferguson, while echoing The Fable's charge that the “standard of felicity” amongst commercial moderns “flatter[s] their own imbecility under the name of politeness,” adopted the same tactic in the 1760s. “It is pleasant,” he wrote of Mandeville,

to find men, who, in their speculations, deny the reality of moral distinctions, forget in detail the general positions they maintain, and give loose to ridicule, indignation, and scorn, as if any of these sentiments could have place, were the actions of men indifferent; and with acrimony pretend to detect fraud by which moral restraints have been imposed, as if to censure a fraud were not already to take part on the side of morality.⁴

For his part, Mandeville seems never to have been less than secure about his own rhetorical agility. Critics who attempted to demolish with ridicule saw their own assertions effectively reduced to parody and held up for derision in the “Vindication of the Book,” where Mandeville mocked the “Scribblers” who attacked him (I, 390), and did so again in both The Fable's second volume and its supplement on “Honour.” Yet in addition to these purely polemical objectives, Mandeville was intensely concerned in these works to answer those critics who bracketed The Fable with Leviathan, the work of Hobbes he seems most to have admired but which he thought had exhausted the analogy between natural and political bodies.⁵ Mandeville distinguished his work from Hobbes' by elaborating and refining his claim that consistent common experience confirmed that men care immeasurably more about the opinions rather than the welfare of others. Pace Hobbes, Mandeville argued that in polished as opposed to predatory societies envy and the hypocrisy to which it gave rise were naturally self-limiting rather than a socially destructive passions—a conception Montesquieu was known to have transposed in his discussion of the stabilizing role of noble honor in monarchies in The Spirit of the Laws.⁶ Instead of encouraging men to engage in bouts of physical aggression and to invade the property of others, as Hobbes had claimed, Mandeville argued that in conditions of modern opulence envy would instead be directed into politically harmless and socially beneficial channels. In fine: the emergence of commerce had unintentionally contributed to the stability of the modern state.

It is important to keep in mind that Mandeville's seminal claim about communally beneficent hypocrisy in commercial settings ran counter to most informed opinion during most of the eighteenth century, not only to Hobbes.⁷ Mandeville's immediate contemporaries like Hutcheson and Law, and later Ferguson, Rousseau and Smith, all worried that once the arts of dissembling, economic self-interest and envy were aroused by the informal as well as the formal institutions of commerce, these intensely self-regarding types of activity could not reasonably be expected to remain confined to economic affairs. They feared that the drive for profit, accumulation, and material superiority would corrupt and then finally dominate all other aspects of communal life. It was classically argued and still widely believed in the eighteenth century that as private interests took precedence over public duties nations largely comprised of persons consumed with self-regard in their struggle for material advantage were threatened with civil incapacity. Public morals would wither amidst an anarchic scramble for wealth as an instrument of dominance, a struggle that could only be contained, as Plato imagined in the final Book of The Republic, by a despot. In The Discourse on the Origins of Inequality Rousseau, who, as we have seen, took Mandeville's Fable as commercial society's most truthful and self-incriminating expression, followed this line of thought. He argued that despotism was the inevitable consequence of modernity, a conclusion in his view supported not only by classical authorities but most recently by Montesquieu's observation in The Spirit of the Laws, where it was argued that mere avarice threatened to supplant lofty ambition in societies circumscribed by petty commercial concerns.⁸ Indeed, when Mandeville directly addressed contemporary British politics in the wake of the collapse of the South Sea Company's shares, he also assumed that talent in trade and knowledge of commercial dealings in no way prepared a person for a full civic identity. Unlike virtually the whole of his initial audience, however, Mandeville remained pointedly undisturbed by the prospect that in commercial societies, which by their nature required an intensified specialization of social functions, a man may “have good notions of Meum and Teum of private persons, and yet not be able to determine anything concerning the property of nations.”⁹

Mandeville seems always to have believed that British politics could safely be left in the hands of enlightened Whig elites. He argued neither that the manipulative practices of these elites, nor the hypocrisy which characterized the commercial populations they governed, in any way threatened social peace, as the dominant strand of Western political argument had maintained. Like his critics, Mandeville understood hypocrisy as the socially constituted ensemble of techniques necessary for the fabrication of disguises civilized persons don in order to conceal their avarice from one another. For persons inextricably bound by the web of commercial relations, hypocrisy is the requisite mask for hiding avaricious economic vanity from the moralizing gaze of one's fellows (1, 72-80 and 131-132). Mandeville repeatedly argued that from any given individual's point of view, hypocritical practices may correctly be seen as devices employed to conceal a person's vicious motives. This was, he knew, the point of view consistently adopted by the moralists he proposed to satirize; and it was one, moreover, whose conclusions he seldom tired of repeating himself. As he put toward at the end of his career, “[t]o make a Shew outwardly of what is not felt within, and counterfeit what is not real, is certainly Hypocrisy, whether it does good or hurt.” Indeed, Mandeville went on, we can reasonably include all that comes under the headings of morality, modern manners and politeness in this category.¹⁰

But amongst Mandeville's most historically important theoretical achievements was the recognition that the individual's point of view, while instinctive in naturally self-regarding creatures, in fact tends often to conceal the social significance of his actions. The first-person perspective encourages the apparently obvious but false belief that what is morally good or materially beneficial for an individual actor must needs be so for society as a whole. Similarly, we unreflectively tend to believe that an individual vice must be communally vicious. Since every person is “an entire individual, a wonderful machine, endowed with thought and will independent of anything visible from without … every body looks upon his own dear person, as an individual, if not independent being which he is obliged in every way to gratify and take care of, very often forgetting they are members of society.”¹¹ The scientific student of society, by contrast, is obliged to regard actions from an altered and counter-intuitive perspective, a perspective consistently alert to the ironic disjunction between the truth of a belief held by an actor—the passions from which his action may spring—and, most significantly, its social consequences. He evaluates the deeds of persons by different criteria,

the Usefulness and dignity of their callings, their capacities, with all qualifications required for the exercise or performance of their functions … In this view we have no regard for the persons themselves, but only the benefit they may be of to the publick … they are only look'd upon as parts and members of the whole society.¹²

As Mandeville put it to Bishop Berkeley, “to understand the Nature of Civil Society, requires Study and Experience … They are silly People who imagine that the Good of the whole is consistent with the Good of every Individual.”¹³

The Fable's conceptually significant and radical claim regarding the function of hypocrisy proceeds from this methodological insight: from the point of view of society itself the vice of hypocrisy in fact serves a hidden positive purpose, the familiar Mandevillian objective of pride being managed for public benefit “by playing the Passion against itself” (II, 78-79). “The more pride [men] have and the greater value they set on [gaining] the esteem of others, the more they'll make it their study to render themselves acceptable to all they converse with” (II, 65). Mandevillian pride, then, should be seen from his own dual, evolutionary perspective. Pride begins its career as the egoistic and hedonistic desire to enhance one's self-esteem. This desire initially empowers “flattery” to tame men by encouraging the internalization of elementary forms of social discipline. Then, after they have become moralized in the latter stages of the civilizing process, pride appears as the consequent desire of persons for some form of dependence on the approbation of others. The passion which highlights human hypocrisy and the role of theatrical appearance, the pride of polished moderns can at the same time be employed by politicians to direct individual actions into socially beneficial channels by appealing to the need of civilized egoists to gain public approval. As was the case with honor, the previous “tye of society,” hypocrisy in commercial nations masks the emulative striving arising from envy. Hypocrisy, disseminated amongst all but the poorest ranks, thereby curbs rather than encourages violent and communally baneful forms of immoderate behavior. As Voltaire perceptively noted, Mandeville effectively disturbed one of his audience's most deep-seated moral intuitions by explaining in detail the positive consequences of envy. By taking emulation rather than aggression as envy's primary expression, Mandeville, so Voltaire thought, achieved his greatest insight: he “is the first who sought to prove that envy is a very good thing, a very useful passion” for society.¹⁴ Mandeville showed how, without any formal encouragement, hypocrites discover socially useful methods of “making ourselves acceptable to others” (II, 147).

What is chiefly aim'd at in a refined Education is to procure as much Ease and Pleasure upon Earth, as that can afford: Therefore Men are first instructed in all the various Arts of rendering their Behaviour agreeable to others, with the least Disturbance to themselves. Secondly, they are imbued with the Knowledge of all the elegant Comforts of Life, as well as the Lessons of human Prudence, to avoid Pain and Trouble, in order to enjoy as much of the World, and with as little Opposition, as it is possible: whilst thus Men study their own private Interest, in assisting each other to promote and encrease the Pleasures of Life in general, they find by Experience, that to compass those Ends, every thing ought to be banish'd from Conversation, that can have the least Tendency of making others uneasy.

(II, 11)

The modish and powerful follow fashion as their chief rule. As Mandeville argued both in his attack on Shaftesbury and in the Introduction to The Fable's second volume, it is from the rules of polite sociability that they acquire their notions of virtue; not, as standardly claimed, the other way round (II, 12). So the difference between being and appearing, which for Mandeville remains the most psychologically significant characteristic of public life in commercial societies (I, 127-130), is at the same time the most visibly obvious and socially significant consequence of the spread of modern manners since the seventeenth century. A regime of polished intercourse had accompanied the growth of commercial relations and the decline of those aristocratic concepts of honor which hitherto tamed the warrior class (I, 122). The unintended social consequence of this transformation, Mandeville argued, was that just as the arts of flattery and thus hypocrisy reached new stages of perfection with the expansion of commerce in the course of recent history, so too did exceedingly subtle and efficiently self-regulating forms of social discipline. Although Hume regarded Mandeville's philosophical arguments as seriously flawed, he endorsed the practical and political implications of this insight when he argued, in the first Enquiry, that “those who prove or attempt to prove, that such refinements rather tend to increase industry, civility, and arts, regulate anew our moral as well as political sentiments.”¹⁵

As we have seen, contemporaries less committed than Hume to adopting Mandeville's scientific perspective on society were often scandalized by the licentious premises of these novel assertions. But they would not have been wholly surprised by the more narrowly economic implications of Mandeville's thesis. During the first decades of the Restoration many English economic writers began to understand that material possessions beyond those necessary to sustain a frugal existence were desired more for their aesthetic effects and approbative power than for the actual material needs they satisfied. Like Mandeville, these writers examined the psychology of envy, desire and imaginary wants, extending their investigations of market relations well beyond the conventional limits of trade viewed as merely the exchange of commodities.¹⁶ The aggregate demand for economic goods, both Nicholas Barbon and Sir William Petty reasoned, would be intensified in wealthy trading nations primarily because of the esteem they attracted and, also perhaps, the consequent self-respect they appeared to engender in their possessors. “The meaner sort,” Sir Dudley North claimed in his Discourses on Trade,

seeing their Fellows become rich, and great, are spurr'd up to imitate their Industry. A Tradesman sees his Neighbour keep a Coach, presently all his Endeavours is at work to do the like, and many times is beggered by it; however the extraordinary Application he made, to support his Vanity, was beneficial to the Publick, tho' not enough to answer his false Measures as to himself.¹⁷

John Pollexfen saw evidence of this process in London at the end of the 1690s. “From the greatest Gallants to the meanest Cook-Maids,” he remarked, “nothing was thought fit, to adorn their persons, as the Fabricks of India.”¹⁸ Once the implications of such observations were accepted, a process of burgeoning consumption could be seen as in principle endless under appropriate legal and political conditions, endless since goods in the economic realm, void of lasting psychological satisfaction, would quickly lose their luster in the face of other novelties supplied by trade and manufacture.

