SOURCE: Schneider, Louis. “Bernard Mandeville: Observations in Lieu of a Biography.” In Paradox and Society: The Work of Bernard Mandeville. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1987, pp. 29-66.

[In the following essay, Schneider, provides an outline of Mandeville's life, thought, and literary activity.]

Material for a life of Mandeville is scant and a biography of him of any considerable scale is not feasible. One may make certain inferences about his character or personal traits from his work. Although this is a somewhat precarious enterprise, it is not entirely unrewarding. The effort to discover something of his character also will suggest intellectual features that help toward the construction of a portrait of the man and thinker.

Kaye has provided a brief sketch of Mandeville's life.¹ From this it appears that Mandeville was baptized in Rotterdam on the 20th of November, 1670. He attended the Erasmian School in Rotterdam and subsequently studied at the University of Leyden, obtaining the degree of Doctor of Medicine from that institution toward the end of March of 1691. He took up the branch of medicine in which his father had been engaged, specializing in nervous and gastric disorders. He may have toured Europe. He did visit London and was apparently taken with England generally, where he settled and married in the late 1690s. Kaye records that he “died at Hackney, Sunday morning, 21 January 1732, in his sixty-third year, possibly of the prevalent influenza.”²

Somewhat more than this bare recital is provided by Kaye but not much that we can be sure of, although it does appear likely that Mandeville was at any rate a reasonably successful physician and it is certain that he was a successful and very well known writer. It is also easy to believe from his writings that he was “neither a saint in his life nor a hermit in his diet.”³ But we must soon turn to his time and indeed to his writings to learn substantially more about him.

The years of Mandeville's maturity were years of economic and social ferment. London, inevitably of great interest to Mandeville, had been growing vastly. About one-quarter of the way into the new eighteenth century, Defoe was writing enthusiastically about the city, claiming to see “such a prodigy of buildings” that nothing ever equalled it except the Rome of Trajan—which, Defoe said, had 6.8 million inhabitants. Defoe estimated the population of London in his day at a million and one-half and wrote of “the present and past greatness of this mighty city.” He even seemed to taken pride in the number of London's prisons, “perhaps as many as in all the capital cities of Europe put together.”⁴ He greatly overestimated the city's population, which was then probably in the neighborhood of one-half million.⁵ But it is evident that London was a large and bustling place—and in process of becoming larger still. Moreover, towns generally were growing, and some twenty percent of the English population lived in towns by the early eighteenth century.⁶

London itself, particularly in the earlier part of the century in which Mandeville's literary activity falls, constituted a world in which, in the words of one writer, “violence, disorder and brutal punishment … were still part of the normal background of life.”⁷ Mandeville looked upon this scene of crime and disease and dirt, and he commented on the dirt in particular in the Preface to The Fable. He argues that people could well wish the streets of London considerably cleaner, but “when once they come to consider that what offends them is the result of the plenty, great traffic and opulency of that mighty city, if they have any concern in its welfare, they will hardly ever wish to see the streets of it less dirty.”⁸ This statement is very much in accordance with what Mandeville tells us in the same Preface is the main design of The Fable, which is to show “the impossibility of enjoying all the most elegant comforts of life that are to be met with in an industrious, wealthy and powerful nation and at the same time be blessed with all the virtue and innocence that can be wished for in a golden age.” Mandeville wishes to expose “the unreasonableness and folly of those that, desirous of being an opulent and flourishing people, and wonderfully greedy after all the benefits they can receive as such are yet always murmuring at and exclaiming against those vices and inconveniences that from the beginning of the world to the present day have been inseparable from all kingdoms and states ever were famed for strength, riches and politeness at the same time.”⁹

Mandeville was always intrigued with economic development. Important new economic organizations were arising in England. The Bank of England came into being in 1694, modelled on the Bank of Amsterdam and serving to fund the national debt. It is of possible significance as background for the motivation of Mandeville's own move to England that an element in the acceptance of the Bank was the popularization among the English of the Dutch and Dutch institutions that came with the accession of William III.¹⁰ The South Sea Company was incorporated in 1711. The inflation of the value of its stock occasioned a great panic in the stock market in 1720 and even generated some revulsion against commerce.¹¹ The emergence of the East India Company as a single, united company in 1709 meant the presence of a third imposing economic enterprise. The dates indicated (1709, 1711, 1720), except for 1694, are at the very center of Mandeville's literary life.

Economic activity in the world of the early eighteenth century posed hard moral questions. The moralist was faced with a dilemma about vice that Mandeville was to explore thoroughly in his own fashion. “Vice” unequivocally brought economic benefits. English prosperity at this time was intimately related to increase of consumption. But that increase meant increase in “vice.” The imbibing of more alcohol meant more drunkenness. Pride and vanity (prime manifestations of vice in Mandeville's lexicon) motivated the purchase of fine items of clothing and choice housing and furniture.¹² Less vice, less prosperity. More prosperity, more vice. (It was in The Fable of the Bees that Mandeville suggested his much controverted definition of vice itself.)¹³ A man like Defoe might have moral qualms about a vice that was nevertheless economically valuable, but, along with Petty, Barbon, North, Carey, Mandeville, and Berkeley, he was still in fear of lowering of employment because of underconsumption.¹⁴ (Yet vice might also mean such large demand for foreign goods as would adversely influence the balance of trade.)

To a new financial world, and a world in which vice and luxury posed serious moral problems that were being discussed in new terms, one must add a world otherwise involved in considerable social change. Old, simple demarcations of social classes or portions thereof were being confused or baffled. There was considerable social mobility. The professions were growing rapidly. Mercantile activity was making its contribution to changing older class situations. Kramnick's book, Bolingbroke and his Circle, pursues the thesis that Bolingbroke (1678-1751) and with him men like the great Augustan literary figures Swift and Pope saw in the England of their time a society changing for the worse as commerce and money engendered corruption. In the view of men such as these, stockjobbing and vulgarity and the disturbance of an ancient system of social rank were all too evident and the country was degenerating. The landed gentry suffered heavily from taxation levied to finance the nearly twenty years of war under William and Anne. The small gentry, indeed, ironically, exhausted themselves financially in “helping to create the class that would dispossess them,” for they paid the taxes that helped the moneyed to take their land away from them. Not only did the gentry feel they were being “victimized by a conspiracy of commerce and government,” but they also responded with a sense of being impersonally thrust about by a novel financial order featuring mysteries of public credit and paper transactions.¹⁵

The political leader Robert Walpole stood for corruption, and particularly financial corruption, in the eyes of critics like Bolingbroke and Swift (although apparently Bolingbroke himself allowed some measure of corruption to be needed “to maintain subordination and to carry on even good government”). Despicable new projects, unappreciative of the old and committed to novelty and immorality were increasing disconcertingly. Or so it seemed to the Bolingbrokes, the Swifts, the Popes, the John Gays, and others like them, who spoke for aristocratic and humanist and nostalgic Tory values. Mandeville is seen by Kramnick as spokesman for the new commercial and financial society. His Fable of the Bees appeared when Tory yearning for the social simplicities and stabilities that the Tories conceived existed before 1688 had expressed itself in demand for sumptuary laws “to curb the luxury they alleged corrupted public manners and extinguished public spirit;” and Mandeville's work undermined the Tory position. Kramnick even writes of Mandeville's “great attack on the Tory position.”¹⁶

In line with his thesis, Kramnick simplifies somewhat. It may be questioned whether he does justice to the tensions in Mandeville's thought: tensions between “virtue” and “vice” in particular; and whether it is not too facile to say that Mandeville flatly saw “nothing wrong” with the corruption of his day that ran through various occupations. Mandeville does have a deep vein of sympathy for a society and economy that pursue worldly goods by worldly methods. Like Pierre Bayle (among others) before him, he insists that Gospel precepts make one sort of demand on humans in society while the exigencies of worldly welfare make a very different sort of demand. In this sense, he may be interpreted to be on the side of “vice” and worldliness, and we have here a powerful strain in his thought. But it is not always clear that he is really quite out of sympathy with “virtue,” and some of the poignancy of effect of his work may be traceable to uneasy conscience on his part about that very corruption and hypocrisy that he does indeed regard as inseparable from a society powered by ambition and the desire for prosperity.¹⁷ Kramnick's views have been challenged on other grounds, as on the ground that while his sense of Mandeville as a Court Whig, a defender of Walpole and his methods, has something to be said for it, it is still too narrow and limited to fit Mandeville's idiosyncratic political stance.¹⁸ But Kramnick's “location” of Mandeville is broadly helpful. If we must see Mandeville's attitude toward the new economic order as rather more nuanced and subtle than Kramnick appears to do, there is still no denying that Mandeville was far indeed from repudiating that order.¹⁹ It is most suggestive that John Gay, in the second volume of his Fables (1738), should have written an item contrasting provocatively with Mandeville's “The Grumbling Hive,” the doggerel that precedes The Fable. The bees in Mandeville's grumbling hive individually pursued “vice” assiduously and achieved public prosperity:

“Thus every Part was full of Vice,
Yet the whole Mass a Paradise.”(20)

In his own fable, “The Regenerate Bees,” Gay wrote:

“Know that, in selfish ends pursuing,
You scramble for the public ruin.”(21)

The opposition could hardly be more plain. But if Mandeville was appreciably partial to the new economic order and its ineluctable propensity toward “vice,” there was another way in which he was much like those who had greater nostalgia than he for aristocratic, so-called Tory values and an older society and economy. Jacob Viner gives us a pertinent account of the conservatism generally shown by the Augustan satirists. After 1660, the civil strife of earlier decades became, in Viner's words, “an unpleasant memory,” and the quality of this memory served to strengthen opposition to change and to criticism of current institutions. The focus here is somewhat different from that in Kramnick's work. In the Augustan age of satire, the satiric lance was not employed to get concerted action against the poverty and wretchedness of the masses. In literate and articulate England for the century or so beginning in 1660, there was no serious push toward modification of fundamental social institutions by that sort of social reform that seeks to recast those institutions and support major legislative change to this end. There might be quarrels significant enough in themselves, such as those between spokesman for aristocracy and spokesman for popular commercial and financial values, but on the whole English satire was overwhelmingly conservative in tendency before the nineteenth century.

Some special reservations may be made for Swift, on the subject of English-Irish relations and aspects of the Irish economy, but Swift hardly qualifies in general as a social reformer. There was concern with the moral reform of individuals. There was the presumption that society would be reformed through the reform of individuals. But criticisms, on moral, intellectual, religious, or other fronts, of the managers of existing institutions were not matched by criticism of institutions themselves. Wickedness was conceived essentially to emanate from humans, not from the social structures they had reared that might embody or “freeze” a variety of evils. (In France, at the same time, as Viner suggests, there was much criticism of institutions, just as there was later in nineteenth-century England.)²² Mandeville himself was by no means a naive sort of sociologist, but at least in not launching an attack upon existing institutions with an eye to changing them fundamentally, he was at one with the Augustan satirists with whom he would have differed considerably on other matters. Rather than attacking the economic and social system that he knew, he twitted those who prospered under it while they presumed that they operated on fine moral principles.

