SOURCE: Hopkins, Robert H. “The Cant of Social Compromise: Some Observations on Mandeville's Satire.” In Mandeville Studies: New Explorations in the Art and Thought of Dr. Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733), edited by Irwin Primer, pp. 168-92. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975.

[In the following essay, Hopkins argues that, despite the attacks of many of his contemporaries, Mandeville in his satires was censuring many of the same things they were, stressing “how much in common Mandeville had with some of his illustrious adversaries in attacking the same satiric targets.”]

Let any Man observe the Equipages in this Town; he shall find the greater Number of those who make a Figure, to be a Species of Men quite different from any that were ever known before the Revolution; consisting either of Generals and Colonels, or of such whose whole Fortunes lie in Funds and Stocks: So that Power, which, according to the old Maxim, was used to follow Land, is now gone over to Money. …

Jonathan Swift, The Examiner, No. 13 (Nov. 2, 1710)

It is my belief that we must ultimately read Mandeville as a comic satirist and that we shall never fully understand him through an ossified history-of-ideas approach which in cataloging likenesses loses Mandeville's devastating sardonic tone. The current trend of dealing with Mandeville as first and last a satirist should do much to restore to him his historical identity; for if, as Edward Rosenheim insists, satire attacks “discernible, historically authentic particulars” and if the critic has an obligation to identify these particulars we shall be forced to relate Mandeville's satire to its historical context.¹ If we can show, furthermore, how The Fable of the Bees and An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour satirize certain ambiguities in Mandeville's world that have not diminished in time and that are still very much a part of our contemporary experience, these works may still be found to be very pertinent indeed. In this essay I shall focus on what one recent critic has aptly termed the “sense of the pressure of the social scene” and try to show through the study of several words and phrases occurring in Mandeville's works how this “pressure of the social scene” results in some of Mandeville's most effective satire.²

Only in the last several years has a critic suggested a really plausible motive for Mandeville's writing the initial verse pamphlet that led to The Fable—The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves Turn'd Honest (1705). Isaac Kramnick drew attention to a number of verse pamphlets written in the 1690's-1700's attacking the corruption of English society by money and identified The Grumbling Hive as Mandeville's answer to this verse convention in defense of what historians now call The Financial Revolution.³ This Financial Revolution is established by the development of long-term public borrowing, the creation of “a whole range of securities in which mercantile and financial houses could safely invest, and from which they could easily disinvest (unlike land mortgages),” and a transition from a primarily agrarian economy to a mercantile economy centered in London around urban monied interests. If Kramnick's conjecture is valid, Mandeville's initial effort in the writing of The Fable would seem to place him on the side of the moneyed interest as opposed to the landed interest although in a very little time the landed interest itself came to be what Raymond Williams has termed England's “first really ruthless capitalist class.”⁴ Mandeville felt compelled later to expound on his verses through essays and prose remarks in the 1714 first edition of The Fable, and then again in the 1723 edition. It was the “Essay on Charity, and Charity-Schools” added to this later edition, however, which finally exploded the time-bomb and made The Fable one of the most vexing works in all of eighteenth-century English literature.

It is my belief that all of the radical elements which were present in the 1714 edition were not really noticed by Mandeville's contemporaries until history itself caught up with the work. Urban capitalism with all of its ambiguities was becoming the dominating mode of life, but its implications had yet to penetrate fully into the consciousness of Mandeville's contemporaries. The sin of Mandeville's wit was that he had stated more explicitly than any other writer yet had the unstated assumptions and hypocrisies of a social compromise which his society had tacitly agreed upon in order to live with the Financial Revolution.⁵ Mandeville had had the unmitigated nerve to depict these hypocrisies under the guise of traditional satire by relying on a norm of Christian rigorism which at times appears itself a target of satire. Whereas Swift clearly seemed to be writing his satire from a base of Christian value, Mandeville seemed to be using the guise of Christian value to expose the impossibility of a compromise between his affluent society and that value, only then to cast his lot with that society in all of its negative as well as positive aspects. Mandeville's contemporaries responded to his satire not by examining Leviathan's goals and priorities but by making Mandeville himself the scapegoat. (It is the classic reaction in all societies to the world's great satirists.) The amazing over-response (overkill?) to the 1723 Fable by John Dennis, Richard Fiddes, William Law, George Bluet, Francis Hutcheson, and later in 1732 by George Berkeley, had the curious result of broadcasting Mandeville's satire to a much wider reading audience until it was not necessary to have read The Fable in order to know its central themes. This unintentional broadcasting of The Fable by its enemies so as to make it a central presence in the literary consciousness of the middle decades of the eighteenth century has not been stressed enough. We may also use these attacks on The Fable as a valuable index to those aspects of Mandeville's satire which seemed to vex most his contemporaries.