Mandeville gave his readers little indication of having carefully studied the reflections of late seventeenth-century pamphleteers on the domestic social implications of an enlarged foreign trade. They were primarily concerned with detailed considerations of government policy, a subject to which Mandeville paid only infrequent attention. Yet, as was long ago pointed out by Marx,¹⁹ and then in some detail in the classic study of mercantilism,²⁰ the amoral and proto-utilitarian assumptions of many neo-mercantilist writers, who treated the pursuit of self-interest as the sole motive required to understand economic behavior, bear a striking resemblance to Mandeville's. When The Fable was branded “Hobbist,” it was Mandeville's affinity with the work of these writers that his critics often had in mind. Here, Mandeville's critics had an important point, although not the precise one they wished to make. Mandeville effectively incorporated the insights of his seventeenth-century predecessors into a comprehensive account of the wider social implications of modern prosperity. According to his picture, first the great and then all monied persons throughout the social spectrum do not derive their primary social satisfactions from a naked ability physically to subdue competitors. Rather, such satisfaction as they attain comes from the attention conspicuous displays of articles of consumption are able to draw from others in an economically expanding world of newly available goods. To this thesis Mandeville added a philosophically significant caveat: it is either blatantly hypocritical or simply conceptually fruitless to attempt to understand the relatively recent explosion of emulative behavior in an expanding commercial market for material marks of esteem within the terms provided by the inherited moral tradition. Instead—so he argued—envy and emulation must properly be conceived from a naturalistic perspective, as strong impulses resulting from the passion for dominance “playing” against pride, while changing “its symptoms” in a way unimagined by Hobbes. The expansion of commerce makes products available which markedly reduce the primitive powers of select individuals to compel approbation and obedience by “Looks and Gestures” backed simply by force. As it does so, “costly Equipages, Furniture, Buildings, Titles of Honour, and everything that Men can acquire” rapidly become the primary “Marks and Tokens” of esteem (II, 126). Commerce thus transforms the rules of dominion. “While … wallowing in a Sea of Lust and Vanity,” civilized men in advanced societies remain psychologically compelled “to put a favourable Construction upon [their] most glaring Vices” (I, 149). For the first time, however, these persons are obliged to gear their public performances to the hidden imperatives of a mobile world of goods, in which relations with others are rarely brutal and immediate, but instead are commonly mediated by the unstable imaginary values embodied in their very possessions. In such a world, Mandeville's relentless critic John Brown recognized to his horror when he attacked The Fable some thirty years after its publication, “moral Beauty and Deformity, Virtue and Vice, could have no other Law, that that of Fancy and Opinion.”²¹

LABOR AND LUXURY

Brown, who authored the popular Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (1757)—a veritable encyclopedia of conventional worry about contemporary immorality which was reprinted at least a dozen times within a year of its appearance—detested Mandeville's glorification of excess. His unmitigated abhorrence flowed from a realization that The Fable had dramatically placed into circulation the question of what happens when large numbers of individuals are required to engage with, and are powerfully moved by, the imagery produced through the display and manipulation of commodities. For Brown, the luxurious practices these fantasies encouraged signalled the imminent “destruction” of the “Desire of Rational Esteem,” just as some of Mandeville's first readers, like William Law, feared that he had perversely but successfully celebrated the fact that persons in modern economic conditions could define their public identities primarily through their patterns of consumption. Mandeville forced his audience to confront the possibility that a conceptual environment had developed in which notions of moral goodness, now degenerated into mere codes of manners and politeness, are merely markers distinguishing habits which easily could be altered or discarded when they came into conflict with economic rationality.

Mandeville's interests always centered on the social dynamics of what he repeatedly styled an “opulent, flourishing and warlike state,” the polity created in Britain by the financial and military revolutions at the end of the seventeenth century. Here, one's public role no longer had any necessarily official connection to the state administration; it could instead largely be constructed from the processes of economic opportunity. The desire of persons activated by self-liking to have their self-image shared by others, so he argued, could account for social cohesion in a commercial world of self-interested egoists, in a society whose habits and social hierarchies were primarily delineated by the mechanisms of fashion, public display and role distance. In this new setting, individuals qua individuals could achieve their social identities through the exchange of goods and ideas, practicing a secular ethos of manners “that will joyn worldly Prudence to Sensuality, and make it their chief Study to refine upon Pleasure” (II, 127). Mandeville claims, in other words, that, from the point of view of the dramatically altered intersubjective conditions which characterize commercial society, an enormous range of social actions should be understood without any reference to moral categories, but rather as starkly instrumental attempts to satisfy pride through the establishment of one's status. Echoing Mandeville's words, the popular moralist Erasmus Jones expressed regret that “in large and populous cities where obscure Men may hourly meet with fifty strangers, handsome Apparel is a main point … and People where they are not known, are generally honoured according to the Clothes, and other accountrements they have about them.”²²

Mandeville thus situated his audience as agents possessing a subjectivity at a considerable remove from any available contemporary account of the person in terms of which he may assent to society's norms as a unified, autonomous, self-reflecting member. He put it to his readers that the actual economy and polity in which they lived had insensibly given birth to a semi-autonomous region of civil society, a zone sustained by private fantasies and driven by future prospects of wealth. He extolled the fact that certain features of social power were radically unstable, and he aimed to show in some detail how emerging opportunities for the advancement of status could thereby be maximized. Social personality in Mandeville's vision became discontinuous with moral commitment; character was now an artifact crafted by role-players within contemporary forms of social exchange and inherited hierarchies of power, and had to remain so if commercial society was to survive and flourish. By highlighting the role of fantasy in modern social intercourse, Mandeville's account of social cohesion in commercial conditions struck at his readers' understanding of themselves and of the very moral foundations of society.²³ He provided an ethically subversive analysis of interest and economic action, understood as founded upon the power of hypocrites guiltlessly to meet as strangers, who each day assembled personae composed of promises and signs of display which signified the “character” of their possessors. The Fable described an emergent zone of human interaction notionally bereft of undivided personalities and populated by characters who threatened to dissolve and reassemble in their staged appearances before others. By identifying the “restless desire after Changes and Novelty” (II, 260) as the psychologically activating mechanism of commercial societies, Mandeville placed the issue of wealth creation within the enlarged and precarious context of markets for rapidly changing symbols of esteem, the demand for which ironically dominated the demand for articles of use. Unsurprisingly, Mandeville's thesis that social identity had come to depend upon the acquisition of things was most starkly expressed (and despised) by Rousseau, who lamented in Emile that “the introduction of the superfluous makes division of labour possible,” and that “a society … of commerce [consists in] the exchange of things, that of banks in [the] exchange of money,” which quickly becomes “the true bond of society.”²⁴

The explicitly economic dimensions of this vision should not however be exaggerated. One must keep in mind that Mandeville gave remarkably little sustained attention to the articulation of any consistently held set of economic principles, and certainly none that are adequately captured by the retrospective application of the language of classical economics.²⁵ The overwhelming majority of readers never understood The Fable as a work whose primary significance derived from its economic doctrines. For them, the text was seen as one which pointed uncomfortably to the paradoxes Mandeville insisted were unresolvable within prevailing conceptions of the moral responsibilities of wealth. The Fable's discussion of wealth creation was scandalous not because of Mandeville's visionary purchase on the hidden laws of economic life, nor yet because of his satiric mockery of elite patterns of consumption,²⁶ but, rather, because he succeeded in placing before the moral imagination of his readers an unsettling vision of a prosperous, powerful and pleasure-filled dystopia, a necessarily desacralized society sustained, as he first put it, only by pride, avarice, prodigality, luxury, envy, folly and fickleness (I, 25).

Many of Mandeville's observations about wealth creation were conventional in the context of early eighteenth-century economic understanding, while at other times his claims could be confused, uninformed or simply unimaginative. As Sir James Steuart remarked of virtually all of his immediate Augustan contemporaries who wrote on the economy, Mandeville had almost no concern for—indeed, he hardly took any notice of—the processes of investment and savings.²⁷ Moreover, unlike Pufendorf or Locke before him, Charles Davenant amongst his contemporaries, or particularly the Scots like Hume, Steuart, Ferguson and Smith who wrote in The Fable's wake, Mandeville showed no abiding interest in the role of property in the development of justice, morals and civilization. Mandeville's great and, to his immediate contemporaries, shocking insight that national prosperity depended substantially upon an enlarged availability of consumer goods, and the consequently enlarged, but, he thought, politically harmless social power of the nouveaux riches who could command them, was nevertheless yoked in The Fable to a wholesale disregard of the economic importance of the mobility of wealth between individuals and families. Mandeville's most striking assertions clearly depend on his assumption that “[a]ll Human Creatures have a restless Desire of mending their condition,”²⁸ and that in commercial societies, and by contrast with previous formations bound by codes of honor, money serves as a singularly significant index of an individual's ability to satisfy his passions (II, 348-349; 353). Yet at the same time, he thought that “all the trading part of the people” are motivated by the want of unfair advantage (I, 61), seeking to conceal their costs,²⁹ and, moreover, often lying in order to turn a profit (I, 81-82). Mandeville accused his contemporaries of being imaginatively imprisoned by atavistic moral ideals. Still, he was quite capable of speaking in the voice of the vanishing age in whose demise he gloried. For example, Mandeville enthusiastically approved of the sumptuary law requiring the dead to be buried in wool instead of linen (I, 329), and defended the privileges of the Turkey Company's monopoly in the Near East, despite its mismanagement and declining business (I, 109). Even Mandeville's criticism of Dutch frugality could reasonably be taken as an example of his failure to understand the relationship between social discipline and national economic success. George Bluett noticed this immediately, pointing out that the example of Holland could be invoked against The Fable's thesis in order to demonstrate that virtue and interest were in fact consonant. “[I]f the Necessities and Poverty of the Dutch made the Practice of Frugality the Interest, and that the keeping up to that Policy, has raised them from Poverty, to the State of Wealth and Grandeur they now enjoy,” Bluett inquired,

why is it not as much the Interest of those Kingdoms to do so, who have none of those Wants to provide against? If the Dutch in their present Condition are oblig'd to be more frugal than their Neighbours, from the vast Experience they have at Repairing their Dykes, the Weight of other Taxes, and the Scantiness of their Dominions; would not the same Frugality in their Neighbours, who have a greater Extent of Land, and no such Demands of Expense, keep them in a Condition still proportionably above them, and continue them still proportionably richer?³⁰