There is certainly room for divergent views of Mandeville on a number of matters, but one of the things that is very clear about him is that he was no supporter of major social upheaval. His Free Thoughts advocated tolerance in religion (within limits). He was sympathetic with a king of Dutch origin and in favor of the Protestant succession. If he did indeed write The Mischiefs that Ought Justly to be Apprehended from a Whig Government (1714), as both Kaye and a more recent student, H. T. Dickinson, have inclined to think,²³ then it is worth noting that we find in it expectable doctrine stressing the obligation of kings to their subjects and expectable Mandevillean dislike of “Popery.” Mandeville's “mercantilism” was not of a rigid variety and he was in economic matters generally “progressive,” as we know. But to think of him as on the order of a social revolutionary of the left is entirely out of the question. His attitude toward the laboring poor, which we shall consider, would alone constitute a serious disqualification in this regard. He certainly did not want to upset the class order.²⁴ Further comment on his conservatism (which should not be exaggerated) is reserved for a later point. In the interim, our knowledge of Mandeville may be advanced by consideration of his writings, an initial overview of which will provide something of an introduction to his distinctive outlook.

MANDEVILLE'S WRITINGS

A middle class nourished on mercantile activity was important in the new social scene of Mandeville's maturity. Readers of middle class origin have been said to have been “the author's main support” in the eighteenth century.²⁵ According to Watt's analysis of the reading public early in the century, such a public did in fact exist among tradesmen, shopkeepers, favored apprentices, and indoor servants; and with accession to these categories from groups engaged in commerce and manufacturing, Watt suggests, the middle class as a whole may have come into “a dominating position” in the reading public at large for the first time.²⁶ Recent research, it is true, has cast some doubt on facile generalization about various connections of “the middle class” (the term itself is not altogether unambiguous) and eighteenth-century literature (especially as regards the novel).²⁷ Yet a person who wrote as Mandeville did was bound to have a certain advantage to make an appeal to persons with sharp understanding even if with no imposing classical education. Mandeville offered “plain talk.” Even the deeper aspects of his thought were presented with a certain captivating lucidity. Dobrée states of Mandeville and Shaftesbury that “they were understandable.” And they addressed themselves to questions that were plausibly important, at least, to significant sectors of a “middle class” audience. “What was the basis of morality? What was the nature of conscience?”²⁸

Mandeville's publications came to an end in 1732, somewhat before the time of really marked increase in English publishing activity.²⁹ This alone certainly suggests limitations on how far down into the class structure his writing penetrated, but it retained the advantage of plainness and cogency that has just been suggested and it clearly received very considerable attention from persons in some sense qualified to judge it. From 1723 on, the success and notoriety of The Fable alone were great. Kaye writes of “the enormous vogue of the book” and indicates that it “retained its celebrity for over a century.” David Hume, in his Treatise of Human Nature, listed “Dr. Mandeville” along with Locke, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Butler as one of “some late philosophers in England who have begun to put the science of man on a new footing and have engaged the attention and excited the curiosity of the public.”³⁰

The earliest writings in the Mandeville canon were much too specialized to “engage the attention and excite the curiosity of the public.” The initial three items were published in Rotterdam and Leyden. The first of these, also Mandeville's first “authentic work,”³¹ is De Medicina Oratio Scholastica, Rotterdam, 1685. Mandeville contended in this that the most important thing in the practice of medicine is observation or experience. It is of interest to note how early this most characteristic empirical bias is stated by him. The second work we have is a philosophical dissertation, entitled Disputatio Philosophica de Brutorum Operationibus, Leyden, 1689. Sakmann renders the substance of this philosophical essay thus:

The position of the Peripatetics who assume a substantial principle of cogitation in animals but do not grant them a rational, immortal soul is untenable. With thought, rationality and immortality are given, as one can show from the Peripatetics' own examples and arguments and from the true idea of God and his decrees. The upshot is that, because of the difference between man and animal, to which we must hold firmly, the capacity to think cannot be granted to animals. Many of their vital functions may now already be explained on mechanical grounds.³²

Mandeville's third authentic work is a medical doctoral dissertation entitled Disputatio Medica Inauguralis de Chylosi Vitata, Leyden, 1691. This is a work on the digestive disturbances supporting the thesis that it is fermentation rather than heat that explains the digestive process.³³ Mandeville had an abiding interest in the digestive processes. The physician who is evidently his spokesman in a later treatise on hypochondriacal and hysterical ailments holds that the stomach is the source of such ailments and Mandeville clearly believed also that the stomach is readily affected by mental disturbance.³⁴

The doggerel, entitled The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves Turned Honest, appeared in 1705. It tells the famous story of a beehive that prospered as a whole when its individual bees were engaged by the millions in “endeavoring to supply each other's lust and vanity” but then declined drastically when by the agency of Jupiter the individual bees had ceased to be knaves and had been rendered honest.³⁵ It was ultimately incorporated in Mandeville's most important work, The Fable of the Bees, the small fable of the hive serving as the nucleus of the much larger Fable.

The Virgin Unmask'd: or, Female Dialogues Betwixt an Elderly Maiden Lady and her Niece was published in 1709. There are ten dialogues in this, between Lucinda, the elderly maiden lady of the title, and her young, unmarried niece, Antonia. Mandeville states his purpose on the penultimate page of his Preface: “My design through the whole is to let young ladies know whatever is dreadful in marriage, and this could not be done, but by introducing one that was an enemy to it. Therefore, tho' Lucinda speaks altogether against matrimony, don't think that I do so too.”³⁶ The design of bringing out “what is dreadful in marriage,” one must acknowledge, is rather well executed. Lucinda is a sagacious woman entirely capable of instructing her niece in those ways of errant husbands that have a cruel impact on wives.

In 1711 Mandeville's A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions was published. (The second, enlarged edition of which—here used—appeared in 1730 under the title, A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Diseases.) This may be described as a summary of Mandeville's psychiatric views and contains much medical lore, especially as bearing on the digestive processes. It probably reveals more about Mandeville as a person than any of his other publications. It is significant that the physician in it is named Philopirio, or lover of experience, and that he is described (and speaks) in such terms that it would appear easy to justify the notion that he is a spokesman for Mandeville.³⁷

The Fable of the Bees was published in 1714. This contained The Grumbling Hive but added “An Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue” and some twenty “Remarks” designed to explain or expand various phrases or statements in The Grumbling Hive. A second edition of the Fable appeared in the same year, but in 1723 another “second edition” was issued with the “Remarks” expanded and the addition of two new essays (“An Essay on Charity and Charity-Schools” and “A Search into the Nature of Society”). This is the material (viz., The Grumbling Hive, the “Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue,” the twenty “Remars,” and the two essays on charity-schools and the nature of society) that now also constitutes the first volume of the extremely useful edition of The Fable that F. B. Kaye published in 1924. Kaye mentions other editions of The Fable of the Bees,³⁸ but crucial is the appearance of a new second volume with that title, issued in 1728 (with 1729 shown on its title-page), which complements the first volume by another of similar length. The Fable is the centerpiece of Mandeville's lifework. Its views will be discussed at length. It features Mandeville's paradoxical juxtaposition of private vices and public virtues. It presents a relatively elaborate theory of human nature. It affords acute views on economy and society and gives in its second volume a most interesting perspective on human evolution.

An interval of six years comes after 1714 before Mandeville's next book is issued. This is his Free Thoughts on Religion, the Church, and National Happiness of 1720. It is, broadly, a plea for religious toleration (although it does not seek to extend toleration to Roman Catholics). It conveys a chastening sense of how once-persecuted sects, when they have achieved acceptance or power, manifest an unseemly intolerance of their own. It is clearly in favor of the Protestant succession to the English throne. Perhaps it should be treated with some reservation, as a not especially characteristic product of Mandeville's, on the ground that it often merely rather mechanically repeats ideas current in his time. Sakmann contended that in large parts of this book its author writes as “no more than a complier” and that “many of the statements of the book are … at most interesting as contributions to knowledge of the theological common sense of the time.” In Free Thoughts, accordingly, in Sakmann's view, Mandeville is minimally original.³⁹ There will be no heavy dependence on the book here but it will be assumed that it does authentically represent Mandeville's views, whether they are inordinately imitative or not.

In 1724 appeared what this writer considers to be one of Mandeville's most powerful and significant pieces of writing, Modest Defence of Publick Stews.⁴⁰ In this work a plan is set out for the establishment and regulations of houses of prostitution, which will have various beneficial effects, including: the preservation of the chastity of “decent” women (a theme already touched on in the Fable and there described as a “seeming paradox”),⁴¹ the reduction of crime and disorder, and the initiation of young men into amatory experiences that will make them less giddily romantic in their comportment in love. This is one of the most ironic of Mandeville's productions and one of the most obviously pervaded by Mandeville's comic sense—which does not prevent it from being a most significant sociological document, with even a not altogether negligible economic argument involved in it, as will be indicated in Chapter 4.

In An Enquiry into the Causes of the Frequent Executions at Tyburn, published in 1725, Mandeville shows interest in theftbote or the carrying on of negotiations with thieves (or criminals connected with them) by the “law-abiding” in getting back goods stolen from the latter. As the title of the pamphlet suggests, the causes of the frequent executions at Tyburn are explored. Mandeville points out that prison evokes or intensifies criminal tendencies. He considers how drunkenness affects the manner in which the condemned take their trip to the gallows and how it affects their behavior when they are about to be executed. He is clear on the point that the main object of public execution, deterrence, is blunted or destroyed by the barbarous spectacles that public executions present.

As previously noted, the second volume of the Fable appeared in 1728 and was dated 1729. Three years later, in 1732, another of Mandeville's more important prose works appeared, his An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour and the Usefulness of Christianity in War. The book is especially significant for its expansion of the discussion of honor that had already appeared in the Fable. It is a subtle study of what might be called the honor motive. It explores what a sociologist might label the “functions” that honor performs, let us say briefly for now, its contributions to the sustainment of the larger social order within which it occurs. It explores as well the complexities confronting the “politician” who works with honor: as when, in the France of Louis XIV, the politician wishes to see maintained the truculence that honor-based duelling encourages but does not wish to see too much valuable military blood spilled in outright orgies of duelling.