THE “STATE OF NATURE” AND THE “NATURE OF SOCIETY”

One of the most vexing phrases in The Fable was the “State of Nature.” It is first encountered in the “Introduction” to “An Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue.” After complaining that “most Writers are always teaching Men what they should be, and hardly ever trouble their heads with telling them what they really are” (I, 39), Mandeville proceeds to state that men are governed primarily by their passions and that this truth is intrinsic to “a flourishing Society.” Mandeville intends to discover how Man might “yet by his own Imperfections be taught to distinguish between Virtue and Vice”: “And here I must desire the Reader once for all to take notice, that when I say Men, I mean neither Jews nor Christians; but meer Man, in the State of Nature and Ignorance of the true Deity” (I, 40).

“An Enquiry” proper begins with the thesis that “all untaught Animals” are motivated only by self-interest, that in “the wild State of Nature” only animals with the “least of Understanding” and the “fewest Appetites to gratify” are “fittest to live peaceably together in great Numbers” (I, 41). In this same “State” Man is the “Species of Animals” least capable of “agreeing long together in Multitudes” without “the Curb of Government.” The social evolution of Man is accomplished by “Law-Givers and other Wise Men” who by the “artful Way of Flattery” insinuate “themselves into the Hearts of Men” and begin to “instruct them in the Notions of Honour and Shame.” These leaders divide “the whole Species in two Classes,” one consisting of “abject, low-minded People,” always “hunting after immediate Enjoyment,” and the other consisting of “lofty high-spirited Creatures,” free from “sordid Selfishness,” who esteem “the Improvements of the Mind to be their fairest Possessions” (I, 44). (Mandeville mimics here the patronizing snobbery of the upper classes.) These “first Rudiments of Morality, broach'd by skilful Politicians, to render Men useful to each other as well as tractable,” were “contriv'd” so that “the Ambitious might reap the more Benefit from, and govern vast Numbers of them with the greater Ease and Security” (I, 47). It turns out, then, that the “lofty, high-spirited Creatures,” “free from sordid Selfishness,” have much to gain from the exploitation of the lower class and that “the very worst” of the ruling class “preach up Publick-spiritedness, that they might reap the Fruits of the Labour and Self-denial of others” (I, 48). Rather than defining virtue and vice in terms of an absolute morality based on Christian revelation, Mandeville proceeds to redefine these terms instrumentally according to what is beneficial or injurious to society. Immediately after this utilitarian redefining, Mandeville returns to “Man in his State of Nature”:

It shall be objected, that no Society was ever any ways civiliz'd before the major part had agreed upon some Worship or other of an over-ruling Power, and consequently that the Notions of Good and Evil, and the Distinction between Virtue and Vice, were never the Contrivance of Politicians, but the pure Effect of Religion. Before I answer this Objection, I must repeat what I have said already, that in this Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue, I speak neither of Jews or Christians, but Man in his State of Nature and Ignorance of the true Deity. …

(I, 49-50)

Since the “Idolatrous Superstitions of all other Nations” were “incapable of exciting Man to Virtue,” Mandeville argues that it is “the skilful Management of wary Politicians” that “first put Man upon crossing his Appetites and subduing his dearest Inclinations”: “Moral Virtues are the Political Offspring which Flattery begot upon Pride” (I, 51).

But politics is supposed to be a branch of ethics, not vice versa! Mandeville's satirical reversal which reflects the image of a society in which political activities are to be judged by the instrumental needs of society rather than by traditional ethical standards is prepared for by his loaded phrase, “State of Nature,” which, I believe, is intentionally derived from Hobbes's famous chapter in Leviathan, “Of the Natural Condition of Mankind …” (Pt. I, ch. 13). What Mandeville is suggesting is that the dominating ethic of his competitive society is the Hobbist ethic of the marketplace rather than the Christian ethic of the cathedral.