Mandeville's most comprehensive economic argument rests upon the assertion that in commercial societies self-interest, driven by ineradicable human passions, is at once the “cause of earthly greatness” (II, 260) and consonant with social order because of its self-regulating properties. He first developed one facet of this argument in a wholly satirical mode, seeking to infuriate contemporary moralists by praising the illegal practices of thieves who provide work for locksmiths, drunkards who benefit brewers and contribute to the duty on malt, and highwaymen who spend more freely than the cautious citizens they prey upon (I, 86-87). Still, while divines like Law were suitably outraged by this defense of vice on the grounds of public utility, the more economically educated of Mandeville's readers recognized that he had implied the absurdity that unproductive labor could in fact create wealth. “I have known an Overseer of the Poor in the Country,” Bluett mockingly reported, “when a lusty Fellow has complain'd to him of his want of Work, employ him for a whole Day together in turning a Grindstone tho' nothing was all that while ground upon it. I believe it won't be said that the Parish was the richer for the Fellow's Labour.”³¹ Mandeville soon came to realize that in commending robbery and drunkenness as wealth-creating he had made a polemical mistake, and he was at pains in The Fable's second volume to provide his audience with no opportunity to echo Bluett's effective mockery. But as with the filth in London streets produced by “the great Traffick and Opulency of that mighty City” (I, 11), and the butchered castrati who on that account sing so beautifully (II, 106), Mandeville's intention in raising these examples was not to suggest that all vice produced wealth, but to ask what inconveniences or outright damage may be the necessary consequence of opulence. This question Bluett, like most of The Fable's immediate audience, either failed fully to understand or simply wished to elide.³² Following Addison, and particularly Shaftesbury, Mandeville's critics were prepared to recognize rather than deny the importance of self-regarding interests, particularly “that passion … having for its aim the possession of wealth … [for] the public as well as private system is advanced by the industry which this affection excites.” “But,” Shaftesbury continued,

if it grows at length into a real passion, the injury and mischief it does the public is not greater than that which it creates to the person himself. Such a one is in reality a self-oppressor, and lies heavier on himself than he can ever do on mankind.³³

Mandeville intended directly to challenge this attempt to moralize self-regard in the name of affluence. If some morally or materially pernicious effects necessarily accompany the causes of prosperity in commercial societies, then it is mere cant, he uncomfortably insisted, to claim that one favors the cause but despises the effect. In fact, as his criticism of the executions at Tyburn demonstrates, Mandeville neither praised all pernicious effects, nor claimed that all of these effects were necessary. “Should any of my Readers,” he wrote,

draw Conclusions in infinitum from my Assertions that Goods sunk or burnt are as beneficial … as they had been well sold and put to proper Uses, I would count him a Caviller and not worth answering: Should it always Rain and the Sun never shine, the Fruits of the Earth would soon be rotten and destroy'd; and yet it is no Paradox to affirm, that, to have Grass or Corn, Rain is as necessary as the Sunshine.

(I, 364)

Mandeville intended to emphasize the consequences of the point—essentially a moral one—that prosperity cannot possibly be caused by other-regarding virtues. As Cleomenes put it, mocking Shaftesbury, it is absurd to think that the barrister toils to secure the property of others, that the doctor works day and night to secure the health of his patients, or that the clergyman who holds several livings does so in order to minister to many souls (II, 52). The primary economic conclusion Mandeville derived from this fundamentally ethical argument was this, that in commercial societies many vices were systemic features of heightened mediums of exchange, in the same way as are the “Hardships and Calamities” of dangerous commercial voyages:

When we are acquainted with … and duly consider [the physical perils of the open sea] it is scarce possible to conceive a Tyrant so inhuman and void of Shame, that beholding things in the same View, he should extract such terrible services from the innocent Slaves; and at the same time dare to own, that he did it for no other Reason, than the Satisfaction a Man receives from having a Garment made of Scarlet or Crimson Cloth. But to what Height of Luxury must a Nation be arrived, where not only the King's Officers, but likewise his Guards, even the Private Soldiers should have such impudent Desires!

(I, 337-338)

Mandeville never tired of repeating his fundamental point that suchlike narrow motives underlie the widest range of individual pursuits in commercial societies. The private soldier, the wealthy barrister and the grasping parson would eagerly perform prodigious feats of self-denial in the process of responding to their petty but unyielding desires for money and the ornaments of status money commanded. In so doing, they unknowingly (and uncaringly) create employment for others. In the minds of his contemporaries, The Fable's analysis of these reciprocally dependent processes offered a direct challenge to the moral legitimacy of modern, opulent nations. So too did Mandeville's corollary claim that the mechanisms of commercial societies were best understood as natural artifacts of hidden, systemic social forces, properly a subject for philosophic inquiry, and a subject which promised to provide scientific foundations for social understanding. For just as physicians “write on Poisons” (I, 408) from a physiological perspective, so too

Philosophers, that dare extend their Thoughts beyond the narrow compass of what is immediately before them, look on the alternate Changes in the Civil Society no otherwise than they do on the risings and fallings of the Lungs; the latter of which are as much a Part of Respiration in the more perfect Animals as the first; so that the fickle Breath of never-stable Fortune is to the Body Politick, the same as floating Air is to a living Creature.

(I, 149)

In ways which directly bore upon issues of economic and social policy, Mandeville developed the second facet of his thesis, that is, that in modern conditions, economic self-interest is a natural, progressive and self-regulating human propensity. Thus, on the local level, he argued that “as it is folly to set up trades that are not wanted, so what is next to it is to increase in any one trade the numbers beyond what are required … This proportion as to numbers in every trade finds itself and is never better kept than when nobody meddles or interferes with it” (I, 299-300), while

[i]n the compound of all nations, the different degrees of men ought to bear a certain proportion to each other, as to numbers, in order to render the whole a well proportioned mixture. And … this due proportion … is never better attained to, or preserved than when nobody meddles with it. Hence we may learn how the shortsighted wisdom of perhaps well-meaning people may rob us of a felicity that would flow spontaneously from the nature of every large society if none were to divert or interrupt that stream.

(II, 353)

These arguments, however, were almost invariably confined to issues bearing upon the domestic economy rather than on problems of international commerce, a subject about which Mandeville simply repeated the conventional view regarding the need for government to ensure a positive balance of trade, believing as he did that unregulated international exchange in goods would reduce employment (I, 248-249; 312-317). Even when discussing the domestic economy, in fact, Mandeville was far from consistent. For example, he emphasized the importance of unconstrained material ambition, while praising the regulation of trades, handicrafts and occupations in London as an example of the “dextrous management” of politicians (II, 321). Indeed, the types of organizations which most aroused Mandeville's interest in both volumes of The Fable and its supplement on “Honour” were neither financial nor productive institutions, but churches, sects and armies. The latter were not viewed by him as bodies which provide their members or the community at large with material resources for living, but as vehicles for the management of men through the manipulation of their pride.

Only two significant regions of economic activity, labor and luxury consumption, attracted Mandeville's sustained attention. In his “Vindication” of The Fable (I, 383-412), addressing the attacks of those seeking to censor the book, he suggested that the main reason for the work's sudden popularity may have been the long “Essay on Charity, and Charity Schools” (I, 253-322), which he had appended to the second printing of the original 1723 edition. There Mandeville criticized the charity schools as ineffectual in their expressed goal of disseminating morality, and as pernicious too, since they encouraged a weakening of the established hierarchies of power, obedience and knowledge upon which the British state rested. He argued that proponents of the schools in the Societies for the Reformation of Manners were nothing but smug hypocrites who supported the schools solely in order to indulge their appetite for praise. Contemporaries expressed outrage at the “Essay” 's brutal assertions that in free and prosperous nations the labor force must be kept poor and ignorant if its members are to be efficiently exploited in heavy, dirty and low-wage work; and that, in direct consequence, the lower orders could no longer be treated within the confines of an inherited morality of protection and obedience. It was a potentially disastrous, as well as hypocritical, mistake, Mandeville thought, to accept, let alone encourage, a paternalist view of the laboring poor as quasi-familial dependents of the social superiors charged with their governance. Laborers were little more than drones in a prosperous hive, creatures whose unrelieved drudgery was a necessary, and thus acceptable, requirement for continued prosperity.

Mandeville's conception of the laboring poor was hardly novel. He allied himself with contemporary economic writers, particularly merchants, who stressed the importance of the dynamics of consumption based on expansion of demand in the domestic market, and who realized that levels of employment, rather than stores of precious metals, held the key to national prosperity (I, 197).³⁴ Mandeville seemed fully to accept the opinion that rich countries would be pulled into a cycle of decline unless their goverments enforced low wages by way of compelling the poor to industry (I, 286-287)—an already old-fashioned view of wealth creation which was attacked by Josiah Child, Charles Brewster, Nicholas Barbon, Dudley North, and John Cary before The Fable was published, and by Defoe amongst others soon after.³⁵ Even so implacable a foe of extravagance and licentiousness as Mandeville's enemy Bishop Berkeley flatly stated in The Querist that “the creating of wants is the likeliest way to produce industry in a people.”³⁶ For unlike the elites to which his argument was directed, and the abstract “man” whose passions The Fable anatomized, Mandeville claimed in The Fable's second edition of 1723 that the poor are “seldom powerfully influenced by pride and avarice” to exert themselves (I, 194 and 242), and that they would only work from “immediate necessity” (I, 192), usually preferring to remain idle in the most rudimentary conditions rather than work to improve their comforts. Bound by customary habits and natural sloth, laborers would attempt to support themselves in conditions of bare subsistence by downwardly adjusting their working hours to any rise in wages. “Every Body knows,” he thought, “that there is a vast number of Journey-men Weavers, Tailors, Cloth-workers, and twenty other Handicrafts; who, if by four Days Labour in a Week they can maintain themselves, will hardly be persuaded to work the fifth” (I, 192). Low wages supplemented by ignorance would thus have a three-fold beneficial effect: individual employers would retain more money to meet their other costs, Britain would gain a competitive advantage for its relatively cheap finished products in the export trade, while enforced material desperation would insure a continuing supply of hands.

Now although the “Essay” on the charity schools was the most likely cause of The Fable's prosecution and Mandeville's sudden rise to fame, none of its central arguments about the laboring poor, it should be noted, was seen to be of importance by Hutcheson, Butler, Hume, Rousseau or, as we shall see, Adam Smith.³⁷ Indeed, by the mid-eighteenth century the European discussion of work and workers began to be placed on a new conceptual footing as the intimate relationship between high wages, worker motivation and commercial prosperity began to be better understood.³⁸ And even in the immediate wake of the scandal initiated by the charity school “Essay,” Bluett, among others, recognized that Mandeville's objections to the schools contradicted some of his own stated principles. There were obvious, indeed Mandevillian, reasons to think that able-bodied laborers wished to better themselves, and that governments exercising the intrusive powers Mandeville had advocated in order to discipline the poor would only damage the economy, in which “trades and Employments will take their natural Course where Profit directs them.”³⁹

As was the case with Butler's important attack upon The Fable's anatomy of self-love, Mandeville carefully responded to some of his critics of the 1720s by revising his original arguments, while never openly conceding in the process that the efforts of these critics held the slightest importance for him. Thus, solely from the text of The Fable, it is impossible to judge the degree to which Mandeville was impressed by the telling criticisms made against the “Essay” on charity schools. Yet it nevertheless remains the case that Mandeville neither repeated nor enlarged upon his first thoughts about labor after 1723, save to mock the supposedly bruised moral sensibilities of those who sought to proscribe his work. Moreover, in The Fable's second volume of 1728, not only did Mandeville dispense with any further discussion of the necessity of low wages or continue to denegrate the capacities of the poor, but he in fact looked to the natural proclivities of “none but Men of ordinary Capacity” as a critical source of economic progress. Contemplating the classical Epicurean (and Baconian) figure of a ship at sea, as Hume was later to do in an identical context,⁴⁰ Mandeville speculated about the processes by which such technical perfection could have been attained.