A Letter to Dion, Occasion'd by his Book Call'd Alciphron, published in 1732, is a short apologia by Mandeville. The title refers to a work by Bishop Berkeley that showed that Berkeley had genuinely misunderstood Mandeville (quite possibly having refused to take the trouble to understand him). Dion is a restrained statement. Among other things, it reminds the reader of Mandeville's position (whether one considers it “sincere” or not) that when he avers that societies cannot rise to worldly wealth, power, and glory without vices, this does not mean that he himself bids men be vicious.⁴²

Something may be learned about Mandeville the man from these writings, but one must proceed with a good deal of caution. It is tempting, and it may well be accurate, to assume that Lucinda, the elderly maiden aunt of The Virgin Unmask'd, often expresses Mandeville's views on women. But the possibility that she is a persona, an assumed identity, introduced for dramatic purposes and an advocate of views unlike those of the “real Mandeville” (in Monro's phrase), cannot be dismissed out of hand. Texts need to be cross-checked. We are fortunate in having the Treatise on the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Diseases, with its physician Philopiro evidently so close to Mandeville himself. The texts at our disposal in any case allow some exploration of certain traits of Mandeville's character, thought, and style that are of peculiar interest either because they are intimately connected with his social-science endeavors or because they have long occupied commentators on Mandeville who have seriously pondered his meaning and sought to assess the quality of his work.

SOME FEATURES OF CHARACTER, THOUGHT, AND STYLE

Mandeville has very frequently struck readers as cynical. It would hardly be possible to be more partial to him than F. B. Kaye; yet Kaye also once referred to him as “cynical Mandeville,”⁴³ if only in the interest of making a point casting him in a more favorable light than “the uncynical Berkeley.” Hayek, who obviously has great regard for Mandeville, suggests that he had a “somewhat cynical mind.”⁴⁴ In our own day, too, Dobrée refers to “the optimism of a Shaftesbury, the pessimism of a Swift, or the cynicism of a Mandeville.”⁴⁵ In an older day, Leslie Stephen wrote of Mandeville (although he found much of value in him) as both “cynical” and “brutal” and could aver that he had “contempt for the human race.”⁴⁶ Stephen rather outdid himself on the subject of Mandeville in his History of English Thought when he observed that “his brutality and his paradox revolt us as a display of cynical levity.”⁴⁷ George Saintsbury wrote of Mandeville's “cynical pessimism” and called him the “Diogenes of English philosophy,” asserting at the same time that he had “a great deal too much of the polecat about him.”⁴⁸ But among writers reaching back roughly a century, probably none insisted on Mandeville's cynicism so vigorously as Wilhelm Hasbach, the historian of economic thought, who must be quoted in full:

Mandeville stands before us as the man who unified in his work all the low conceptions of human nature that had gotten a distinctive stamp in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Himself of French derivation, he becomes the channel through which the Epicurean-skeptical-mechanical thought of the French is definitely brought over into English ethics and politics. With the boldness of the epigonus he sharpens this thought on all fronts. With cynical enjoyment he rummages in filth. With mephistophelian laughter he seeks to lower humans in their own eyes. He knows how to convert the treasures of wisdom of the libraries into rough coins that pass quickly from hand to hand.⁴⁹

In Mandeville's own time the Fable was repeatedly described as a wicked book and Mandeville himself as misanthropic. “Cynical” is certainly an apt word to convey the sense of him of many of his contemporaries. Mandeville has also often been charged with brutality (as by Stephen), heartlessness, callousness. Notoriously he objected to and wrote against charity schools for the poor, taking the position that the society in which he lived needed a plentiful supply of ignorant people willing to work for very modest compensation. Thereby he aroused much antagonism and the accusation of brutality. John M. Robertson was keenly appreciative of Mandeville's merits but observed that “it cannot be denied that there is certain aggressive callousness in his treatment of the problem of poverty.”⁵⁰ Again in Mandeville's own time a critic like William Hendley, who devoted a long pamphlet to a defense of the charity schools, averred forthrightly that it is “both unjust and unnatural to make the poor always slaves to the rich and exclude them and their children forever from bettering their fortunes in this world.”⁵¹ From Hendley's entire argument it might well appear that Mandeville was thoroughly heartless in his opposition to education for the poor.

The accusations of cynicism and brutality are of considerable interest if only because they bear on traits of character intimately related to Mandeville's social thought. The “real Mandeville” is in all likelihood more complex than the accusations suggest. Cynicism and brutality can be closely connected and either might be considered first. It is well now to continue with brutality, which, as easily as cynicism would, brings us duly to a kind of holistic outlook on society that is most important in Mandeville and that it is well to note at an early point.

But to begin with, it is well to remember that Mandeville was a practicing physician with a special interest in nervous (and digestive) disorders. His attitudes as a physician are not irrelevant to the general question of his brutality or humanity. The Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Diseases suggests a measure of authentic humanity. At the beginning of the first of the three dialogues that make up the book, the patient Misomedon (hater of medicine or doctors; “hater of restraint,” according to Cook)⁵² goes on at some length in his meeting with his doctor (Philopirio) about his history and ailments and is finally apologetic for having someone listen to so tedious a tale. But this elicits a most encouraging and friendly response from Philopirio, who assures his patient that his story is both diverting and medically valuable. Asked at a certain point by Misomedon to stay another quarter hour, Philopirio answers, “With all my Heart; half an Hour if you please.”⁵³

Perhaps some of this is mere professional and self-interested courtesy. But Philopirio shows much gentleness with the people he attends, at least on the representations of the Treatise. He evidently listened very carefully to what his patients said and reported their talk with every sign of sympathy. Misomedon's wife, Polytheca,⁵⁴ who suffers from “the vapors,” says:

I never dare speak of vapours, the very name is a joke; and the general notion that men have of them is that they are nothing but a malicious mood and contrived sullenness of willful, extravagant and imperious women, when they are denied or thwarted in their unreasonable desires; nay, even physicians, because they cannot cure them, are forced to ridicule them in their own defense, and a woman that is really troubled by vapours is pitied by none but her unhappy fellow-sufferers, that labor under the same affliction.⁵⁵

Misomedon, as if to verify part of Polytheca's statement, states at a later point, “I can't think but the greater part of her distemper is fancy.”⁵⁶ He cannot believe “it's real” either. Misomedon is indeed a harsh critic of Polytheca's views, and Philopirio points out to him that harsh criticism is hardly helpful to the sort of disorder from which she suffers.⁵⁷ Again, all this might be explained on grounds of effort at professionally appropriate and competent behavior, but it is difficult after a while to avoid an impression of sheer compassion for his patients on Philopirio's (or Mandeville's) part. His listening with great care would have been reinforced by his powerful empirical or observational bent. He clearly understood more than a little of psychic suffering. It appears quite evident that he sought his patients' welfare.⁵⁸

Mandeville's attitudes toward women are also of interest in relation to brutality. He remarks in the preface to the Virgin Unmask'd that, though the elderly maiden lady Lucinda argues strongly against matrimony, it does not follow that he would do so too. (On this point, at any rate, then, Mandeville claims that Lucinda's views differ from his own.) Nevertheless, Lucinda states various views on men and women that Mandeville may well have shared. One might conceive that Lucinda is deliberately moved by her author-creator to present a strong case for women's rights. She certainly has a powerful sense of their wrongs. Men, she contends, have “a thousand advantages beyond us [women].” Advocates of women's rights might thoroughly disapprove when Lucinda avers that “in reasoning, women can never cope with men” or that “women are shallow creatures; we may boast of prattling, and be quick at a jest, or repartee, but a sound and penetrating judgment only belongs to men, as the masters of reason and solid sense.” Yet these statements do occur in the course of a paragraph in which Lucinda points, precisely, to men's advantages in education, for “it is thought sufficient, if a women can but read and write; we receive no other education, as to learning. But where we leave off, they [viz. men] start out; they are not trusted to manage their own affairs, before they are sent to schools, and universities, to have their intellectuals mended and sharpened.”⁵⁹ Lucinda apparently has not the slightest notion of changing the social order as it pertains to the relations of the sexes, but she can certainly be interpreted to be critical of that order. Granted the hazards of this sort of presumption: still, just as Mandeville seemed sympathetic to a vaporish or “hyp-ish” (the word “hyp” deriving from hypochondriasis) Polytheca, he appears sympathetic to Lucinda. He was evidently willing to “listen” to her sort of talk.

In the Fable, even the proposition that Lucinda had sustained, to the effect that “sound and penetrating judgment only belongs to men,” at least if it may be supposed that Lucinda thought this an inevitable or “natural” male advantage, is directly challenged. Horatio asserts that sound judgment is a great rarity among women, to which Cleomenes (who is undoubtedly very often Mandeville's spokesman) answers that this is true “only for want of practice, application and assiduity.” Cleomenes adds that there is “no labor of the brain which women are not as capable of performing, at least, as well as men, with the same assistance, if they set about, and persevere in it …” He even holds that “the workmanship in the make of women seems to be more elegant and better finished” and suggests that this greater refinement on the “outside” might well be continued on the “inside,” with particular reference to “the formation of the brain, as to the nicety of the structure, and superior accuracy in the fabric.”⁶⁰ Whatever the merits or demerits of these views, and even if it should be argued that Mandeville is here only stating “facts” as he understands them, he appears, on the basis of what has been adduced, anything but brutal or callous toward women; and it is at least plausible to presume that he would have had sympathy with the notion of better education for them—a matter to which he had obviously given some thought. In this whole area, his conservatism is subject to real strain.

It might be argued that Mandeville on the subject of prostitution reveals far less amiable attitudes toward women. The Modest Defense of Publick Stews, however ironic one may construe its intention to be, is clearly in support of prostitution. The argument that the chastity of women generally is preserved by the incontinence of a number of them may have seemed to some a piece of outright brutality or indeed cynicism. George Bluet plainly suggested that there was a class bias associated with Mandeville's stance on prostitution.⁶¹ There is little doubt that Mandeville was in fact complacent toward prostitution, and he sounds as if he rather relishes it. He hardly dons the mantle of the prophet crying out against it. Many others in his time also failed to don that mantle. Defoe, for example, who hardly relished prostitution, evidently was disposed to have a controlled, carefully limited practice of it, willing to tolerate a certain amount of discreetly segregated sex for sale.⁶² Here, as often elsewhere, too, what appears as brutality or cynicism may not strike one quite the same way when he takes into serious account Mandeville's holistic-functional outlook on society, as will be done shortly. (One need not condone such brutality or cynicism as may occur in Mandeville but it is important to consider them in the full light of his own outlook.)