To appreciate fully the significance of this point, C. B. Macpherson's treatment of Hobbes in his The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (London, Oxford University Press, 1962) becomes of paramount importance. Macpherson believes that the theoretical foundations for the liberal-democratic state stem from seventeenth-century individualism and the political theories of Hobbes and Locke among others which provided the philosophical underpinning for this individualism. The “possessive” quality of this individualism developed from a concept of the individual as essentially a proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them. The individual is no longer seen as part of a larger social whole, or as an intrinsically moral entity, but as an owner of himself. Society comes to consist of a series of relations of exchanges between proprietors, and political society becomes a calculated device for the protection of the property of proprietors and for the maintenance of an orderly relation of exchange. Macpherson believes that in the past Hobbes's political theory has been studied too narrowly in an analytical philosophical tradition which ignores both Hobbes's historical and cultural context and the unstated assumptions operative in his theory which are provided by a historical frame of reference. In a section entitled “Human Nature and the State of Nature,” Macpherson argues persuasively for an interpretation of Hobbes's “Natural Condition of Man” not as literally to be referred to as early primitive man, but as a logical hypothesis about “men whose desires are specifically civilized … the hypothetical condition in which men as they now are, with natures formed by living in civilized society would necessarily find themselves if there were no common power able to overawe them” (pp. 18-19): “Natural man is civilized man with only the restraint of law removed” (p. 29). What Hobbes has done, according to Macpherson, is to construct a political theory on the model of a “possessive-market society,” a society in which the market itself provides the real basis for morality in contrast to traditional society with its basis for morality stemming from Christian revelation and natural law. Men in Hobbes's possessive-market society find themselves “subject to the determination of the market” and this determinism explains “the somewhat inhuman flavour of Hobbes's political obligation” (p. 106). Hobbes's great achievement was to penetrate into “the heart of the problem of obligation in modern progressive societies,” even though, as Macpherson wryly notes, “the English possessing class … did not need Hobbes's full prescription” and had “some reason to be displeased with his portrait of themselves.” “Before the end of the century the men of property had come to terms with the more ambiguous, and more agreeable, doctrine of Locke” (p. 106). Though Macpherson's overall treatment of Hobbes appears to be too reductive in order to support a Marxist interpretation, I would plead that his analysis of the ironies of Hobbes's “State of Nature” is sound because he has hit upon the uses of this loaded term for a literary strategy. If political scientists tend to seek only univocal meanings in Hobbes as political scientist, we as literary critics may relish the deliberate pluri-significant meanings in Hobbes as Restoration satirist.⁶

What I am suggesting is that in the 1714 editions of The Fable Mandeville was using “State of Nature” in the Hobbist sense. Mandeville's myth or fiction describing how clever politicians govern society by a “Flattery begot upon Pride” reflects the actual expedient ethic of an age governed increasingly by possessive individualism, one which truly needs the “Curb of Government” if men are to restrain themselves. Insofar as the actual ethic of most men is not a Christian one, but one governed by the market in a mercantile economy, virtue really is “the Political Offspring which Flattery begot upon Pride.” Mandeville's genealogy-of-morals parable reflects satirically on his own society. Too many critics have unfortunately read this fiction in a literal sense, partly because Mandeville's contemporary critics deliberately chose to rebut his work by reading it literally rather than as deliberate irony (with the important exception of John Dennis). Quoting Mandeville's insistence that he meant “neither Jews nor Christians, but meer Men in the State of Nature, and Ignorance of the true Deity,” Dennis shrewdly observed that it took “very little Discernment” to see “that when he [Mandeville] says Men, he means Englishmen, whether they are Christians, or Deists, or Atheists.”⁷

Later in “Remark (O)” (1714) Mandeville fuses deliberately “State of Nature” in its Hobbist sense with a theological sense to taunt his readers who are, of course, all in a state of grace: “Thus I have prov'd, that the Real Pleasures of all Men in Nature are worldly and sensual, if we judge from their Practice; I say all Men in Nature, because Devout Christians, who alone are to be excepted here, being regenerated, and preternaturally assisted by the Divine Grace, cannot be said to be in Nature. How strange it is, that they should all so unanimously deny it!” (I, 166). The double meaning here is particularly effective in carrying the satiric thrust of the passage. Christian readers living in a state of grace need not fear Mandeville's thesis, but since society assumes that most men are really living their everyday lives as if they were in a fallen “State of Nature” Christians will not find themselves easily able to live in society and still maintain their integrity. By equating the Hobbist “natural condition of man” which reflects a possessive-individualistic market society with the Augustinian view of fallen, unregenerated man in “Remark (O),” Mandeville articulates a highly vexing paradox.