There are many Sets of Hands in the Nation, that, not wanting proper Materials, would be able in less than half a Year to produce, fit out, and navigate a First-Rate [Man of War]: yet it is certain, that this Task would be impracticable, if it were not divided and subdivided in a great Variety of different Labours; and it is certain, that none of these Labours require any other, than working Men of ordinary Capacities.

(II, 142)

Even in rudimentary societies,

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 more 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.

(II, 284)

These examples served further to enhance the aggressively evolutionary perspective Mandeville had adopted by 1728. They further emphasize the point that “we often ascribe to the Excellency of Man's Genius … what is in Reality owing to … the experience of many Generations, all of them very little differing from one another in natural Parts and Sagacity” (II, 142), But in contrast to his earlier claim that “what we call Evil in this World … is the … solid Basis, the Life and Support of all Trades and Employments without Exception” (I, 369), in The Fable's second volume Mandeville makes no reference at all to vice when discussing the division of labor. Indeed, without any moral comment, he simply treats material improvement as the necessary consequence of the unplanned development of specialized skills, a process so ubiquitous, as he later wrote in “Honour,” that one could recognize its profound effects even in the organization of the Roman Church.⁴¹

This argument about the centrality of the division of labor Mandeville made specifically in support of an original sociological thesis, that is, that the progress of society depends upon increasing specialization, which in turn is the natural outgrowth of political stability. The entry in The Fable's index of 1728, “Labour, The usefulness of dividing and subdividing it” (II, 335), directs the reader precisely to this point: “When once Men come to be govern'd by written Laws, all the rest comes on a-pace,” since “[n]o number of Men, when once they enjoy Quiet, and no Man needs to his Neighbour, will be long without learning to divide and subdivide their Labour” (II, 283-284). An intensified division of labor is at once the axial productive characteristic of economically advanced communities, Mandeville claimed, and a wholly natural concomitant of civilization itself. Moralists who drew their principles from the civic tradition's ideal of self-sufficiency saw in commercial specialization a threat to personal integrity and the power of the full citizen to command his landed dependents. Mandeville countered with the startling claims that civilized living and commercial opulence entailed the liberation of large numbers of persons from previous martial dependencies, encouraged social mobility because of the increase of monied wealth at the expense of landed power, and simultaneously brought forth new mutual dependencies fostered by the progress of the division of “Art into many Branches” (II, 284).

When he first addressed the pretensions of London moral reformers in the charity school “Essay,” Mandeville embraced the conventional view that the consumer demand of the masses was and would continue to be economically insignificant, and that enforced subsistence living amongst the poor could therefore be regarded as an economically benign instrument of social discipline. But he abandoned this view by 1728 in the face of trenchant criticism, shifting his focus to the necessary connections between the development of the division of labor and the growth of civilization. There is good reason to think that Mandeville only provisionally adopted conventional presumptions about the laboring classes in the “Essay” on charity schools for the immediate polemical purpose of heaping scorn on the pretensions of his enemies, the London moral reformers. For even in The Fable's first volume of 1723, Mandeville's primary economic insight was that wealth creation in commercial society depended upon the “emulation and continual striving to out-do one another.” While he here mainly referred to the conspicuous consumption of monied elites, Mandeville clearly intended to encompass all persons throughout the social hierarchy, beginning with “the poorest Labourer's Wife.” His main example is worth quoting in full:

The poorest Labourer's Wife in the Parish, who scorns to wear a strong wholesome Frize, as she might, will half starve herself and her Husband to purchase a second-hand Gown and Petticoat, that cannot do her half the Service; because forsooth, it is more genteel. The Weaver, the Shoemaker, the Tailor, the Barber, and every mean working Fellow, that can set up with little, has the Impudence with the first Money he gets, to Dress himself like a Tradesman of Substance: The ordinary Retailer in the clothing of his Wife, takes Pattern from his Neighbour, that deals in the same Commodity by Wholesale, and the Reason he gives for it is, that Twelve Years ago the other had no bigger a Shop than himself. The Druggist, Mercer, Draper, and other creditable Shopkeepers can find no difference between themselves and Merchants, and therefore dress and live like them. The Merchant's Lady, who cannot bear the Assurance of those Mechanics, flies for refuge to the other End of the Town, and scorns to follow any Fashion but what she takes from thence. This Haughtiness alarms the court, the Women of Quality are frighten'd to see Merchants Wives and Daughters dress'd like themselves: this Impudence of the City, they cry, is intolerable; Mantua-makers are sent for, and the contrivance of Fashions becomes all their Study, that they may have always new Modes ready to take up, as soon as those saucy Cits shall begin to imitate those in being. The same Emulation is continued through the several degrees of Quality to an incredible Expence, till at last the Prince's great Favourites and those of the first Rank of all, having nothing else left to outstrip some of their Inferiors, are forc'd to lay out vast Estates in pompous Equipages, magnificent Furniture, sumptuous Gardens and Princely Palaces.

To this Emulation and continual striving to out-do one another is owing, that after so many various Shiftings and Changings of Modes, in trumpting up new ones and renewing old ones, there is still a plus ultra left for the ingenious; it is this, or at least the consequence of it, that sets the Poor to Work, add Spurs to Industry, and encourages the skilful Artificer to search after further Improvements.

(I, 129-130)

Some critics may have merely feigned outrage at Mandeville's hackneyed assertion in the “Essay” on charity schools that continued British prosperity depended upon the exploitation of the laboring poor. Yet most of The Fable's first readers, and many others during the next generation, found this foundational claim about the crucial social significance of hyper-consumption and luxury spending both conceptually shocking and morally suspect. For if true, they sensed, the unbridled emulative propensities Mandeville described posed a threat to social stability. In such a society, Henry Fielding warned, in a virtual paraphrase of The Fable's remarks, “while the Nobleman will emulate the Grandeur of a Prince and the Gentleman will aspire to the proper state of a Nobleman, the Tradesman steps from behind his Counter into the vacant place of the Gentleman. Nor doth the confusion end there: It reaches the very Dregs of the People, who aspire still to a degree beyond that which belongs to them.”⁴²

Seen as an excess every bit as fatal to individuals as to states, luxury was an established pejorative designator belonging both to the vocabularies of morals and politics during much of the early eighteenth century. The term retained its strong association in historical memory with the licentiousness, corruption and political enfeeblement of great states, most notably the Roman Republic.⁴³ Moreover, Mandeville's contemporaries had before their eyes two competing and exclusive models of modern economic history: the frugal Dutch as leaders in economic growth and the luxurious Spaniards (or most recently, the French) as exemplars of decadence accompanied by material decline. From the beginning of his literary career, Mandeville strove to subvert these defective notions about the association between inherited moral ideals and the requirements of economic advance by offering a competing account of the relationship of prosperity to social hierarchies of wealth and power in societies as diverse as republican Holland, absolutist France, and the limited monarchy of contemporary Britain. His model stressed that man was a consuming animal with boundless appetites to emulate the “Gayety and Fickleness” of the opulent, to follow the ephemeral conformity dictated by fashion and to seek social promotion through spending.

Mandeville made two important, linked claims about luxury consumption, each following from the historical thesis that if we “look back on old Greece, the Roman Empire, or the great Eastern Nations, that flourish'd before them, and we shall find, that Luxury and Politeness ever grew up together, and were never enjoy'd asunder” (II, 147). Here he developed his original discussion of modern consumption in The Fable's “Remark L” (I, 107-123), drawing for the purpose on Bayle's observation that luxury enriches a nation through the promotion of avarice, the particular vice which encourages the manufacture and circulation of goods.⁴⁴ This argument had as its primary targets the moralizing arguments of writers like Addison, Boyer and Shaftesbury, for whom the polished habits of the expanding urban elites they sought further to refine were a vital aspect of improvement and civilization. Leisured ways of polished intercourse, so they argued, were indispensable to an expanding society, in which tolerant sociability and broadened views are the necessary concomitants of material growth. Mandeville challenged these claims. He did so not by attempting to show them as strictly false, but by exposing to view what he argued was the essential psychological reality of opulent societies—that they were driven by excess rather than moderation, and characterized by extravagance masquerading as refinement. Not only did all “great societies” rest upon “increased wants,” but the satisfaction of these wants and the consequent creation of others in their stead constitute the propulsive mechanism for change in the interdependent domains of fashion and morals. Since “our Liking or Disliking of things chiefly depends on Mode and Custom, and the Precepts and Example of our Betters and such whom one way or other we think to be Superior to us,”

In Morals there is no greater Certainty [than] … What Men have learned from their Infancy enslaves them, and the Force of Custom warps Nature, and at the same time imitates her in such a manner, that it is often difficult to know which of the two we are influenced by.

(I, 330)

Mandeville did not simply give voice to the much-repeated Latin proverb that “fashion is more powerful than any tyrant.” Nor, in pointing to an intimate connection between moral habits and prevailing tastes, did he wish merely to make satirical sport of philosophers like Locke, here in agreement with the main stream of British and continental Protestant casuistry, who regretted that “the greatest part” of mankind “govern themselves chiefly, if not solely, by the Law of Fashion” rather than “the unchangeable Rule of Right and Wrong, which the Law of God hath established.”⁴⁵ Instead, Mandeville proposed a radical thesis, systematically elaborated in “A Search into the Nature of Society” (I, 323-370), that the history of the civilizing process offered conclusive evidence for thinking that moral reasoning itself was a species of fashion and, like habits of dress, a dependent feature of the search for esteem.

Mandeville's second significant point about luxury was that hyperconsumption should properly be understood as the direct consequence of social processes. The conventional moral condemnation of supposedly superfluous material indulgence rested, he argued, upon a patent absurdity—a point neatly expressed in The Fable's parable of small beer, repeated in A Letter to Dion,⁴⁶ where a community is supposed in which

the chief moral evil … was Thirst, and to quench it, a Damnable Sin; yet they unanimously agreed, that Every one was born Thirsty more or less. Small Beer in Moderation was allow'd to All; and he was counted an Hypocrite, a Cynick, or a Madman, who pretended that One could live together without it; yet those who owned they loved it, and drank it to Excess, were counted Wicked. All this while the Beer itself was reckon'd a Blessing from Heaven, and there was no Harm in the use of it; all the Enormity lay in the Abuse, the Motive of the Heart, that made them drink it. He that took the least Drop of it to quench his Thirst, committed a heinous Crime, while others drank large Quantities without any Guilt, so they did it indifferently, and for no other Reason than to mend their Complexion.