The more amiable attitudes toward women still remain, and it is by no means implausible that Mandeville should have entertained these at the same time as the less amiable ones that his stance on prostitution might suggest. In point of the former attitudes, his conservatism, as suggested, would appear to be mitigated, although the attitudes did not lead him to reform activity on behalf of women. Questions about his brutality and cynicism are not unconnected with questions about his conservatism. If he was not a social revolutionary of the left, Monro is still justified in saying that it is hard to believe him simply a reactionary, “even by present-day standards.”⁶³ He was certainly critical, for example, of the church of his time, in the interest of a larger tolerance and more relaxed attitude about theological differences than he saw prevailing about him. This is something that his Free Thoughts, whatever its precise significance in the corpus of his writings, makes quite clear. But his conservatism is very marked with respect to the laboring poor. And here too the matter of brutality again comes sharply to the fore.

It comes to the fore even because of what Mandeville writes himself. It is true that he wanted the poor to serve as a labor force doing back-breaking, unskilled jobs while they were kept in ignorance even for “their own good”—for knowledge would only bring them gnawing dissatisfaction. They would not be tormented by better possibilities if they could not even imagine them. Their wants must be relieved but it would be folly to “cure” them. Their education must be severely restricted and they did not need the pampering of charity schools to give them the rudiments of religion they required. Mandeville condemns joint efforts of servants to improve their working conditions or wages to “abolish the low dignity of their condition,” which they have already raised beyond what it would be for the general welfare.⁶⁴ With all this, Mandeville is remarkably self-conscious about his stance. He writes in the famous essay on the charity schools in which his views of the poor are expounded, “I have no design that is cruel, nor the least aim that savors of inhumanity.” He then adds, as if to make this assurance concrete: “To have sufficient hospitals for sick and wounded I look upon as an indispensable duty both in peace and war: Young children without parents, old age without support, and all that are disabled from working ought to be taken care of with tenderness and alacrity.” Again he tells us in the same essay: “I would not be thought cruel and am well assured, if I know anything of myself, that I abhor inhumanity.” And he is not done yet, for a few pages later he tells us, “I would not advance anything that is barbarous or unhuman.”⁶⁵ He did indeed get much criticism of his position on the poor and charity schools. Whatever the motivation for his repeated apologies and qualifications, they do suggest some inner uncertainty on the whole matter of his antagonism to charity schools and exploitation of the laboring poor. If Mandeville “sinned” here in the direction of brutality, callousness, or the like, he was not a man simply and unreservedly brutal or cynical about the laboring poor. Yet he was still constrained by his theoretical views on the economic necessity of a large, ignorant, and poor working population.

Kaye observes that the “gusto” of his assault on the charity schools and on “petty reverence for the poor” (Mandeville's own phrase) is likely to strike the modern reader as “incredibly brutal,” but that this impression comes from judging Mandeville from a humanitarian point of view hardly existing in his own time: “Seen in historical perspective, there is nothing unusually harsh in Mandeville's position.”⁶⁶ Here Kaye may be a little too generous. The relevant literature on the charity schools in Mandeville's time, as there will be occasion to note in Chapter 4, does express a measure of humanitarianism. (It is significant that it occurs within a context of acceptance of the status quo, but it is present.) Granted Mandeville's apologetic remarks about his position on the schools and the laboring poor, the position was still clearly and unambiguously stated. There was finally no doubt about the point that Mandeville was firmly “conservative” here. Horne is close to the mark when he suggests that Mandeville offers us the picture of a “strictly differentiated class-structured society,” dependent for its prosperity on mass poverty.⁶⁷

But now it becomes important to mark Mandeville's holistic outlook on society. The body politic, he suggests in a well known passage, might be compared to a bowl of punch:

Avarice should be the souring and prodigality the sweetening of it. The water I would call the ignorance, folly and credulity of the floating insipid multitude; while wisdom, honour, fortitude and the rest of the sublime qualities of men, which separated by art from the dregs of nature the fire of glory has exalted and refined into a spiritual essence, should be an equivalent to brandy … A … dull stranger that is unacquainted with the whole composition, if he was to taste the several ingredients apart, would think it impossible they should make any tolerable liquor. The lemons would be too sour, the sugar too luscious, the brandy … too strong … Yet experience teaches us that the ingredients I named, judiciously mixed, will make an excellent liquor, liked … and admired by men of excellent palates.⁶⁸

The body politic or society, analogously, needs a variety of ingredients to make some sort of tolerable or “palatable” whole, even if particular ingredients abstracted from that whole should seem singularly unappealing or “unappetizing.” Mandeville again gives expression to the holistic view in the following:

Some narrow souls can never thrive because they are too stingy, while longer heads amass great wealth by spending their money freely and seeming to despite it. But the vicissitudes of fortune are necessary, and the most lamentable are not more detrimental to society than the death of the individual members of it. Christenings are a proper balance to burials. Those who immediately lose by the misfortunes of others are very sorry, complain and make a noise; but the others who get by them, as there always are such, hold their tongues, because it is odious to be thought the better for the losses and calamities of our neighbour. The various ups and downs compose a wheel that always turning round gives motion to the whole machine. 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 rising 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 politic the same as floating air to a living creature.⁶⁹

There are those “who extend their thought beyond the narrow compass of what is immediately before them,” and in so doing inevitably regard what is before them in relation to larger contexts. “Christenings are a proper balance to burials.” In the existence and maintenance of large populations and societies, one must observe that some individuals die while others get born. Seeing from this vantage point does not mean that when one shifts one's attention to the deaths of particular individuals one must be callous or brutal about them. But the individuals are part of a demographic flux that transcends them.

This holistic view of Mandeville's strongly suggests what is now called a “functional” analysis of society. The term functional is here used with particular reference to Merton's assertion regarding “the central orientation of functionalism,” to the effect that that orientation is “expressed in the practice of interpreting data by establishing their consequences for larger structures in which they are implicated.⁷⁰ (Nothing can be clearer, with regard to Mandeville's punch, than that its individual ingredients are to be considered in relation to the whole.) In this sense, functional analysis is concerned with whether various social activities work “adaptively” (“or maladaptively”) “positively” (“or negatively”) for a system or larger whole.

The mischief of imputing to Mandeville ideas of today that he did not hold must be avoided. Certainly, he could not use the term structures in the sophisticated sense in which Merton does. Nor did Mandeville seek deliberately to develop his functional view as a strategic sociological “approach.” And he did not introduce under the rubric of “dysfunction” the notion of “negative” consequence for a large system. In fact, on this point he may strike us today as excessively optimistic: must the ingredients of a punch or of a society always “blend” so harmoniously for the excellence of the whole?⁷¹ May not a punch have ingredients that are simply bad from the point of view of the whole mixture? And, for that matter, may not a punch itself be subject to criticism? If something is “functional” or “adaptive” for a large whole, this implies nothing whatever as to the value of that whole itself. But, all this conceded, we find ourselves faced time and again with Mandeville's holistic-functional bias. It is impossible to avoid it, no matter what we may call it, and it is part and parcel of some of his most striking and important paradoxes. He will say that the prostitution of some women has effects in the larger society, preserving the chastity of women generally. He will say that duelling harms individuals (it might of course kill them) and yet insist that the duel diffuses civility and courtesy throughout society at large and keeps alive a touchiness and bellicosity generally valuable to a nation engaged in military enterprise.⁷² He will say that (under appropriate circumstances) private vices become public benefits. These are matters at the heart of his concerns. And of course we must not forget that in his view keeping the poor ignorant and very modestly paid would work out to the larger social good. This does not necessarily mean that Mandeville was right on this point. It is, however, to note his perspective.

The holistic-functional orientation we find in Mandeville is a “theoretical” orientation that, as it happens, does not give much factual grounding for any of his particular propositions. Obviously, to consider what prostitution actually “does” within a society, for example, raises questions of fact. Those questions will be faced as best they can be in Chapter 6. But in all this one may note a persistent tension. Let us suppose that one outcome, at any rate, of the assassination of a central political figure in a nation would be to enhance and deepen “unselfish” feeling for the nation throughout its expanse. Let us further assume that this is in some important sense a “beneficent” outcome for the nation as a whole. The assassination itself thereby becomes no less cruel and savage. But neither does the “positive” or “beneficent” effect disappear. (Mandeville does not give this example, but it is very much in his spirit, not least in making good emerge from evil.)⁷³ Thus we may be repelled and at the same time persuaded of the emergence of something desirable. Possibly the modern exhortation not to “commit a social science” is well advised. But it was already too late even for Mandeville to refrain. He has already begun to “commit” a social science. And it becomes clear that the questions of his brutality (or cynicism) can get so closely involved with questions about the nature of his social science that the latter questions often must be brought up in order for us to consider the former.

Here, indeed, one confronts two problems with respect to brutality (or cynicism, as the case may be). There is of course on the one hand Mandeville's holistic-functional position. Yes—the poor have very little; but the nation thereby prospers. Yes—men die in duels; but the general tone of civil society and the general level of courtesy are greatly improved because of duelling. And so on. If at any time Mandeville should be accused of sounding insufficiently distressed about the suffering and dying, he could claim that he was merely concentrating on the holistic-functional aspect of things, and that to concentrate on such matters does not necessarily imply brutality. But there is another problem. It is plainly not always safe to make inferences about personal character or personal traits from theoretical positions. Thus, one might advance a theory asserting the thorough selfishness of humans while being personally the most unselfish of men or women. To infer an analogous personal quality from the nature of the theory would then of course be disastrously wrong. Mandeville's view of the poor might have been due to his being a victim of a faulty economic doctrine. If one should then say that the view was in some objective sense “brutal,” it would yet be hazardous to infer from it a personal trait or character of brutality.

It is still possible that Mandeville had an element of brutality in his personal make-up. But in the absence of information bearing quite directly on the point, we have to assess this possibility against what clearly seems to have been his sympathetic attitudes as a physician toward patients, a measure of apparent friendliness toward women, his holistic-functional orientation as a social scientist, and the doubts that attach to inferring personal traits from theoretical positions.⁷⁴

Insofar as we can separate cynicism from brutality, the charge of cynicism is seen to have some foundation as Mandeville's theory of human nature is considered. (He is by no means cynical about all matters.)⁷⁵ Here, too, however, it is necessary to exercise some degree of caution. Again, we must not overlook Mandeville's paradoxical bias. He tells us explicitly, “The short-sighted vulgar in the chain of causes can seldom see further than one link; but those who can enlarge their view, and will give themselves the leisure of gazing on the prospect of concatenated events may, in a hundred places, see good spring up and pullulate from evil as naturally as chickens do from eggs.”⁷⁶ Envy and love of glory will make schoolboys do well in their studies. Mandeville goes on with his asymmetrical, paradoxical play intended precisely to exhibit the sources of good in evil. Envy will also stimulate pointers to improvement as they try to outdo their superiors. And married women, generally guilty of the “vice” of envy too, seek to arouse the same “passion” in their husbands, and, whey they have succeeded, “envy and emulation have kept more men in bounds and reformed more ill husbands from sloth, from drinking and other evil courses, than all the sermons that have been preached since the time of the apostles.”⁷⁷ Is this cynicism? Or is Mandeville most perceptive on the point that “low” passions can have great value? (The point would be highly significant in psychological, sociological, and ethical perspectives.)⁷⁸ When Leslie Stephen asserted regarding Mandeville that “his brutality and his paradox revolt us as a display of cynical levity,” he was saying far too much far too fast.