Mandeville's mythical “State of Nature” represents an image of early eighteenth-century London society as it really was. If the Hobbist naturalistic ethic was unacceptable to most Englishmen, John Locke's political theory provided the foundation for a more amiable compromise between the ethic of the marketplace and the traditional ethic of moral authority. Macpherson is again invaluable in his analysis of Locke's compromise. In his rejection of political theories based on paternalism, Locke devised a theory of natural right by which men were originally created equal by God and then lost this equality in history. To support this myth of natural right and equality, Locke's “State of Nature” assumes in one sense that “the natural condition of man is eminently rational and peaceable” (Macpherson, p. 245). Locke's optimistic fiction enables him to “base property right on natural right and natural law, and then to remove all the natural law limits from the property right” (Ibid., p. 199). Thereby Locke is able to put men “on their own, and leave them to confront each other in the market without the protections which the old natural law doctrine upheld” (Ibid., p. 245). Macpherson's deduction from this analysis is that Locke conceived “man in general in the image of rational bourgeois man, able to look after himself and morally entitled to do so” (p. 245).

Once Locke had worked out a fiction which would free society from traditional restrictions, he then had to work out an explanation for man's observable inequality. As Macpherson shows, Locke equated this inequality with the difference in men's reasoning powers, and this difference was “not inherent in men, not implanted in them by God or Nature,” but rather “socially acquired by virtue of different economic positions” (p. 246). Since men are through this process unequal and possess varying degrees of rationality, a civil society with legal sanctions and a church with spiritual sanctions are necessary to maintain an orderly society. Locke's utilitarian argument for this kind of social order is really focused on what Mandeville terms the “Nature of Society.” Macpherson is invaluable in showing how Locke arrives at an ambiguous compromise to accommodate a society based on possessive individualism while defending traditional political institutions. Locke will have it both ways. Unlike Hobbes, according to Macpherson, Locke “refused to reduce all social relations to market relations and all morality to market morality” or to “entirely let go of traditional natural law” (p. 269). On the other hand if Locke “did not read market relations back into the very nature of man, as Hobbes had done,” he did read into the nature of society a Hobbist ethic “in the image of market man” (pp. 268-69). This ambiguity in Locke's political theory is the result of a kind of compromise, then, between the necessity for an ethic of economic and political expedience and the necessity for retaining traditional moral sanctions.⁸

If, as I have suggested, Mandeville's use of paradox is intended to highlight in public consciousness the unstated ambiguities of the compromises in a possessive individualistic society, his paradoxes are indeed the perfect vehicle for his intentions. In his 1714 edition of The Fable Mandeville had exploited the satirical possibilities in the Hobbist state of nature. His 1723 addition to The Fable, “A Search into the Nature of Society,” attacks Shaftesbury and the political compromise of his tutor, John Locke, based on an amiable view of man in a state of nature. It is a logical expansion of his position in “Remark (O),” and to show that man is “sociable beyond other Animals the Moment after he lost Paradise” because of “the Hateful Qualities of Man, his Imperfections and the want of Excellencies which other Creatures are endued with” is to counter the tendency to see society as an extension of the natural goodness of man. The very nature of society itself is intrinsically evil and legislatures should act to harness this society through laws for the public good. In a parody of sermonizing rhapsodies of Man before the Fall, Mandeville alludes to Man “endued with consummate Knowledge the moment he was form'd,” “the State of Innocence, in which no Animal or Vegetable upon Earth, nor Mineral under Ground was noxious to him,” “wholly wrapt up in sublime Meditations on the Infinity of his Creator” (I, 346). “In such a Golden Age,” there is no possible explanation as to why mankind should ever have formed large societies. Only when Man was fallen was there a need for society, and by implication this society by absolute moral standards must be evil although by utilitarian standards absolutely essential for survival. Mandeville's definition of society is that of “a Body Politick, in which Man either subdued by Superior Force or by Persuasion drawn from his Savage State, is become a Disciplin'd Creature, that can find his own Ends in Labouring for others, and where under one Head or other Form of Government each Member is render'd Subservient to the Whole, and all of them by cunning Management are made to Act as one” (I, 347).