(I, 235)

Luxury, Mandeville sought to show, effectively captures the behavior of individuals possessed of the ability by virtue of their command of wealth to satisfy the desires they share with others. In commercial societies these desires are decisively shaped by newly liberated emulative propensities which may be (temporarily) satisfied through the acquisition of socially esteemed goods. If correct, Mandeville recognized, this understanding of consumption would immediately throw into question the semantic force of “luxury” as conventionally understood, a point which revolted Rousseau,⁴⁷ and one Diderot emphasized to readers of the Encyclopédie when he proposed “luxury” as the term best exemplifying the abuses to which words have commonly been put.⁴⁸ In conventional usage, Mandeville wrote, luxury is “that not immediately necessary to make Man subsist” (I, 107). “It increases Avarice and Rapine: And where they are reigning Vices, Offices of the greatest Trust are bought and sold; the Ministers that should serve the Publick … corrupted, and the Countries every Moment in danger of being betray'd to the highest Bidders: And lastly, that it effeminates and enervates the people, by which the Nations become an easy Prey to the first Invaders” (I, 135). But, he added,

If you tell me, that Men may make use of all … [supposedly luxurious] things with Moderation, and consequently that the Desire after them is no Vice, then I answer, that either no Degree of Luxury ought to be called a Vice, or that it is impossible to give a definition of Luxury, which Everybody will allow to be a just one … [for] if once we depart from calling every thing Luxury that is not absolutely necessary to keep a Man alive, then there is no Luxury at all.

(I, 108)

Indeed,

if we are to abate one Inch of this Severity [in the definition of luxury], I am afraid we shan't know where to stop. When People tell us they only desire to keep themselves sweet and clean, there is no understanding what they would be at; if they made use of these Words in their genuine proper literal Sense, they might soon be satisfy'd without much cost or trouble, if they did not want Water; But these two little Adjectives are so comprehensive, especially in the Dialect of some Ladies, that no body can guess how far they may be stretched.

(I, 107)

Francis Hutcheson immediately recognized that Mandeville's primary intention was to displace the conventional meaning of luxury, as well as terms like intemperance and pride, in public discourse⁴⁹—meanings which, for Hutcheson, were foundational moral concepts. Luxury, he said, was properly to be defined as

an excessive desire or use of the lowest pleasures as is consistent with discharging the offices of life … Luxury … lavishes out men's fortunes, and yet increases their keen desires, making them needy and craving. It must occasion the strongest temptations to desert their duty to their country, whenever it is inconsistent with pleasure: it must lead the citizens to betray their country, either to a tyrant at home, or to a foreign enemy … With the luxurious generally everything is venal.⁵⁰

In defending Shaftesbury, Hutcheson objected to Mandeville by insisting that any “man of good sense” would immediately recognize when a superfluity of consumption would be injurious to his health or fortune.⁵¹ He perfectly expressed the ambivalent and, in Mandeville's view, essentially incoherent contemporary attitudes to prosperity that The Fable intended to expose. Mandeville's most insistent scorn was always reserved for those, like Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, who sought to moralize prosperity by claiming that excessive consumption, symbolizing a loss of independence and self-control, was nothing beyond the character defect of a socially insignificant minority within progressive and polished societies.

Hutcheson focused on this point in order to refute Mandeville's main contention about the beneficial effects of vice, envisioning the common-sensical possibility that the development and expansion of commercial exchanges could be founded upon socially moderate and, in Hutcheson's view, virtuous behavior. He offered the counter-example of how the beer industry would be better supported by people who drank in moderation, and who therefore had a normal life expectancy, than the immoderate imbibers suggested by Mandeville's parable, who ran the risk of dying young.⁵² What this criticism missed or, more likely, what Hutcheson wished to elide, was Mandeville's pointing out the absurdity of any strict definition of luxury, and thus of moderation, in which consumption above the level of subsistence could be considered an indulgence, and therefore vicious. Furthermore, Mandeville had already anticipated and roundly dismissed the heart of Hutcheson's argument when he maintained that even a looser definition of luxury than the one inherited from classical and Christian ethics would offer no conceptual advantage in understanding the moral implications of large populations living in societies characterized by rapidly increasing levels of consumption. A more lax and apparently reasonable standard of moderate behavior would serve merely to rescue rhetorical space for the hypocritical jeremiads of traditional strict moralists—precisely the persons from whom both Shaftesbury and Hutcheson wished to distance themselves.

Mandeville stuck fast to his initial paradox, first developed in “A Search Into the Nature of Society”: the establishment of morality was conventional; and without a precise, socially agreed-upon limit between necessity and luxury, it would have been quite impossible to imagine the establishment of self-denial as the foundation of moral virtue. Although this standard could be shown to be philosophically empty, it was nevertheless a socially necessary device, since without its foundation in a putatively objective language of morals society could not safely regulate the passions of its members through the promotion of shame.

The Fable's analysis of luxury, then, follows from a consistent adherence by Mandeville to his initial rigoristic definition of morality as self-denial, which he then supported with arguments and often examples that paralleled Bayle's, as some of his initial opponents like Bluett recognized. But Mandeville approached the problem of the morality of hyper-consumption from a different perspective when considering the public effects of immoderate and vicious behavior. He pointed out another paradoxical and counter-intuitive disjunction between private pleasures and public policies in modern states. As with his argument about the unexpectedly self-regulating and publicly beneficial workings of hypocrisy—when, of course, this vice was considered from the perspective of the community as a whole rather than from the point of view of the individual actor—Mandeville sought to demonstrate that in commercial as opposed to antique and static societies two distinct sets of criteria were required in order to evaluate the propriety of actions. Mandeville took a thoroughly conventional line in stressing the dangers posed by indulgence to the fortunes of individuals. As he put it, “[i]t is certain that the fewer Desires a Man has and the less he covets, the more easy he is to himself; the more active he is to supply his own Wants, and the less he requires to be waited upon, the more he will be beloved and the less trouble he is in a Family” (I, 355). But he then added forthwith that the personal tragedies born of imprudent spending were of no concern to the public at large, since from the point of view of commercial prosperity it was only the aggregate gain from the mobility of goods and money that counted, and that the power of states themselves was markedly increased by the acceleration of commercial exchanges, regardless of the immediate fortunes of any given participant in them. For, “let us be Just,” he said, and ask

what Benefit can these things be, or what earthly good can they do to promote the Wealth, the Glory and the worldly Greatness of Nations? It is the sensual Courtier that sets no Limits to his Luxury; the Fickle Strumpet that invents new fashions every Week; the haughty Duchess that in Equipage, Entertainments, and all her Behaviour would imitate a Princess … It is these that are the Prey and proper Food of a full grown Leviathan; or in other words … we stand in need of the Plagues and Monsters I named to have all the Variety of Labour perform'd … in order to procure an honest Livelihood to the vast Multitudes … that are required to make a large Society: And it is folly to imagine that Great and Wealthy Nations can subsist, and be at once Powerful and Polite without.

(I, 355-356)

The mobility of modern property as exemplified by the explosion of the luxury trades, Mandeville contended, had effectively amplified natural emulative propensities. These could no longer be moralized, as both traditional moralists and the followers of Shaftesbury hoped, but now had to be managed by governing elites. Unlike the ascetics of economically rudimentary ancient republics, or the culturally and materially primitive dependents of predatory feudal warriors, a commercial public could, under conditions of modern opulence, be the direct if unintended beneficiaries of personally disastrous private indulgence. On the level of the polity, moreover, the intemperance of the great, and of those who could afford to emulate them, in no way threatened public security by draining the courage and fortitude of a patriotic citizenry. The military fortunes of commercial states no longer depended upon the supposed virtues of ancient republics, “public spiritedness to one's ruin, and the contempt of death to any extreme,” as Mandeville put it when defending the Whig regime. These “romantick notions” are now “laugh'd out of countenance by those who best understand the world,”⁵³ for the recent victories against France, solidified by the Peace of Utrecht, had amply demonstrated that the power of modern states like Britain no longer depended upon the martial virtues of citizens, but on the capacities of their treasuries to arm and support a professional soldiery.

Recent domestic and European history thus provided Mandeville with conclusive evidence of a transformation of both morals and public priorities, in the process of which the arms-bearing citizen whose stable holdings provided the foundation for his martial independence and civic identity was relegated to the realm of nostalgic romance. He argued that the social dynamics of what was commonly decried as morally degenerate luxury consumption in fact revealed the most startling example of public benefits issuing from private vice.

Required by their recently unshackled emulative propensities to live within the parameters of Mandeville's animating paradox, commercial moderns had unintentionally traversed an unbridgeable gulf, separating them irrevocably from an antique or Christian ethic of private restraint. Like Hume, following Hutcheson, a number of critics sought to deny Mandeville's paradox, since it is, as Hume said, “little less than a contradiction in terms, to talk of a vice, which is in general beneficial to society.”⁵⁴ Yet The Fable's argument was nevertheless purveyed on the continent by Montesquieu's friend and John Law's secretary Jean-François Melon, then by Montesquieu himself in The Spirit of the Laws,⁵⁵ and triumphantly by Voltaire in Le Mondain and the entry “Luxe” in the Philosophical Dictionary. By mid-century a critically important segment of his European audience had been convinced that in modern commercial conditions, as Hume himself said, classical moral “principles are too disinterested and too difficult to support, [and] it is requisite to govern men by other passions, and animate them with a spirit of avarice and industry, art and luxury.”⁵⁶The Fable's account of a public sphere transformed by wealth, in which the arts and sciences flourished, rapidly became conventional within a large segment of Enlightenment Europe. The assumption was as pivotal in Voltaire's account of the ascendancy of French culture in La Siècle de Louis XIV as in Gibbon's praise of aristocratic civility under the Antonines in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. After Mandeville, even a pious Christian like Doctor Johnson could offer a defense of luxury on moral grounds by comparing its effects on the industry of the poor with those slothful habits induced by charity.⁵⁷ Men had to be governed by, in Mandeville's idiom, “playing” their passions against each other. Or as Hume put it in the conclusion of his essay, “Of Refinement in the Arts,” “[b]y banishing vicious luxury, without curing sloth and an indifference to others, you only diminish industry in the state, and add nothing to men's charity or their generosity. Let us, therefore, rest contented with asserting, that two opposite vices in a state may be more advantageous than either of them alone.”⁵⁸

HOMO ECONOMICA AND HER DOUBLE

If Mandeville's striking claims about the causal relationship of abundance to refinement proved a critical point of departure in the Enlightenment's attempt to comprehend commercial modernity, The Fable's discussion of luxury consumption also had embedded within it a particularly disturbing, because less easily moralized, implication regarding the psychological foundations of economic activity. In satirically trading upon the classical and Christian conceptions of luxury as a self-indulgent diversion from the exercise both of public and private responsibilities, Mandeville highlighted the paradox that the pursuit of leisure, rather than disciplined attention to work and duty, was the energizing force of contemporary prosperity. He denied, in the words preached by an Anglican divine in 1700, that “Industry, Temperance, and Frugality are most inexhaustible mines, and make the certainest, if not the most ample Returns to the Publick; whilst Luxury, Prodigality and Idleness are continually preying upon it, and dayly tending to enervate by Impoverishing it.”⁵⁹ At the same time, The Fable's ideal economic agent was the person whose voracious self-seeking produces materially beneficial effects in commercial societies. It is apparent that Mandeville's actor is primarily motivated not by considerations of rational economic choice, but by inconstancy and whimsy—by the frivolity of those wants whose satisfaction energizes the economy.