Mandeville nevertheless is measurelessly skeptical of imputations of high human motivation. Human conduct, generally, has to be motivated by some form of self-interest and humans are most especially liable to the desire for glory, which lurks beneath a great many unselfish facades. Mandeville's discussion of the case of Dr. John Radcliffe, who left most of his fortune of eighty thousand pounds to Oxford University, is quite typical. Whatever Dr. Radcliffe's character may have been (and Mandeville clearly found it unadmirable) and however one may actually regard the doctor's leaving “a trifle among his relations who stood in need of it and an immense treasure to an university that did not want it,” in Mandeville's words, the argument that Mandeville presents about the doctor's motivation is in any case to be expected from him. The doctor was but indulging his “darling passion,” catering to his own vanity, thinking of monuments and praise and the outpouring of reverence and veneration that would be his posthumous portion. The contemplation of all this homage must have thrown the doctor's ambitious soul into “vast ecstacies of pleasure” as he ruminated” on the duration of his glory and the perpetuity he would by this means procure to his name.”⁷⁹ Except for a few rare souls, authentic Christians, this is how humans are likely to be motivated. This view of motivation is a matter of principle with Mandeville. Ostensible noble motivation, in any area of conduct, must be shown to be no more noble in reality than conduct no one would claim to be nobly motivated.⁸⁰

John Hervey gave a fundamental, two-pronged criticism of this reductive bias of Mandeville's. Hervey compares Herostratus, who set fire to the temple of Diana at Ephesus for the sake of his own glory, with Decius, “who threw himself for the sake of his country into the gulf that opened in Rome.” Hervey asks us in effect to consider that one might argue that both men acted from the same motive and were “equally influenced by the vanity of being mentioned in history and perpetuating their names to posterity for as long as those of Rome and Ephesus should be known.” Hervey does not elaborate the point but he clearly means to cast doubt on a theory that finds a Herostratus and a Decius motivated in precisely the same way.⁸¹ Hervey goes on immediately to the second prong of his attack, which suggests a practical question: “I would be glad to ask the author of the Fable of the Bees whether he thinks it would promote and encourage that virtue called the love of one's country to show that the most renowned patriot in antiquity and the most famous incendiary were in the same way of thinking and actuated by the same passions.”⁸²

In a special sense, humans contribute to the construction or destruction of their own virtue. The views that they hold of virtue have some power to influence that virtue itself. Hervey sees this point—as did Hutcheson.⁸³ It was also seen, however, by notable eighteenth-century thinkers outside the category of critics of Mandeville in his own day. Thus Hume, for one, is again relevant. He does not easily adopt the opinion that all those who have spoken ill of humans have been enemies of virtue or moved by evil intentions. Yet he contends that those who incline to think more favorably of mankind do more for virtue than those who give human nature a bad name. Inspired with “high notions” of themselves, people will endeavor to live up to them and scorn the base and vicious.⁸⁴ Kant outdoes others in the eloquence and power of the exposition of this point in his Anthropology: “All the human virtue in circulation is small change: one would have to be a child to take it for real gold. … But we are better off having small change in circulation than no money at all; and it can eventually be converted into genuine gold, though at considerable loss.” Kant even goes on to say that it is “high treason against humanity to issue these coins as mere counters having no value at all …” He then quotes Swift (“Honor is a pair of shoes that have been worn out in the mind”) and refers to the preacher Hofsteder's slandering of Socrates. (He might of course have quoted and referred to others. That he did not quote or refer to Mandeville in this connection, however, was not due to ignorance of the latter's work.) He suggests, further, that authentic virtue may emerge from presumptions—he even says “pretences”—of the existence of virtue among us: “We must value even the semblance of good in others; for out of this play with pretences, which win respect though they may not deserve it, something serious can finally develop.”⁸⁵

If a measure of cynicism may be imputed to Mandeville, it does not follow that one has thereby disposed of his theory of human nature. Far from it. That theory will still merit scrutiny. It is a powerfully realistic, empirically oriented theory, and “realism” and “cynicism” are not always easy to distinguish; or, we may say, in one important aspect cynicism is but realism pushed so far that it ceases to be realistic. (Leslie Stephen deeply appreciated Mandeville's realism even while repudiating his cynicism.) Labeling Mandeville cynical will finally carry us no great distance in understanding him. The question of cynicism also points to the matter of temperament, which will be further referred to in the next chapter when Mandeville is discussed in relation to Shaftesbury.

Was Mandeville “personally” cynical? Did cynicism tincture or pervade his character and affect his relations with others? There is no way to be sure. Like some others thinkers, he may have suspended his theories when he was with congenial companions.

Mandeville's empirical bent is of course something showed by others in his day, but it is so marked that it merits special attention. It has already been noted, in connection with his works as a physician, how much he was the observer. The prime medical injunction for him is always “Observe, observe, observe!” He is a firm, unswerving enemy of speculative medical systems. In the preface to the Treatise he already indicates that he greatly prefers the experience of painstaking practitioners to “the witty speculations of hypothetical doctors.” Philopirio characteristically remarks that “the practical part of medicine”—a part not attempted by many—“is only attained by an almost everlasting attendance on the sick, unwearied patience, and judicious as well as diligent observation.” He avers again, “What I am against is the speculative part of physic, as it is distinct from the practical, that teaches men to cure all manner of distempers in their closets, without ever seeing a patient.”⁸⁶

So devoted is Mandeville to observation, to the empirical, that he sometimes creates an impression of a certain crudity or naiveté of thought along this line. One may well contend that he is too depreciatively inclined to think of “reason” and “hypotheses” as consisting “only in opinion.”⁸⁷ There is a tendency in him to regard theories in science as trivial, as a kind of intellectual fluff.⁸⁸ He can carry his zeal for observation and against hypothesis, speculation, and “opinion” so far that he ends with the position that “the hypotheses only make a shew, and are wholly insignificant.” Philopirio does say at a later point, a few pages after he has thus spoken of hypotheses, that actually he “would not make a step without reason”;⁸⁹ it is only that he wants his reasoning always firmly controlled by observation. It is perhaps not always easy to catch Mandeville's precise meaning when he refers to “hypotheses.” Forbes reminds us that the word had variant meanings in the eighteenth century (as in Newton himself) and points out that one might find the same thinker scorning and, in the same breath, using “hypotheses.”⁹⁰ The impression persists that Mandeville's observational bias is so strong that it can lead him to a view of science that errs in its extreme empiricism.

In what there is good reason to consider an early statement of Mandeville's opinion, the “Oxford gentlemen”—who is evidently Mandeville's spokesman in a number of the issues of the Female Tatler—criticizes “the abominable pride and haughtiness” of men of learning. He observes that a man be a famous general or a deep politician or an able merchant without knowing a word of Latin. This is certainly fair enough. But the Oxford gentleman unreservedly applies criteria of utility to learning at large and, in turning to medicine, avers, “They may talk of anatomy, economy, chemistry, philosophy, pathology, therapeutica, and make as many barbarous divisions of their art as they please, but it is very plain that all these branches of university learning are very unnecessary, if not frivolous, as to the cure of the patients. …”⁹¹ Here it is certain that the empirical, utilitarian, and “practical” bias is overreaching itself.

Yet the Fable repeatedly shows that Mandeville values thinking “abstractly,” as for example when he comments, “I write not to many, nor seek for any well-wishers but among the few that can think abstractly.”⁹² It is also plain that he was very willing to allow scope to his imagination. The determined—the too determined—empiricist is appreciably offset by a man who is effectively willing to entertain and work with numerous “hypotheses.” Mandeville's Free Thoughts at least demonstrates that he was not uninterested in theological speculation. (Indeed, what else should one expect from a man who had been deeply influenced by Pierre Bayle?) We are not to expect from him long chains of reasoning that become very remote from some empirical base and we are not to expect much of the determined system-builder in him, but we can expect authentic efforts at probing thought.

The “real Mandeville,” one must propose, is a man whose mind is strongly preoccupied with medical and biological, psychological, social, and economic phenomena. One might conceivably be “empirical” and turn one's attention to the spiritual exercise of devout men and women, which, after all, are also “real.” But this sort of thing does not engage Mandeville's empirical bent. His mind dwells where women of fashion purchase clothes and poorer women seek to imitate them, where prostitutes offer their wares, where merchants seek to make profits, where the streets of a great city are piled with dirt. To say that such things alone preoccupy him would simply be wrong, but they do catch much of his interest. Here he is in the midst of discussion (very much along the lines of his interests) of what we now call conspicuous consumption, suggesting his own delight in “viewing the various scenes of low life” (and revealing his wonted psychological insight):

Whoever takes delight in viewing the various scenes of low life, may on Easter, Whitsun, and other great holidays, meet with scores of people, especially women, of almost the lowest rank, that wear good and fashionable clothes: if coming to talk with them, you treat them more courteously and with greater respect than what they are conscious they deserve, they'll commonly be ashamed of owning what they are; and often you may, if you are a little inquisitive, discover in them a most anxious care to conceal the business they follow, and the places they live in. The reason is plain; while they receive those civilities that are not usually paid them, and which they think only due to their betters, they have the satisfaction to imagine, that they appear what they would be, which to weak minds is a pleasure almost as substantial as they could reap from the very accomplishments of their wishes: this golden dream they are unwilling to be disturbed in, and being sure that the meanness of their condition, if it is known, must sink 'em very low in your opinion, they hug themselves in their disguise, and take all imaginable precaution not to forfeit by a useless discovery the esteem which they flatter themselves that their good clothes have drawn from you.⁹³

The interest in such scenes is intimately connected with Mandeville's style, his plain talk, his bluntness, his pungency, his “down-to-earth” quality. He wants to “tell it like it is.” His bluntness is part of his clarity (although it may also shade into a degree of cynicism and possibly misanthropy). The statement that we are born amid human bodily wastes (“Inter urinas et faeces nascimur”) would hardly have disturbed him. He might have relished the description given by some diabolical character of C. S. Lewis' of a human being as “this animal, this thing begotten in a bed”; and the bluntness of description of humans (by evil spirits) in all their naked creatureliness that one may find in a popular contemporary book on exorcism like that of Malachi Martin⁹⁴ is in a way reminiscent of Mandeville's style.