Martin Price has suggested that Mandeville relies on “causal or genetic explanation” as did Hobbes because such explanation “is our stay against confusion in an essentially unknowable world, and its causal nature is the condition of its rationality.”⁹ But Kaye is surely correct to see Mandeville rejecting such fictions on the genesis of society and believing that civilization is “the result, not of sudden invention, but of a very slow evolution based on man's actual nature” (I, lxiv-lxvi, 46-47, fn. 1). The political-genesis myths of Hobbes and Locke become valuable reductive myths for Mandeville whose real commitment is to an empirical descriptive account of society as it actually is. When Mandeville writes that “no Societies could have sprung from the Amiable Virtues and Loving Qualities of Man,” he is attacking those optimistic theories of human nature which seemingly ignored the Fall completely while retaining the Garden of Eden. It is on this point that Macpherson offers an interesting partial explanation for the rise of optimistic theories of human nature in early eighteenth-century thought. Macpherson argues that when Locke chose to depict, unlike Hobbes, an idyllic state of nature in which all men were equal, Locke was conceiving “man in general in the image of rational bourgeois man able to look after himself and morally entitled to do so”: “Now when man in general is thus conceived in the image of rational bourgeois man, the natural condition of man is eminently rational and peaceable” (Macpherson, p. 245). If Macpherson is right on this point, and I believe that he is, the rise of optimistic views towards human nature and society in the essays of Addison and Steele and in the ethical theories of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson may be viewed as self-delusionary ideologies which support in all of their affirmative aspects a society committed to possessive individualism while refusing to confront the realities of such individualism in all of its negative aspects. By calling attention to some of the precedents to Mandeville's The Fable in Hobbes's Leviathan and in Locke's Two Treatises of Government, we may develop some genuinely new insights both into the function of Mandeville's satire and into the sociology of competing literary styles.

Mandeville's first satiric target in the 1714 version of The Fable was of course not Shaftesbury but Steele: “When the Incomparable Sir Richard Steele, in the usual Elegance of his easy Style, dwells on the Praises of his sublime Species, and with all the Embellishments of Rhetoric sets forth the Excellency of Human Nature, it is impossible not to be charm'd with his happy Turns of Thought, and the Politeness of his Expressions” (I, 52-53). Relying on the excessive alliteration of S's and P's and on the burden of meaning being carried vacuously by the adjectives, Mandeville's parody suggests that Steele often substitutes metaphors and analogies for logical exposition and often substitutes for the concrete reality of experience a glib fictitious world too easily gained by the internal coherence of style.

Mandeville's parody of Addison's The Spectator, No. 69, may be found, I believe, in his essay “A Search into the Nature of Society” added to the 1723 edition of The Fable. The impact of The Spectator, No. 69, on eighteenth-century ideology has been discussed by Donald F. Bond who notes that it became for “eighteenth-century Whigs one of the classic expositions of the value of the merchant class to the nation”; and, indeed, Addison's half-comic and half-serious panegyric on the Royal Exchange does seem painfully chauvinistic: “I am wonderfully delighted to see such a Body of Men thriving in their own private Fortunes, and at the same time promoting the Publick Stock; or in other Words, raising Estates for their own Families, by bringing into their Country whatever is wanting, and carrying out of it whatever is superfluous” (The Spectator, I, 294).¹⁰ Mandeville, on the other hand, goes to great pains to show both the negative and the positive effects of commerce on the “labouring poor.” Whereas Addison tends to rhapsodize over the products which come to England from all over the world, Mandeville dwells on the plight of the human beings who make such commerce possible: “… the Losses of Men and Treasure swallow'd up in the Deep, the Tears and Necessities of Widows and Orphans made by the Sea, the Ruin of Merchants and the Consequences, the continual Anxieties that Parents and Wives are in for the Safety of their Children and Husbands, and … the many Pangs and Heart-akes that are felt throughout a Trading Nation by Owners and Insurer at every blast of Wind …” (I, 361). Whereas Addison celebrated mock-heroically that romanticized image of commerce, “the single Dress of a Woman of Quality,” Mandeville countered with a mock-heroic celebration of “Scarlet or crimson Cloth” (I, 356-57). Whereas Addison tends to assume that what is good for private fortunes is good for public well-being, Mandeville examines with considerable glee the conflict between manners and morals involved in an economy of conspicuous consumption:

It is the sensual Courtier that sets no Limits to his Luxury; the Fickle Strumpet that invents new Fashions every Week; the haughty Dutchess that in Equipage, Entertainments, and all her Behaviour would imitate a Princess; the profuse Rake and lavish Heir, that scatter about their Money without Wit or Judgment, buy every thing they see, and either destroy or give it away the next Day, the Covetous and perjur'd Villain that squeez'd an immense Treasure from the Tears of Widows and Orphans, and left the Prodigals the Money to spend: It is these that are the Prey and proper Food of a full grown Leviathan. …

(I, 355)

F. B. Kaye himself recognized the literary resemblances between Mandeville's satire and Addison's essay (The Fable, I, 357, fn. 1), but the clinching piece of evidence that Mandeville had The Spectator in mind was his attack on Addison's rhapsody of England's commercial blessings as a gift from God: Addison exclaims, “Nature seems to have taken a particular Care to disseminate her Blessings among the different Regions of the World, with an Eye to this mutual Intercourse and Traffick among Mankind, that the Natives of the several Parts of the Globe might have a kind of Dependance upon one another, and be united together by their common Interest” (The Spectator, I, 294-95). Writing after the South Sea Bubble and refusing to minimize “the necessary Consequence of Foreign Trade, the Corruption of Manners, as well as Plagues, Poxes, and other Diseases, that are brought to us by Shipping” (I, 360), Mandeville almost certainly refers to Addison when he asks: “… would it not be amazing, how a Nation of thinking People should talk of their Ships and Navigation as a peculiar Blessing to them, and placing an uncommon Felicity in having an Infinity of Vessels dispers'd through the wide World, and always some going to and others coming from every part of the Universe?” (I, 361).

It seems to me that Mandeville throughout The Fable of the Bees shows a more all-encompassing, genuine sympathy with the laboring poor than Addison ever does. Spectator, No. 69, presents an attitude which really does tend to romanticize English commerce as if God were a middle-class merchant. To counter this attitude, Mandeville uses the Hobbist “State of Nature” as a foil with which to attack the delusionary optimism in the Steele-Shaftesbury tradition. To assume that the Christian ethic and the mercantile ethic can be easily unified in an ideological compromise was repugnant to Mandeville. The Financial Revolution is an amoral secular phenomenon, Mandeville seemed to be suggesting, and requires carefully thought-out secular solutions. Within the marketplace the Christian ethic has little, if any, place, and one must not pretend that it does. Rather than reacting to the scandal of the South Sea Bubble with jeremiads in the pulpit, Englishmen should follow the lead of the Netherlands and pass good regulations and laws which will hold politicians to a strict accounting (The Fable, I, 190). But above all, Mandeville is saying, one must not fall back on a reactionary kind of Luddite Christianity which rejects the modern world or delude oneself with an optimistic “moral” compromise which views the world as made primarily for the affluent middle class.

“Religion is one thing, and Trade is another” (I, 356) is the vexing thesis of “A Search into the Nature of Society.” Mandeville brought home to his contemporaries more dramatically than almost any other writer the intimations of a modern world with an economic soul while appearing not to condemn such a world, and for this he was made a scapegoat. Swift, too, brought home the shock of recognition with remarks in Gulliver's Travels to the effect that the “positive, confident, restive temper, which Virtue infused into Man, was a perpetual Clog to public Business” (III, viii) and that the failure of the Brobdingnagians to apply such secrets as the manufacture of gunpowder to affairs of state resulted from their failure to reduce “Politicks into a Science, as the more acute wits of Europe have done” (II, vii). But I would suggest that, unlike Swift, Mandeville is a modern who saw that to cope with the complexities of the modern secular state a political science was necessary.