This celebration of perfidious desire as a signal source of economic advance followed from The Fable's thoroughgoing attack upon frugality in “Remark L” (I, 181-198). Here the promotion of “prudent Oeconomy, which some people call Saving,” Mandeville understands in terms of what we now call the fallacy of composition. While an obvious course of action from the point of view of distressed individuals seeking to improve their family's meagre fortunes, frugal practices have ruinous consequences when understood as a principle meant to govern the economy as a whole (I, 182). And when thoroughly practiced, as by the Spartans or Dutch, Mandeville views prudence and thrift merely as consequences of impending poverty, when the “Necessaries of life [are] scarce, and consequently dear” (I, 183). For “[f]rugality is like Honesty, a mean starving Virtue, that is only fit for small Societies of good peaceable Men, who are contented to be poor so they may be easy; but in a large stirring Nation you may soon have enough of it.” “Prodigality,” by contrast, “has a thousand Inventions to keep People from sitting still, that Frugality would never think of; and as this must consume a prodigious Wealth, so Avarice again knows innumerable Tricks to rake it together, which Frugality would scorn to make use of” (I, 104-105).

In his early journalism in The Female Tatler, Mandeville had drawn a portrait of a wealthy merchant, Labourio, ever diligent “in getting a penny.” Labourio explained to a friend who wondered why he would rise at five in the morning and pore over his accounts all day, rather than enjoy a life of luxury, that parsimony was his pleasure, and that the accumulation of money itself, rather than the goods it commands, was his reward. “Some never think themselves happy but in the enjoyment of a thing,” Mandeville has Labourio say, “whilst the happiness of others consists in the Pursuit only … I am sure that I enjoy the same satisfaction in the keeping of money, that a Sovereign has in being possessed of a power which he doesn't care to exert.”⁶⁰ Labourio's point, emphasized in a following number of the journal by Mandeville's Lucinda, is that since all action results from the attempt to satisfy desire, and since the strength of different passions varies amongst individuals, anybody “is happy who thinks himself so.”⁶¹ No behavioral style can be deemed superior to any other, save on the grounds of the satisfactions it brings. In commercial societies, satisfactions derived from the habit of gain rather than the demands of vanity could be seen to engender the small but significant virtues of thrift and punctuality, a view later adopted by Hume and then Smith.⁶² By the time he published The Fable, however, Mandeville had abandoned this defense of frugality, however emotionally and socially plausible. Rather than a virtue, he relocated frugality in opulent nations within an altered psychological context, that of the indolent drone with a strong fear of shame who embraces this supposed virtue merely in order to escape contempt. By contrast, the active man with the same share of vanity would do anything rather than submit to frugality's restraints, “unless his avarice forc'd him to do it” (II, 113). In attempting to devalue both moderation and self-discipline as either moral or economic virtues, Mandeville's attack upon frugality immediately placed The Fable within contentious streams of ideological dispute.

As Tawney long ago pointed out, what we have come to identify as a vital feature of Weber's thesis about the development of capitalism—the ascription to different confessions of distinctive economic orientations—was by the late seventeenth century something not far from a platitude.⁶³ Among writers concerned with the contrasts between different post-Reformation European societies it was almost a common form of argument, as it was a standard feature occurring repeatedly in works of religious controversy. Routinely, the extravagance of Catholic ruling elites was contrasted with the indolence of their subjects on the one hand, and, on the other, to the disciplined attention paid by Protestants to the mundane economic opportunities afforded by daily life in reformed communities. The same link can be found, as we have seen, in Sir William Temple's account of the United Provinces, in which he repeats identical views of the De la Courts,⁶⁴ as well as in Petty's Political Arithmetic.⁶⁵ In England particularly, the explanation of economic superiority by resort to the habits promoted by Protestant churches merged with establishment Whig celebrations of trade, notably in the homilies of Addison's Sir Andrew Freeport in The Spectator. As Defoe attested,⁶⁶ such assumptions easily meshed with Dissenting self-assertion and anti-Catholic animus after the Revolution of 1688. Clearly aware of these ideologically charged associations, Mandeville offered an explicitly competing explanation of the modern history of economic advance. “I protest against Popery as much as ever Luther and Calvin did, or Queen Elizabeth herself,” he said in “A Search Into the Nature of Society,” “but I believe from my Heart, that the Reformation has scarce been more Instrumental in rend'ring the Kingdoms and States that have embraced it, flourishing beyond other Nations, than the silly and capricious Invention of Hoop'd and Quilted Petticoats” (I, 356).

The association of luxury with women's inconstancy and the social power of female desire was ancient. It served most potently as a standard resource in classical republican as well as Augustinian-inspired accounts of political decline, where “effeminacy” and the luxury it entailed were standardly considered integral features of moral and political corruption.⁶⁷ In this discourse, the term “virtue” itself, as Mandeville pointed out, derived from the Latin vir—the disciplined manliness which distinguished a genuine man.⁶⁸ At Chartres, luxury appears as a woman carrying the comb and mirror of cupidity and self-love, while in many other medieval and Renaissance depictions she holds a scepter to mark her omnipotence and sexual domination over men, several of which depictions place beneath her name the subtitle: “The Power of Woman.”⁶⁹ By the late seventeenth century, however, the argument ad feminam against luxury consumption had significantly intensified, notably amongst economic writers who observed a rising demand by women for imported items, which these writers saw as hurting the home economy by draining money from the country as well as fostering lax morals.⁷⁰ The words “commerce,” “intercourse” and “conversation” typically came to be employed equally as terms for social and sexual exchange, while the analysis of desire in the literature regarding the economy exposed sexuality as a visibly threatening and unstable feature of the market's liberation of private instinct,⁷¹ which Dudley North called the “exorbitant appetites of man,” while using women as his main examples.⁷² Women were often pictured as capricious beings entirely devoted to traffic, to sexual and social human intercourse, to the unreflective and unending activities of shopping, and especially to fashion, which incessantly urges trivial shifts in custom and appearance.

By the time Mandeville added his comments on the social significance of female luxury in The Fable's “Remark T” (I, 225-238), women made up a significant proportion of owners of Bank of England stock and subscribers to government loans.⁷³ They commanded earnings of their own, had access to a greater proportion of rapidly rising metropolitan incomes, and had established a burgeoning market for goods dominated by their own consumer choices, particularly for fashion accessories which, by the turn of the century, formed a significant segment of international trade.⁷⁴ An observer of British society could not help but notice the profusion of manuals of decorum, like John Gay's Implements Proper for Female Walkers (1716), specifically addressed to women with recently acquired disposable incomes. Both these “ladies” and their serving maids, Defoe observed in a pamphlet that went through at least five editions in 1725 alone, were thought habitually to exhibit in their costumes “an excess of pride and extravagance,”⁷⁵ a common literary observation which Mandeville noted in The Fable (I; 115; 117; 122) and Hogarth made part of eighteenth-century popular imagery. The heroine of Richardson's Pamela (1740), although the humble personal maid to a lady of the gentry, found that by assiduous application of the social niceties—dress, deportment, conversation—she was able to achieve her ambition of marrying into the family of her late mistress. Pamela's impenetrable virtue was not so attractive to the rakish Mr. B. as was her acceptability gained through the heightening of her natural virtues by applied intelligence. Clothes, Richardson knew, were the visible emblems of social standing in a society where fashions were no longer dictated at court, but were increasingly manipulated by industries catering to monied social ambitions. When Pamela dressed in her home-spun gown and petticoat with a plain muslin tucker, instead of the cast-off fine silk gown and lace which she had been given from her mistress's wardrobe, Mr. B. was literally unable to recognize his mother's servant, so accustomed was he to seeing her in clothes befitting a newly acquired gentility—a recurring theme in eighteenth-century novels and plays, where potential suitors mistake the mistress for the maid dressing up in fancy costume.

Thus feminized, attendance to fashion easily conveyed an image of masculine corruption, as in Fielding's portrait of the decadent Bellarmine in Joseph Andrews. Bishop Berkeley thought that the luxurious desires of “women of fashion … enslave[d] men to their private passions,”⁷⁶ while William Law, Mandeville's persistent adversary, claimed that “fictions of reason” and “fictions of behaviour” were leading characteristics of contemporary society. What is more extravagant, he asked,⁷⁷

than to suppose a man racking his brains, and studying night and day how to fly?—wandering from his own house and home, wearying himself with climbing in every ascent, cringing and courting everybody he meets to lift him from the ground, bruising himself with continual falls and at last breaking his neck.

Such were the deplorable effects of a public sphere dominated by feminine whimsy, a zone in which, Law observed to his horror, women might buy “two hundred suits of clothes” in ten years.⁷⁸ The pursuit of wealth itself was hardly immune to these associations. When seen to be the province of sober mercantile interests, commerce, viewed as a source of national power, posed little ideological threat to established conceptions of social order. But when conceived as driven by fashion industries catering primarily to female tastes and women's liberated incomes, commercial exchange could appear radically transfigured. Trade was “a mystery, which will never be completely discovered or understood,” Defoe wrote in his Review of 1706. “[I]t suffers convulsive fits, hysterical disorders, and most unaccountable emotions—sometimes it is acted by the evil spirit of general vogue; tomorrow it suffers violence from the storms and vapours of human fancy—a sort of lunacy in trade attends all its circumstances, and no man can give a rational account of it.”⁷⁹ A generation later, in a work modelled on Defoe's Compleat English Tradesman, commerce was simply assumed to require “a fruitful Fancy, to invent new Whims, to please the Changeable Foibles of the Ladies,” habits of capricious consumption which had penetrated the entire social body.

No man is ignorant that a Taylor is the Person that makes our Cloathes; to some he not only makes their Dress, but, in some measure, may be said to make themselves. There are Numbers of Beings in and about the Metropolis who have no other identical Existence than that what the Taylor, Milliner and Periwig-Maker bestow upon them. Strip them of these Distinctions, and they are a quite different Species of Beings; have no more Relation to their dressed selves, than they have to the Great Mogul, and are as insignificant in Society as Punch, deprived of his moving Wires, and hung up upon a Peg.⁸⁰

Even Montesquieu, whose Persian Letters was one of the century's most prominent declarations of female rationality and moral insight,⁸¹ took care in that work, and again in The Spirit of the Laws, to reassure his audience that while emulation and luxury consumption, powerfully promoted by women, were amongst the most effective spurs to prosperity, these arts of civilization in no way “make men effeminate,”⁸² a claim John Brown forcefully denied in his famous Estimate of 1757. Condillac, perhaps alluding to The Fable, saw in the faculty of the imagination—“a bee that culls its treasure from the finest blooms of a flower bed”—the feminine principle lurking behind the confusions wrought by the liberation of fancy.

It is a flirtatious woman whose only desire is to please, and who draws on her fancy rather more than on her reason. Ever obliging, she adapts herself to our tastes, passions weaknesses. One she attracts and persuades by her saucy flirting manners, the other she surprises and astonishes by her grand and noble ways … Although imagination changes everything it touches, it often succeeds when its meaning is merely trying to please.⁸³

Mandeville's “petticoat” thesis achieves its full import when situated within these ideological contexts. In Britain particularly, Protestant, especially “vulgar Whig,” associations of commerce with liberty,⁸⁴ were fed by complementary misogynist fears that were themselves exacerbated in the early eighteenth century by the explosion of the European luxury trades. In reducing to self-serving cant the attempt to moralize economic expansion by associating it with the frugal virtues of pious, independent citizens, Mandeville, while insisting that “Religion is one thing and Trade is another” (I, 336), forced his readers to confront the sheer power of their now unadorned avarice. As he put it, “nothing could make amends for the Detriment Trade would sustain, if all those of that Sex, who enjoy the happy State of Matrimony, should act and behave themselves as a sober wise Man could wish them” (I, 356). Indeed,

a considerable Portion of what the Prosperity of London and Trade in general … and all the worldly Interest of the Nation consists in, depends entirely on the Deceit and vile Strategems of Women; and that Humility, Content, Meekness, Obedience to reasonable Husbands, Frugality, and all the Virtues together, if they were possess'd of them in the most eminent Degree, could not possibly be a thousandth Part so serviceable, to make an opulent, powerful, and what we call a flourishing Kingdom, than their most hateful Qualities.