There is nothing coy or roundabout in the assertion in the Modest Defense that “as long as it is in the nature of man … to have a salt itch in the breeches, the brimstone under the petticoat will be a necessary remedy to allay it.”⁹⁵ It is a certainty that Mandeville did not handle human creatureliness with inordinate delicacy. He tells of St. Francis, who, in order to conquer his sexual desires (his “domestic enemy”) was capable of throwing himself into an ice-filled ditch or a heap of snow (or of scourging himself). One still catches the ironic chuckle in the comment that “the fever of lust must be very high, where such violent coolers are required.”⁹⁶

Mandeville's bluntness and pungency are also suggested by a vulgar side of his makeup. Misomedon entertains Dr. Philopiro with this compact item: “I have heard of a waterologer or piss-prophet, so expert that he could tell by a man's working-day's water what trade; and by his Sunday's water, what religion he was of.”⁹⁷ But Mandeville's style and a recital of some of the distinctive phenomena of human life he dwelt upon, suggestive as these may be, do not give us definitive answers to certain questions: Did he take a measure of real and robust joy in the concrete physiological detail of human existence? Or did he like to twit prudes with “the facts of life”? Or did he himself (although one could never accuse him of being prudish) have some disgust for the “darling lusts” of humans? Perhaps he was complex enough for the answers to all three questions to be in the affirmative.⁹⁸

SOME REACTIONS TO MANDEVILLE OVER TIME

The Fable aroused much controversy in Mandeville's lifetime (controversy addressed to considerably more than cynicism or brutality). This controversy will be referred to as the “Battle of the Bees,”⁹⁹ a battle participated in by men like Berkeley, Francis Hutcheson, and William Law. It is somewhat arbitrary to confine the Battle of the Bees to British “battlers” in the years before Mandeville's death, but it is convenient to do so and of course it does not prevent consideration of subsequent discussants of Mandeville's work. Significant features of the Battle of the Bees will be covered later, and there are several writers close to the Battle in time who will also require later consideration. But a few very outstanding men, in whose work reactions to Mandeville can be noted and who will give some notion of how he fared in the eighteenth century after the Battle of the Bees, may now be briefly attended to (while a spare statement is added bringing reaction to Mandeville up to date). Hume, Adam Smith, Rousseau, and Herder, then, are considered. The relation of the first two to Mandeville is important for this study in any case, and Mandeville exercised a considerable (if not always acknowledged) influence upon them. Rousseau is obviously a significant figure in his own right and shared with Mandeville a certain interest in the primitive. Herder may be regarded as representative of early German lack of appreciation of Mandeville's thought. There can be no question of rendering only a “sample” of reactions to Mandeville, but neither are the reactions noted seriously unrepresentative (though it must yet be remembered that eighteenth-century French thought was generally more favorable to Mandeville than English).

Hume is perhaps the least negative in tone of the four men chosen, although (as Lindsay states), he was in matters of morals and politics “on the side of the angels” and thus had to play his role, too, in objecting to Mandeville and Hobbes, “the two Mephistopheles of the eighteenth century in morals and politics.”¹⁰⁰ Hume repeatedly showed his reservations about views of human nature such as Mandeville's. He specifically criticized the idea that conniving politicians created morality, contending that virtue cannot simply be “talked into” humans.¹⁰¹ (It is a very serious question, however, to what extent or in what sense this idea that Hume—and others before him—thus criticized was held by Mandeville.) Although Hume rarely refers to Mandeville by name, Mandeville was clearly often present to his thought, and it may well be that much of Hume's “reaction” to Mandeville is along the line of appreciable acceptance of the latter's work. Thus, Hume's discussions of pride plainly suggest much adoption of Mandeville's views.¹⁰² It is not easy to say how far Hume may have taken over Mandeville's particular conception of the slow evolution of human institutions. When Hume writes of society that it “must be esteemed in a manner accidental and the effect of many ages” or refers (again in a context of discussion of the history of society) to “reflections … which, in fact, arise insensibly and by degrees,”¹⁰³ although the language is like that of Mandeville, this does not prove very much. But when we note the striking parallelism between Mandeville's and Hume's powerful statements on the evolution of the ship,¹⁰⁴ we are again inclined to infer that Hume took over significant Mandevillean ideas. It was noted above that Hume listed Mandeville among philosophers in England who had begun to put the science of man on a new footing.

Adam Smith's tone with respect to Mandeville is harsher than Hume's. In an early item in the Edinburgh Review, Smith referred to Mandeville at some length, coupling his name with those of Hobbes, Locke, Shaftesbury, Butler, Clarke and Hutcheson. He observes that anyone attentively reading Rousseau's discourse on the origin of inequality would see that the second volume of the Fable had “given occasion to the system of Rousseau.” He asserts that in Rousseau's work Mandeville's principles were “stripped of all that tendency to corruption and licentiousness which has disgraced them in their original author.”¹⁰⁵ Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments tells us that Mandeville's system taught vice to “appear with more effrontery and to avow the corruption of its motives with a profligate audaciousness which had never been heard of before.” Yet Smith did suggest that Mandeville's system, however “destructive,” had in some respect bordered upon the truth.”¹⁰⁶ It would be too much of a distraction here to trace in detail actual resemblances of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Fable,¹⁰⁷ but Smith's explicit statements about Mandeville create the impression that his views are more remote from the latter's than they actually are. The importance of Mandeville's work in relation to Smith's The Wealth of Nations has again been suggested very recently by the numerous references to that work by the editors of the latest edition of Smith's major economic treatise.¹⁰⁸ Both Kaye and Joseph Schumpeter suggest that the “respectable” Adam Smith was rather too eager to depreciate the dubious Dr. Mandeville.¹⁰⁹

“I believe I need fear no contradiction in allowing man the sole natural virtue which the most extreme detractor of human virtue has been forced to recognize.” Thus wrote Rousseau, referring to compassion or pity, and “the most violent detractor of human virtue” is Mandeville, who—even he!—must acknowledge man's sense of compassion.¹¹⁰ Yet Rousseau avers that Mandeville did not see that from this sense flowed those very special virtues he denied to humans. (Rousseau of course develops the argument that in the state of nature man is more capable of compassion for others than he is outside that state, in the conditions of civil society.) Mandeville again gets a rather “bad press.” Smith's statement that the second volume of the Fable occasioned the system of Rousseau is certainly not supported in numerous particulars. Like Mandeville, Rousseau shows a strong sense of the great length of time certain human achievements may well have required, notably in the case of language. Again like Mandeville, he imputes great power in human affairs to amour-propre, to which, in his view, we owe a great deal that is bad and a few things that are good. For Mandeville, pride is an “instinct,” native to man, whereas for Rousseau it did not exist in the state of nature. Also, Rousseau looks on luxury as evil, in sharp contrast to Mandeville, who, while he may still have some qualms about luxury as “vice,” nevertheless attaches great value to it as cause and concomitant of prosperity. Rousseau clearly did not react to Mandeville with any wholesale adoption of his views.¹¹¹

Herder's Adrastea asks, referring to Mandeville's Grumbling Hive, “Where is there consistency? Where is there consistently pursued truth? The fable fits neither the beehive nor human states.” Herder sees the fable as a wretchedly poor piece of work. He writes: “Who will trust himself to a rogue? What a monstrosity would be a state, not only full of rogues but entirely built on roguery and consisting of rogues! Every society is built on fidelity and honor.” Again Herder writes:

That there are in every estate [in jedem Stande] respectable scoundrels—who does not know this? … But that the welfare of the state should be built upon them and upon the trickery that they carry on [auf die kunst die sie treiben] is a slander upon all states. Swift at least opposed the Yahoos to his honorable Houyhnhnms: Mandeville makes all citizens into Yahoos, only with different masks and functions.

Herder goes on to say that Mandeville's affirmations were taken in England to constitute “a system of difformity” [sic] but this system or scheme of “deformity” Herder calls an ugly dream. Mandeville's republic of the bees amounts to “a nest of spiders, of which one eats up the other; no abode of healthy industry but a place for the sick, a Bedlam.” Herder has some justification when he argues that every society is built on fidelity and honor, but he does not seem to have a very good understanding of Mandeville, who hardly wants or conceives of a society based exclusively upon vice; and Herder conveys the impression that he took the term vice as Mandeville used it too loosely to capture the latter's meaning.¹¹²

Kaye notes that The Fable retained its celebrity for over a century, until about 1835, by which time “it had apparently ceased to be a sensation.”¹¹³ Mandeville went into eclipse for much of the nineteenth century. A figure bridging the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, like Malthus, might contend in the midst of other concerns that Mandeville's great art consisted in misusing words,¹¹⁴ and Mandeville was not entirely neglected. But he does not appear to have aroused serious or extensive modern attention until about a century ago, when, Grégoire notes, a section was devoted to him by Bain in his Mental and Moral Science.¹¹⁵ Bain's section, however, was, despite Grégoire's putting it in the category of “a complete or disinterested study,” no more than a brief sketch. When Grégoire points to Leslie Stephen's essay on Mandeville in Stephen's Essay on Freethinking and Plainspeaking, we may well be more inclined to see this a sign of genuine revival of interest in Mandeville.¹¹⁶ Also pertinent is the somewhat appreciative estimate of Mandeville that Stephen presented in his History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (originally 1876). Scholarly interest in Mandeville is alive again. There are indications of that interest over the past century, and recent decades have witnessed a regular flow of relevant material.¹¹⁷

Notes

1. F. B. Kaye, “Life of Mandeville,” in Kaye's Introduction to The Fable of the Bees (hereafter FB), 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), 1:xvii-xxx.

2. Kaye, FB 1, Introduction, xxix-xxx.

3. See Kaye, FB 1, Introduction, xxi.

4. Daniel Defoe, A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (originally 1724-1726). With an Introduction by G. D. H. Cole. 2 vols. (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1968), 1: 316, 332, 355.

5. See Peter Earle, The World of Defoe (New York: Atheneum, 1977), pp. 117, 165, 323, n. 76. Stone states that the population of London and its suburbs increased “from about sixty thousands in 1500 to about five hundred and fifty thousand in 1700.” Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), p. 147.

6. Earle, The World of Defoe, p. 160.

7. M. Dorothy George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Capricorn Books, 1965), p. 4.

8. Preface to FB 1:11.

9. Preface to FB 1:6-7.

10. See Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and his Circle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), p. 41.

11. Sherburn observes that there is considerable evidence of “the long-term chastening effects” of the bursting of the South Sea bubble and that there is evidence here even for “a revulsion from the mercantilist worship of commerce to the physiocratic idea that wealth comes basically from the soil.” George Sherburn, The Restoration and Eighteenth Century. A Literary History of England, edited by Albert C. Baugh, vol. 3 (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1948), p. 830.