(I, 228)

Following upon this argument, Mandeville then transformed female desire from a localized force driving recent economic advance into a general principle of social explanation. His acid observation that a great society depends upon “the abominable improvement of Female Luxury” (I, 356) was meant to and succeeded in challenging one of his audience's deepest assumptions about the moral integrity of its own aspirations. Luxury, as one of the characters in The Tryal of the Lady Allurea Luxury bemoaned, “is the Author of all the Books that have been published these last fifty Years in Favour of … Gaming, Atheism, and every Kind of Vice, public as well as private.” Indeed, “[s]he wrote the Fable of the Bees, and published it under the Name of Mandeville.”⁸⁵ Mandeville endorsed precisely the behavior which horrified Law, observing that women, “when they have half a Score Suits of Clothes, Two or Three of them not the worse for wearing, will think it a sufficient Plea for new Ones, if they can say that they have never seen a Gown or Petticoat, but what they have been often seen in, and are known by” (I, 226). He took information of this kind as evidence for the provocative thesis “that the worst of Women and most profligate of the Sex did contribute to the Consumption of Superfluities, as well as the Necessaries of Life, and consequently were Beneficial to … peaceable Drudges, that … have no worse design than an honest Livelihood.” Indeed, “the number of Hands employ'd to gratify the Fickleness and Luxury of Women” is nothing short of “prodigious” (I, 225-226). After incorporating these passages into his own defense of luxury, Helvétius nicely caught one of Mandeville's primary implications when he attributed to the euphemistically titled “femmes Galantes” a primary role in the promotion of public welfare.⁸⁶

The Fable's ironic arguments about the liberating economic effects of female desire derived from the established libertine literary genre within which Mandeville first began to publish. In the so-called “Querelle des Femmes” of the previous century, paradoxical elaborations of women's supposed failings had as their intended purpose the satirical exploitation of conventional misogynist sentiments in order to offer a critique of institutions like marriage, coupled with a defense of women's abilities. Many were founded upon a materialist assumption that social expressions of sexuality were historically conditioned phenomena.⁸⁷ In The Virgin Unmask'd (1709), as well as in his articles in The Female Tatler during the two following years, Mandeville exploited these conventions by speaking through female personae—one of whom, Lucinda, is “a student of medicine”⁸⁸—in order to expose as exploitative contemporary prejudices against women. “The Men like wary Conquerors,” one of his women says, “keep us Ignorant, because they are afraid of us, and that they may the easier maintain their Dominion over us, they Compliment us into Idleness, pretending those P[r]esants to be the Tokens of their Affection, which in reality are the Consequences of their Tyranny.”⁸⁹ Mandeville sought to show how female avarice, inconstancy and ambition, now “at their height” as he put it,⁹⁰ were socially generated “vices” of opulent living rather than natural artifacts of femininity. He situated his main characters, like Mrs. Crackenthorpe in The Female Tatler, “the Lady who knows everything,” as persons cognitively empowered by their sexually constituted social inferiority to voice pertinent truths to which men were blind. Lucinda brushes aside all moralized accounts of social intercourse by baldly insisting that money is “the only thing that standing by itself has any signification, to which all the vertues and good qualities are meer cyphers, that are never to be used but to advance the figure,”⁹¹ a point whose informing principle regarding the illusions fostered by commercial life Fulvia articulated in The Fable, insisting that “no body can please my Eye that affronts my Understanding” (II, 33).

While Mandeville had no interest in arguing that women should have equal political rights, he thought the conventional view that women are more lustful than men because of a defect in their constitution—a view which he would have found not only in contemporary moralizing, but clearly asserted by Bayle⁹²—to be physiologically absurd. “There is no Reason to imagine,” as he said in The Fable, “that Nature should have been more neglectful of them … and not have taken the same Care of them in the Formation of the Brain, as to the Nicety of the Structure, and superior Accuracy in the Fabrick, which is so visible in the rest of their Frame” (II, 173). Mandeville also found derisory the attempt by followers of Shaftesbury to moralize the supposed constitutional opposition between the sexes into a higher form of cosmic harmony, presenting society as an ordered moral whole, only apparently composed, as in Addision and Steele, of discordant parts. It was nothing but self-delusion to believe with Pope that

Each loves itself, but not itself alone,
Each sex desires alike, till two are one.
Nor ends the pleasure with the fierce embrace;
They love themselves, a third time, in their race.(93)

For Mandeville, conflict and contrivance, dissimulation and deception, are elemental and necessary features of polished social life. In sexual relations particularly, self-love never finds “the private in the public good,” as Pope would have it. Rather, women, less attractive “naked and unenhanced” in the state of nature than men, quickly discover that they are able to augment their beauty by the use of artifice and ornament.⁹⁴ Since all human beings strive to emulate those whom they feel are superior, women are driven to dress above their stations and enthusiastically embrace the world of fashion as they compete with one another for men's attention (II, 123-125). Women have more pride than men, and efficiently exploit it, not because of their natures, but from an education which, especially amongst the higher ranks, at once puts a premium on virginity and coquettishness.⁹⁵ Women thus have a powerful, historically constituted interest in perfecting the arts of flattery, especially in the cultivation of devices linking sexual attraction with modesty (I, 63-69), and unnaturally maintaining their virginity at the expense of their mental health (I, 46). Engendered by the sexual division of labor, enhanced female pride and the need for the attentions of men combine to produce in modern conditions an almost insatiable desire for fashionable goods amongst women of all ranks.

Once unmasked, the “modesty” of virgins can properly be understood as “the Result of Custom and Education … the Lessons of it, like those of Grammar, are taught us long before we have occasion for, or understand the Usefulness of them” (I, 69; 72). Conversely, while “Men may take greater Liberty, because in them the Appetite is more violent and ungovernable” (I, 74-75), women, as bearers of children, are more in need of “good breeding” and the arts of dissimulation to achieve their socially specified ends. So while both sexes cultivate “politeness” to enhance, rather than abridge, their sensual pleasures (I, 73), the sexual marketplace mediated by modern habits of sociability, Mandeville argued, provides an occasion to reflect on market mechanisms themselves.

In A Modest Defence of Publick Stews, published shortly after the charge against The Fable's publisher, and elaborating upon his comments on the function of prostitution in “Remark H” (I, 94-100),⁹⁶ Mandeville offered his fullest technical account of how vice may lead to public benefit. He proposed the establishment of public houses of prostitution in London and market towns, above all to allay male sexual desire and to reduce overall whoring. Mandeville would have the licensed public stews maintain healthy women, who would attract men, even without penalties designed to keep them away from other prostitutes, and by so doing protect respectable ladies from male lust. “As there is constantly in the nation a certain number of young men, whose passions are too strong to brook any opposition, our business is to contrive a method how they may be gratified, with as little expense of female virtue as possible.”⁹⁷ But when his project is first launched, Mandeville expects a run upon the stews, which would involve too much neglect of private whoring, “the only nursery for our courtezans,” since “the whole body of our incontinent youth, like a standing army, being employ'd in constant action, there cannot well be spar'd a sufficient detachment to raise the necessary recruits.”⁹⁸ Thus, while it is in the public interest to discourage private prostitution, the demands of the market require that the ranks of privately debauched women be permitted at a level acceptable for continued recruitment into public houses.

Anticipating criticism, Mandeville then argued that even if the run on the stews should not be remedied by supplies of young women from private employment, the worst that would happen would be “a gradual relapse into our former state of private whoring; and this no farther than is just necessary to recruit the stews and thereby make them retrieve their former character.” The debauching of more numbers of women than are strictly necessary to allow the stews to satisfy demand will make these public houses popular, thereby curtailing private whoring which, in consequence, “must be reduced so low that there will remain just a sufficient quantity to supply the stews; which is as low as in the nature of the thing is possible.” While whoring would be diminished to the lowest level possible, ample scope for male sexual drives outside of marriage would nevertheless be accommodated. The mechanism of supply and demand alone would thus work to effect maximum public benefit or, as Mandeville says of his proposal, it “necessarily executes itself.”⁹⁹

Mandeville's wry but wholly unsatirical scheme for the licensing of prostitutes followed from and was meant to supplement his initial aim of exploiting the anxiety of his readers about the intrusion of vicious desire into the heart of prosperity. In the essay on Publick Stews he deliberately invoked culturally threatening images of unbridled male lust and the morally undecorated acceptance of its consequences. In The Fable he employed images of feminine instability, where fashion reigns and even merchants are imagined as so overcome by luxury that one might expect them to “walk along the street in petticoats” (I, 118). Mandeville combined an aggressive insistence that commercial modernity heavily depended upon female desire—upon both the “fickle strumpet” and the “haughty Dutchess” (I, 355), whose “Fickleness and Luxury” employ a “prodigious number of Hands” (I, 226)—with the unsettling observation that the technical operations of the market could be seen to govern even the most intimate aspects of civilized living. In so doing, he achieved some of the most disturbingly paradoxical of his purposes: to show first, that modern prosperity not only depended upon the emancipation of persons from their former political dependencies, but, equally important, upon the liberation of their self-regarding wants; and second, to show that the desires of these persons were rooted in the most elemental of passions, whose capricious expressions, while governable, were nevertheless the necessarily defining features of commercial society's occluded moral life. After Mandeville, particularly after the incorporation of The Fable's primary arguments about luxury consumption into the heart of Enlightenment public discourse, any systematic defense of commercial society's moral legitimacy remained vulnerable to a Mandevillian critique of the substructure of viciousness and sublimated sexual license upon which it rested. This problem was nowhere more importantly confronted than in the work of Adam Smith.

Notes

1. E. Phillips, An Appeal to Common Sense: Or, Some Considerations Offer'd to Restore Publick Credit. As Also the Means of Reviving It (London, 1720), p. 4.

2. William Law, Remarks, p. 43.

3. Francis Hutcheson, Reflections on Laughter and Remarks on The Fable of the Bees (Glasgow, 1750).

4. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society 1767, ed. Duncan Forbes (Edinburgh University Press, 1966), p. 33.

5. Bernard Mandeville, A Modest Defence of Publick Stews (London, 1724), p. 57.

6. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, III.7. See Melvin Richter, The Political Theory of Montesquieu (Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 43-44.

7. A point usefully explored by Thomas Horne, “Envy in Commercial Society,” Political Theory 9, 4 (1981), pp. 551-569.

8. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, III.3.

9. Bernard Mandeville, Free Thoughts, pp. 390-391.

10. Honour, p. 202.

11. Mandeville, Free Thoughts, pp. 282 and 285.

12. Mandeville, Free Thoughts, p. 282.

13. Mandeville, A Letter to Dion, p. 49.

14. Voltaire, “Envie,” Questions sur l'encyclopédie (1771), in œuvres complètes de Voltaire, ed. Louis Moland (Paris: Garnier, 1878), II, pp. 537-538, added to all later editions of the Dictionnaire philosophique.