12. See Earle, The World of Defoe, p. 152.

13. He clearly intimated that he would agree that “everything which, without regard to the public, man should commit to gratify any of his appetites” is legitimately labeled vice (adding, “if in that action there could be observed the least prospect that it might either be injurious to any of the society or ever render himself less serviceable to others”). The name of virtue would be assignable to “every performance by which man, contrary to the impulse of nature, should endeavour the benefit of others or the conquest of his own passions out of a rational ambition of being good.” FB 1:48-49.

14. Earle, The World of Defoe, pp. 152-57 and 308, n. 7.

15. Kramnick, Bolingbroke and his Circle, pp. 59-60.

16. Kramnick, Bolingbroke and his Circle, pp. 203, 304.

17. See, e.g., E. D. James, “Faith, Sincerity and Morality: Mandeville and Bayle,” in Irwin Primer, ed., Mandeville Studies (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), p. 65.

18. See H. T. Dickinson, “Bernard Mandeville: An Independent Whig,” in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 152 (1976): 559-70. Other reservations and pertinent sources for them are briefly indicated in Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 57, fn. w. But see also the restatement of Kramnick's theme in John Sekora, Luxury (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1977), ch. 2.

19. See Kramnick, Bolingbroke and his Circle, p. 225.

20. FB 1:24.

21. John Gay, Poetry and Prose, ed. by Vinton A. Dearing with the assistance of Charles E. Beckwith, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 2:416.

22. See Jacob Viner, “Satire and Economics in the Augustan Age of Satire,” in H. K. Miller, E. Rothstein, and G. S. Rousseau, eds., The Augustan Milieu: Essays Presented to Louis A. Landa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), pp. 77-101. (Viner is here followed in his application of the term “satire” but whether Mandeville himself is aptly characterized as a “Satirist” is discussed in Chapter 6.) Note also the very pertinent comments in Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom, Joseph Addison's Sociable Animal (Providence: Brown University Press, 1971), pp. 42-43. A more optimistic picture of social reform in the Augustan Age than Viner affords is suggested by Cecil A. Moore in “Shaftesbury and the Ethical Poets,” in More, Backgrounds of English Literature, 1600-1760 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1953), ch. 1.

23. Kaye, FB 1, Introduction, xxxi, fn. 5; H. T. Dickinson's Introduction, pp. 1-xii of the Augustan Reprint Society publication of the Mischiefs, William A. Clark Memorial Library, University of California at Los Angeles, 1975.

24. His defense of “vice” against the “virtuous” bent of the Societies for the Reformation of Manners should also be mentioned. See especially Horne, The Social Thought of Bernard Mandeville, ch. 1, and D. W. R. Bahlman, The Moral Revolution of 1688 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957).

25. A. R. Humphreys, The Augustan World (New York: Harper and Row, 1954), p. 91.

26. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965), p. 48.

27. See Monroe Berger, Real and Imagined Worlds: The Novel and Social Science (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), pp. 43-44.

28. See Bonany Dobrée, English Literature in the Early Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 261.

29. “The average annual publication of new books, excluding pamphlets, grew nearly fourfold between 1666 and 1802. From 1666 to 1756 it averaged less than 100 a year; from 1792 to 1802, it averaged 372. Illiteracy and semi-illiteracy, caused by inadequacies of education, poverty, lack of leisure and the high price of books delayed the growth in demand until the second half of the eighteenth century.” Diane Laurenson in Laurenson and Alan Swingewood, The Sociology of Literature (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1971), p. 121.

30. David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, 2 vols. (1739; reprint ed., New York: Dutton, Everyman's Library, 1974), 1:6.

31. Kaye lists “authentic works” in his Introduction, FB 1:xxx-xxxi. Kaye's list is reproduced in Irwin Primer, ed., Mandeville Studies, p. 212, with brief but useful comments appended on the Mandeville canon since 1924 (when Kaye's edition of the Fable appeared), at pp. 212-13.

32. Sakmann, Bernard de Mandeville, pp. 9-10.

33. The information about these first three works derives from Sakmann, Bernard de Mandeville, pp. 8-11. (Sakmann's detailed description of Mandeville's writings is generally valuable although perforce based on information available at the end of the last century. A much briefer listing and description, the description being guided by interests rather different from the present ones, is provided in Chiaki Nishiyama, “The Theory of Self-Love,” pp. 232-37.) As regards explanation of animal behavior, Kaye observes, “Mandeville had originally held the Cartesian hypothesis that animals are feelingless automatons. … In the Fable, however, he has adopted instead the position of Gassendi … that animals do feel.” Kaye, FB 1:181, fn. 1.

34. See Mandeville, A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Diseases. 2nd ed. Corrected and enlarged by the author. London, 1730, pp. 94, 163-64.

35. Between the Disputatio Medica Inauguralis of 1691 and The Grumbling Hive of 1705 there had appeared Some Fables after the Easie and Familiar Method of Monsieur de la Fontaine (1703), Aesop Dress'd or a Collection of Fables Writ in Familiar Verse (1704), and Typhon: or the Wars between the Gods and Giants: a Burlesque Poem in Imitation of the Comical Mons. Scarron (1704). The content of Aesop Dress'd is precisely the same as that of Some Fables. (See Sakmann, Bernard de Mandeville, p. 11.) Also, in 1712 appeared Mandeville's Wishes to a Godson, with Other Miscellany Poems. It must suffice to say of Typhon (1704) and Wishes to a Godson (1712) that they attest, as does Mandeville's prose work, that he was irreverent, capable of vulgarity, and quite free of prudishness. His Aesop poetry (after La Fontaine—with two of the fables by Mandeville himself), it may be remarked, still makes amusing reading. A substantial discussion of the verse is provided in Cook's Bernard Mandeville, ch. 2. Thomas Horne, The Social Thought of Bernard Mandeville, pp. 25-28, takes La Fontaine as a significant figure in the French moraliste tradition that deeply influenced Mandeville's view of human nature. In 1703, also, Mandeville wrote a short poem (not considered here) prefixed to a medical treatise by one Johannes Groeneveldt or John Greenfield. (See H. Gordon Ward, “An Unnoted Poem by Mandeville,” Review of English Studies 7 [1931]: 73-76.) This poem is one of two attributions to be accepted into the Mandeville canon since Kaye wrote in 1924, the other being the thirty-two Lucinda-Artesia papers in The Female Tatler that are referred to below, fn. 42.

36. Preface, not paginated, of The Virgin Unmask'd, London, 1709, Facsimile Reproduction with an Introduction by Stephen H. Gord, Scholar's Facsimiles and Reprints (New York: Delmar, 1975).

37. Note the statement in the Preface, at p. xiii of A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Diseases, 2nd ed., 1730: “Philipirio is a foreigner and a physician, who, after he had finished his studies and taken his degree beyond-sea, was come to London to learn the language; in which having happened to take great delight, and in the meantime found the country and the manners of it agreeable to his humour, he has now been many years, and is like to end his days in England.”

38. See his Introduction to FB on the “History of the Text,” at pp. xxxiii-xxvii and his “Description of the Editions” in Kaye, FB 2: 386-400.

39. Sakmann, Bernard de Mandeville, pp. 158, 177-78.

40. There is substantial scholarly agreement that this is Mandeville's work and Kaye includes it in the Mandeville canon.

41. FB 1:100.

42. This is a convenient point at which to add a word regarding the thirty-two Lucinda-Artesia papers appearing in The Female Tatler between November 2, 1709 and March 31, 1710, now also included in the Mandeville canon. The papers contained early expressions of some of Mandeville's very characteristic views. (See the article by Paul B. Anderson, “Splendour out of Scandal: The Lucinda-Artesia Papers in the Female Tatler.” Philological Quarterly 15 [July, 1936]: 286-300.) M. M. Goldsmith's article, “Public Virtue and Private Vice: Bernard Mandeville and English Political Ideologies in the Early Eighteenth Century,” in Eighteenth Century Studies 9 (1976): 477-510, provides much pertinent information for those who do not have ready access to the Lucinda-Artesia papers (Note Goldsmith's statement, p. 500: “Lucinda and Artesia were Bernard Mandeville.”) The papers will be drawn upon in this study. The sole omission of items of Mandeville's prose in the present overview is of letters published in the British Journal for April 24 and May 1, 1725. These are of minor significance. (Note the comment on them by Gerald Howson, Thief-Taker General: The Rise and Fall of Jonathan Wild [London: Hutchinson, 1970], p. 294.)

43. FB 2: 413.

44. Friedrich A. Hayek, “Dr. Bernard Mandeville” (Lecture on a Master Mind, British Academy), Proceedings of the British Academy 7 (1966): 128.

45. English Literature in the Early Eighteenth Century, p. 19.

46. Essays in Freethinking and Plainspeaking (London: Smith, Elder and Co., Duckworth and Co., 1907), pp. 279, 280.

47. History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 2:34.

48. George Saintsbury, A Short History of English Literature (London: Macmillan, 1913), p. 544.

49. Wilhelm Hasbach, “Larochefoucault und Mandeville,” in Schmollers Jahrbuch für Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Volkswritschaft im deutschen Reich 14 (1890): 17.

50. Robertson in Essays towards a Critical Method, p. 218.

51. William Hendley, A Defense of the Charity Schools, London, 1725, p. 28.

52. Cook, Bernard Mandeville, p. 65

53. Treatise, p. 68.

54. Her name is rendered by Cook as “one with many containers—pillboxes.” Cook, Bernard Mandeville, p. 65.

55. Treatise, 1730, p. 270.

56. Treatise, 1730, p. 353.

57. In the light of Polytheca's statement and Misomedon's later comment, it is of interest that, according to Cecil Moore, physicians in Mandeville's day were strongly of the opinion that emotional instability was very “real” and that it had a special “gusto for the female sex.” Cecil A. Moore, “The English Malady,” in Moore's Backgrounds of English Literature, 1700-1760 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1953), p. 189.

58. Light is thrown on Mandeville's medical work or the psychiatry of his time by Moore, “The English Malady”; Cook, Bernard Mandeville, ch. 4 (“Mandeville as a Physician”); G. S. Rousseau, “Mandeville and Europe: Medicine and Philosophy,” in Primer, ed., Mandeville studies, pp. 11-21; John Hill, Hypochondriasis: A Practical Treatise (1766; reprint ed., William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California at Los Angeles, 1969. See also the Introduction to this edition by G. S. Rousseau.) The Treatise, incidentally, shows that Mandeville had no exaggerated opinion of the abilities of doctors and The Grumbling Hive has it that “physicians valued fame and wealth above the dropping patient's health.”

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

60. FB 2:172-73. See also the Treatise, where Philopirio says he thinks women “unfit both for abstruse and elaborate thoughts, all studies of depth, coherence, and solidity, that fatigue the spirits and require a steadiness and assiduity of thinking.” But where women have advantages of education and knowledge equalling those of men, they “exceed the men in sprightliness of fancy, quickness of thought, and off-hand wit.” Treatise, p. 247. An apt passage on the different aspects of differing education in the generation of “modesty” among men and women is in FB 1:71-72. It is worth noting that John M. Robertson (Essays towards Critical Method, p. 231) saw Mandeville as “quite unique in his generation in his insistence on the intellectual capacities of women.”

61. See George Bluet, An Enquiry Whether a General Practice of Virtue Tends to the Wealth or Property, Benefit or Disadvantage of a People, London, 1725, p. 146.

62. See Daniel Defoe, Some Consideration Upon Street-Walkers, London, 1726.

63. Monro, The Ambivalence of Bernard Mandeville, p. 99.

64. FB 1:306.

65. FB 1:267, 310, 314. See also FB 2:351-52.

66. Introduction to FB 1:lxx.

67. Horne, The Social Thought of Bernard Mandeville, p. 69. Horne is more cognizant of certain hard realities in Mandeville's position on the laboring poor than a writer like Robert H. Hopkins in his “The Cant of Social Compromise: Some Observations on Mandeville's Satire,” in Primer, ed., Mandeville Studies, pp. 185-86.

68. FB 1:105-106.

69. FB 1:250.

70. Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (New York: Free Press, 1968), pp. 100-101. (It may also be important to note different consequences for different portions of a “larger structure.”) See also Albert Schatz, “Bernard de Mandeville (Contribution a l'Etude des Origines du Liberalisme Economique),” in Vierteljahrschrift für Socialund Wirtschaftsgeschichte (Leipzig: Hirschfeld, 1903), 1:455-56. A contemporary discussion of Mandeville and functional analysis is also presented in Joseph Spengler, “Veblen and Mandeville Contrasted,” Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv 82 (1959):35-65.

71. One may note the optimistic laissez-faire accent that appears when Cleomenes refers to “a felicity that would flow spontaneously from the nature of every large society if none were to divert or interrupt the stream.” FB 2:353.

72. See FB 1:219-20, FB 2:102; Origin of Honour, London, 1732, p. 65.

73. The example is deliberately not carried beyond this point. A view of its “full” effects might make it seem to point to a less happy outcome than that suggested. While in some sense benefiting the nation as a whole, it might, for example, demoralize other leading political figures.

74. Reference should at least be made also to FB 1:173-81, where Mandeville eloquently expresses compassion for the animals that humans slaughter for meat and writes (p. 175) of “this barbarity of eating flesh.” Another comment about Mandeville's holism is required also. The emphasis of his holism need not necessarily be in the functional direction, although it often is. The emphasis may rather be in the direction of order. Here a whole is looked upon as its exhibits regularity or predictability. A holistic-orderly outlook in Mandeville is likely to become marked when, for example, he contrasts the actions of individuals directed to their own limited economic purposes or interests and the (unanticipated or unintended) orderly outcome of those limited pursuits for a society or economy as a whole (or for some sector thereof conceived as a whole). Every part is “full of vice” as individuals strive for their own gain but an orderly (and not merely a beneficent) economic whole emerges as they strive (at least under certain circumstances). The holistic-orderly orientation in Mandeville is also extremely important and will call for attention again. Holistic-functional and holistic-orderly orientations are not incompatible, but they differ as concern turns to contribution to a whole, on one hand, or to state or degree of order exhibited by the whole itself, on the other.

75. The Free Thoughts is worth adducing in this connection. The book seems clearly to be the work of man who is trying (within his limitations) to be reasonable and is desirous of seeing peace and tolerance among his fellows. Here Mandeville is neither cynic nor misanthrope as he seeks to ascertain how humans may enjoy “as much happiness as the condition of mortals is susceptible of” (his very last words in Free Thoughts, p. 409).

76. FB 1:91.

77. FB 1:138-39.

78. Much of this paragraph is taken, with minor changes, from the writer's paper, “Mandeville as Forerunner of Modern Sociology,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 6 (July, 1970):229.

79. FB 1:263-64.

80. The view of human motivation presented undoubtedly—and quite understandably—is the source of innumerable accusations of cynicism brought against Mandeville. No attempt is made here to discuss the pertinent thought of Mandeville in relation to that of “an Epicurean or a Hobbist,” in the sense in which Hume writes, “An Epicurean or a Hobbist readily allows that there is such a thing as friendship in the world without hypocrisy or disguise, though he may attempt, by a philosophical chemistry, to resolve the elements of this passion, if I may so speak, into those of another and explain every affection to be self-love twisted and molded by a particular turn of imagination into a variety of appearances.” An Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), p. 114. For a contention that this “Epicurean or Hobbist” view of human nature is “subtler” than Mandeville's and much harder to refute, see John Laird, Hume's Philosophy of Human Nature (Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1967), p. 239. Quite possibly Laird is right. The precise value of this alternative view is another matter.

81. In Mandeville's day, Bishop Butler suggested something similar with regard to power: “For the sake of power,” humans may engage in very different ways of behaving, as they may engage in charitable action, “for power”—and in mischievous action, “for power.” Joseph Butler, Fifteen Sermons (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1953), p. 34. Hume has some cogent statements in this same general connection. He notes that the virtuous are not indifferent to praise—“and therefore they may have been represented as a set of vainglorious men who had nothing in view but the applause of others.” However, “it is very unjust in the world, when they find any tincture of vanity in a laudable action, to depreciate it upon that account or ascribe it entirely to that motive. … Vanity is so closely allied to virtue, and to love the form of laudable actions approaches so near the love of laudable actions for their own sake, that these passions are more capable of mixture than other kinds of affection. …” “Of the Dignity or Meanness of Human Nature,” in T. H. Green and T. H. Grose, eds., Hume's Essays Moral, Political and Literary, 2 vols. (New York: Longmans Green, 1912), 1:155-56. (Neither Butler nor Hume mentioned Mandeville specifically in these connections.)

82. See John Hervey, Some Remarks on the Minute Philosopher, London, 1732, pp. 46-47. See also Kaye in FB 2:412.

83. See Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725; reprint ed., Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1971). Appended “Alterations and Additions Made in the Second Edition” (1726), pp. 20-21.

84. Hume, Essays, 1:151.

85. Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Mary J. Gregor (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1974), p. 32.

86. Treatise, pp. v, 35, 59-60. See also, e.g., pp. 69, 98. Philopirio was also no friend to doctors who adorned ignorance with Latin or to those who made pretentious claims about what mathematics could do in the sphere of medicine. On mathematics and medicine there are some acute comments in the Treatise, pp. 183-84. On Medicine, mathematics and observation, see also FB 2:161-62, 164.

87. See Treatise, pp. 120-21.

88. At the same time he is most shrewd on the sociology or social psychology of scientific strife. See Treatise, pp. 125-26.

89. Treatise, pp. 123, 129-30.

90. Ducan Forbes, Hume's Philosophical Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 61

91. The Female Tatler, No. 66, December 7, 1709.

92. FB 1:231.

93. FB 1:128.

94. See his Hostage to the Devil (New York: Reader's Digest Press, 1976), particularly p. 79. Yet one must admit that Malachi Martin's demons might be a bit too strong even for Mandeville's stomach.

95. Preface to Modest Defence.

96. Free Thoughts, pp. 216-17.

97. Treatise, p. 80.

98. A more circumstantial statement on Mandeville's style than the above very curtailed one would, among other things, give fair attention to his oft-encountered “verbal” or “rhetorical” ironies and attend, also, to his gift for sharp and concise statement, as in this: “To search into the real causes of things imports no ill design nor has any tendency to do harm. A man may write on poisons and be an excellent physician.” FB 1:408.

99. The term “Battle of the Bees” has been most directly suggested by Grégoire's phrase, “La Querelle de Fable” (see Grégoire, Bernard de Mandeville, p. 146, and his title for the section of his book running pp. 177-94), although an older writer like Sakmann uses in the subtitle of his study of Mandeville the phrase, “die Bienenfable-Controverse.”

100. See A. D. Lindsay's Introduction to Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, 2:v.

101. See the Treatise of Human Nature, 2:204; An Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, p. 42.

102. See, e.g., the Treatise of Human Nature, 2:287-95. Laird, who is not excessively receptive to Mandeville, also proposes that Hume owed him a good deal in the matter of analysis of pride. John Laird, Hume's Philosophy of Human Nature, p. 211.

103. Treatise of Human Nature, 2:198, 207.

104. See FB 2:141-42; Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1947), p. 167.

105. See The Early Writings of Adam Smith, ed. J. Ralph Lindgen (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1967), pp. 15-28, esp. 23-25.

106. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, eds. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 313.

107. See Kaye's interesting fn. in Introduction, FB 1:cxli-cxliii.

108. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, eds. R. H. Cambell and A. S. Skinner, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976); see Index of Authorities, vol. 2, s. v. Mandeville.

109. Kaye, FB 1, “Introduction,” cxlii, fn. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 184, fn. 16.

110. J. J. Rousseau, Discours sur l'Origine et les Fondements de l'Inégalité Parmi les Hommes, in C. E. Vaughan, ed. The Political Writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau, 2 vols. (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1962), 1:125-220, p. 160.

111. Informative commentary on Mandeville in relation to eighteenth-century French thought other than that of Rousseau is given by Ellen Ross, “Mandeville, Melon, and Voltaire: The Origins of the Luxury Controversy in France,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 155 (1976):1897-1912.

112. Johann Gotfried von Herder, Sämmtliche Werke. Herausgegeben von Bernhard Suphan, 33 vols. (Berlin: Wiedmannsche Buchhandlung, 1886), 24:105, 106, 119. Bernhard Fabian does not appear to see much more merit in Herder's understanding of Mandeville than does the present writer. Fabian also notes Kant's more sympathetic attitude toward The Fable, while noting that Kant apparently was the sole critic of Mandeville in eighteenth-century Germany who comprehended clearly the quality of the latter's thought. Bernhard Fabian, “The Reception of Bernard Mandeville in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” in Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 152 (1976): 693-722.

113. Introduction, FB 1:cxvii, fn. 5.

114. Grégoire, Bernard de Mandeville, p. 221, fn. 6.

115. Alexander Bain, Mental and Moral Sciences (London: Longmans Green, 1872), pp. 593-98; Grégoire, p. 223.

116. On Leslie Stephen as renewing interest in Mandeville, see also Walther Hübner, “Mandeville Bienenfabel und die Bergründung der praktischen Zweckethik in der englichen Aufklärung,” in Paul Meissner, ed., Grundformen der Englichen Geistesgeschichte (Stuttgart and Berlin: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1941), p. 307.

117. A useful selective bibliography of items of controversy over The Fable, for a period of two and one-half centuries up to 1969, is afforded in The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, ed. George Watson (Cambridge: University Press, 1971), vol. 2, 1660-1800, cols. 1096-98.