15. David Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford University Press, 1902), p. 181.

16. Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 158-198.

17. Sir Dudley North, Discourses on Trade (London, 1690), p. 15.

18. John Pollexfen, A Discourse on Trade, Coyne, and Paper Credit (London, 1697), p. 99.

19. Karl Marx, Capital (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, n.d.) I, p. 616, n. 2.

20. Eli F. Heckscher, Mercantilism, trans. Mendel Shapiro (London: Allen and Unwin, 1955), II, pp. 286-315. See, too, J. A. W. Gunn, Politics and the Public Interest in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge, 1969), pp. 205-265, p. 21, and John Brown, Essays on the Characteristics of the Earl of Shaftesbury (1751) (New York: Garland Reprint, 1970), p. 140.

21. John Brown, Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (London, 1757), I, p. 173.

22. Erasmus Jones, Luxury, Pride and Vanity the Bane of the British Nation (London, 1736; reprinted 1750), p. 14. Compare Fable, I, pp. 127-128.

23. Compare J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 465-6.

24. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Free Press, 1979), pp. 185 and 189.

25. For the literature on this subject, primarily by historians of economic doctrine, see Goldsmith, Private Vices, Public Benefits, Chapter 5; Nathan Rosenberg, “Mandeville and Laissez-Faire,” Journal of the History of Ideas 24 (1963), pp. 183-196; and Salim Rashid, “Mandeville's Fable: Laissez-Faire or Libertinism?,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 18, 3 (1985), pp. 313-330.

26. Jacob Viner, “Satire and Economics in the Augustan Age of Satire,” in H. K. Miller, G. Rothstein and G. S. Rousseau (eds.), The Augustan Milieu: Essays Presented to Louis A. Landa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), pp. 77-101.

27. Sir James Steuart, Inquiry Into the Principles of Political œconomy (1767), ed. Andrew Skinner (Edinburgh: Olner and Boyd, 1966), 2 volumes, II, pp. 606-607.

28. Mandeville, Honour, pp. 15-16.

29. Mandeville, Free Thoughts, p. 292.

30. Bluett, Enquiry, pp. 48-49.

31. Bluett, Enquiry, p. 5.

32. For example, see Bluett, Enquiry, p. 17.

33. Shaftesbury, “An Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit,” p. 326.

34. On these writers see Jacob Viner, Studies in the Theory of International Trade (New York: Harper and Row, 1937), pp. 52-57, and 117-118, and William Letwin, The Origins of Scientific Economics (London: Methuen, 1963), pp. 59-60 and 198-201.

35. See, amongst a large literature, Charles Wilson, “The Other Face of Mercantilism,” in D. C. Coleman (ed.), Revisions in Mercantilism (London: Methuen, 1969), pp. 118-139, and Daniel Defoe, A Plan of the English Commerce, in J. R. McCulloch (ed.), A Select Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts on Commerce (London: Harrison, 1859), p. 109 and passim.

36. See T. W. Hutchinson, “Berkeley's Querist and its Place in the Economic Thought of the Eighteenth Century,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 4 (May 1953-February 1954), pp. 52-77.

37. They did, however, receive the approval of Voltaire. See A. Owen Aldridge, “Mandeville and Voltaire,” in Irwin Primer (ed.), Mandeville Studies (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1975), pp. 142-156.

38. See, for example, Edgar S. Furniss, The Position of the Laborer in a System of Nationalism (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1920); A.W. Coates, “Changing Attitudes Toward Labour in the Mid-Eighteenth Century,” Economic History Review 2nd series, 11, 1 (1958), pp. 35-51; Richard C. Wiles, “The Theory of Labour in Later English Mercantilism,” Economic History Review 2nd series, 30, 1 (1968), pp. 113-126, and E. J. Hundert, “The Achievement Motive in Hume's Political Economy,” Journal of the History of Ideas 35 (1974), pp. 139-143.

39. Bluett, Enquiry, p. 181. See, too, William Hendley, A Defence of the Charity Schools (London, 1725), pp. 27-28.

40. David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. J. V. Price (Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 167.

41. Mandeville, Honour, pp. 102-103.

42. Henry Fielding, Enquiry into the … Recent Causes of the … Increase of Robbers, in Complete Works, II, p. 783.

43. Ellen Ross, “Mandeville, Melon and Voltaire: The Origins of the Luxury Controversy in France,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 155 (1976), pp. 1897-1912; John Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollett (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1977), especially pp. 80-88, 113-115 and 138; André Morize, L'Apologie du luxe au XVIIIe siècle et ‘Le Mondaine’ de Voltaire (Geneva: Slatkine Reprint, 1970); and Hans Kortum, “Frugalité et luxe à travers la querelle des anciens et des moderns,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 56 (1987), pp. 705-775.

44. Pierre Bayle, Continuation des pensées divers, in œuvres diverses de Pierre Bayle, ed. Pierre Des Maizeaux (The Hague, 1717-1731), III, Section 124, p. 361, and Bayle, “Ajax, fils de Telamon B,” in Dictionnaire.

45. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Niddich (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), II.28.12.

46. Mandeville, A Letter to Dion, pp. 25-26.

47. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, note i.

48. Diderot, “Encyclopédie,” in Encyclopédie, IV, pp. 635-636.

49. Francis Hutcheson, A Collection of Letters, in Collected Works, pp. 146 and 386.

50. Hutcheson, A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy (Glasgow, 1747), in Collected Works, IV, p. 321.

51. Hutcheson, A Collection of Letters, p. 385.

52. Hutcheson, Reflections on Laughter, pp. 144-156.

53. Mandeville, Free Thoughts, p. 285.

54. Hume “Of Refinement in the Arts,” in Essays Moral, Political and Literary (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1985), p. 280.

55. See Jean François Melon, Essai politique sur le commerce (Bordeaux, 1734; English trans., 1735), Chapter 9, and Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, VII.1 and IV.8.

56. Hume, “Of Commerce,” Essays, p. 263.

57. James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman, revised by J. D. Fleeman (Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 755-756 and 947-948.

58. Hume, “Of Refinement in the Arts,” Essays, p. 250. The essay was originally entitled “Of Luxury.”

59. Matthew Heynes, A Sermon for the Reformation of Manners Preac'd in St. Paul's Church in Bedford at the Assizes there held March the 15th 1700 (London, 1701), pp. 7-8, quoted in M. M. Goldsmith, “Liberty, Luxury and the Pursuit of Happiness,” in Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 225-251, p. 236.

60. The Female Tatler, No. 108 (misnumbered as 105), 13 March-15 March, 1710. Compare the discussion of this character in M. M. Goldsmith, “Mandeville and the Spirit of Capitalism,” Journal of British Studies 17 (1977), pp. 63-68, and Goldsmith, Private Vices, Public Benefits, pp. 137-139.

61. The Female Tatler, No. 112 (misnumbered as 109) 22 March-24 March, 1710.

62. See, David Hume, “Of Interest,” in Essays, pp. 300-301, and Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, III.iv.3.

63. R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926) (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1954), especially pp. 8-9, and 171-172.

64. The True Interest and Political Maxims of the Republick of Holland, Part 1, Chapter 4.

65. William Petty, Political Arithmetic (London, 1690), pp. 25-26.

66. Daniel Defoe, Enquiry into Occasional Conformity (London, 1702), pp. 18-19.

67. Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, Fortune is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolo Machiavelli (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

68. Honour, iii-iv.

69. Sekora, Luxury, pp. 44-45.

70. Joan Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). p. 134.

71. See J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, pp. 452-453, and Pocock, “The Mobility of Property and the Rise of Eighteenth-Century Sociology,” in Virtue, Commerce and History (Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 114.

72. Dudley North, Discourses on Trade, pp. 14-15.

73. Dickson, The Financial Revolution, p. 256.

74. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb (eds.), The Birth of a Consumer Society (London: Hutchinson, 1983), Chapter 2, especially p. 23.

75. Daniel Defoe, Everybody's Business is Nobody's Business (1725), in Works (London: Bohn's Classics, 1870), II, p. 504.

76. Berkeley, The Querist, pp. 20 and 308-309.

77. William Law, A Serious Call to A Devout and Holy Life (London, 1729), p. 119.

78. William Law, A Serious Call, p. 69.

79. Daniel Defoe, The Review No. 3 (1706), p. 503.

80. Richard Campbell, The London Tradesman (London, 1747), p. 191.

81. E. J. Hundert, “Sexual Politics and the Allegory of Identity in Montesquieu's Persian Letters,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Society 31, 2 (1990), pp. 99-113.

82. Montesquieu, The Persian Letters, Letter CVI. See, too, The Spirit of the Laws, VII.1 and XIX.8.

83. Condillac, “Where the Imagination Gets the Embellishments it Gives to Truth,” in Philosophical Writings of Etienne Bonnot, Abbé de Condillac, trans. Franklin Philip (Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1987), II, pp. 478-479.

84. Duncan Forbes, “Sceptical Whiggism, Commerce and Liberty,” in A. S. Skinner and T. Wilson (eds.), Essays on Adam Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 179-202.

85. Anon., The Tryal of the Lady Allurea Luxury (London, 1757), pp. 40 and 52, quoted in James Raven, Judging New Wealth: Popular Publishing and Responses to Commerce in England, 1750-1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 173.

86. Helvétius, De L'Esprit, Discourse II, 15.

87. Rosalie L. Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 53-60 and 102-107. See, too, Gordon S. Vichert, “Bernard Mandeville's The Virgin Unmask'd,,” in Irwin Primer (ed.), Mandeville Studies (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1975), pp. 1-10, M. M. Goldsmith, “‘The Treacherous Arts of Mankind’: Bernard Mandeville and Female Virtue,” in M. M. Goldsmith and Thomas A. Horne (eds.), The Politics of Fallen Man (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 1986), pp. 93-114, and Carol J. Gibson, “Bernard Mandeville: The Importance of Women in the Development of Civil Societies,” MA thesis, University of British Columbia, 1989.

88. The Virgin Unmask'd, p. 123.

89. The Female Tatler No. 88 (1 February 1710), p. 68.

90. The Virgin Unmask'd, pp. 3-4.

91. The Virgin Unmask'd, pp. 58-59.

92. Pierre Bayle, Pensées diverses sur la comète, 2 volumes ed. A. Prat (Paris: Droz, 1939), II, pp. 79-80 and 82.

93. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, Epistle III, lines 121-124.

94. Mandeville, The Virgin Unmask'd, pp. 10-12.

95. The Virgin Unmask'd, p. 27.

96. Bernard Mandeville, A Modest Defence of Publick Stews: Or an Essay upon Whoring as it is now Practis'd in these Kingdoms, Written by a Layman (London, 1724). See too Richard I. Cook, “The Great ‘Leviathan of Lechery’: Mandeville's Modest Defence of Public Stews (1724),” in Irwin Primer (ed.), Mandeville Studies (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1975), pp. 22-33.

97. Mandeville, Publick Stews, pp. 63-64.

98. Mandeville, Publick Stews, p. 64.

99. Mandeville, Publick Stews, pp. 64-65.