“CHARITY,” “PITY,” AND THE PROBLEM OF THE POOR

Mandeville's treatment of “State of Nature” and the “Nature of Society” so as to bring out into the open all of the implications of a society increasingly governed by the market-place while professing Christian values is based on his primary satiric norm which is defined in Free Thoughts on Religion, the Church, and National Happiness (1720): “Whoever would be happy should endeavour to be wise, and as this consists in having a diffusive Knowledge of the real worth of Things, and a Capacity of chusing on all Emergencies what to sound and unbyass'd reason would seem the most eligible, so it is by shaking of all Clogs of Prejudice, and Fetters of human Authority, by thinking freely, that Men can only mount to Wisdom. There is no better way of curing groundless Jealousy and pannick Fears, than by daring to examine and boldly look into the Face of Things” (p. 335). Unlike the genteel liberalism of Addison and Steele which tended to view society in terms of the middle class while unintentionally patronizing the poor, Mandeville's hard-boiled acceptance of the implications of the Financial Revolution enabled him to see things as they really were and to sympathize with the laboring poor without sentimentalizing over them. The historian Charles Wilson has shown how in the late seventeenth century there developed a particular concern over the relief and employment of the poor and over the relationship of employment to the national welfare as reflected in the balance of trade and how efforts were made to find new alternatives for the relief of the poor in contrast to the passive forms of relief (alms) common in earlier periods.¹¹ New solutions were necessary because of the flow of population to London from the country as families sought to be nearer to the financial centers and because of the subsequent increase of urban poor, probably from the servant classes and farm workers who followed householders into the city. Organized philanthropy, supported primarily by the merchant and middle classes, was unable to ameliorate the lot of the urban poor to any great extent because of their large numbers. In the ensuing national debate over the problem of the poor which lasted for almost a century one side saw the solution to be through the charity school and the workhouse while the other side, which included Mandeville, saw the solution to be “only through an accelerated rate of economic activity in general” (p. 99). The parallel to our age seems obvious. Now that the most highly industrialized society in the twentieth century has discovered how much institutionalized welfare leaves to be desired and how in such a society as ours jobs, and access to jobs are desperately needed by the poor to sustain a living standard commensurate with human dignity, perhaps Mandeville's “Essay on Charity, and Charity-Schools” will no longer be interpreted as brutally cynical.

Mandeville's essay seems even less cynical if one is fully aware of just how much the charity schools had become a political pawn in Anglican politics. In the second decade of the eighteenth century many of the London charity schools were considered hotbeds of Jacobite sympathizers.¹² They constituted for Mandeville the symbol of the vicious repression of the Societies for the Reformation of Manners and the reactionary dogmatism of the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge which had in the second decade hounded out of the charity-school movement the nonconformists. The hypocritical compromise of the charity schools was their effort to indoctrinate, rather than to educate genuinely, the children of the poor. Worse yet, this attempt to control the poor by indoctrinating their children submerged its intention under the smokescreen of helping to solve the problem of the poor by training their children for suitable jobs. Thus in Spectator, No. 294, Steele could plead good-naturedly with his readers to contribute to the charity schools even if for no “other Expectation than that of producing a Race of good and useful Servants, who will have more than a liberal, a religious Education” (III, 49). Steele's concluding sentence is from a charity-school sermon: “Thus do they [the students] become more exalted in Goodness, by being depressed in Fortune, and their Poverty is, in Reality, their Preferment to Heaven” (III, 50). It was just such an attitude that angered Johnson in his review of Jenyns.

The charity schools through their subscription campaigns offered the middle class the opportunity to placate its conscience, and the charity school sermon or subscription illustrates a particularly egregious form of conspicuous consumption. One such event is described in the 1720 enlarged edition of Stow's Survey of the Cities of London: “And here the Charity Children are brought and placed with their Masters and Mistresses, in convenient Seats, where they may be seen decently habited, sitting or standing, joining with the Publick Prayers, responding, singing the Psalms, and sometimes answering their Catechisms; to the great Delight and Satisfaction of the better sort that see and hear them [italics mine]” (p. 49). In later editions of Stow's Survey, Strype included a description of the annual gathering of London charity children at St. Andrew's Holborn Church (later held at St. Paul's) and which was one source for William Blake's “Holy Thursday” poems. From Mandeville's point of view the propaganda in favor of the charity schools was a well-meaning but totally self-deluding effort that failed to see that the long-range solution to the problem of the poor would have to be political and economic. Mandeville deliberately takes an unpopular stance on the issue of charity schools and the problem of the poor, and if a precedent is to be found in eighteenth century literature to William Blake's poetical indictment of false charity and patronizing pity, it is in Mandeville's “Essay on Charity, and Charity-Schools.”

Genuine charity is defined at the beginning of the “Essay on Charity” as the “part of that sincere Love we have for our selves” which is “transferr'd pure and unmix'd to others” (I, 253). Mandeville distinguished between charity and pity: “This Virtue is often counterfeited by a Passion of ours, call'd Pity or Compassion, which consists in a Fellow-feeling and Condolence for the Misfortunes and Calamities of others: all Mankind are more or less affected with it; but the weakest Minds generally the most” (I, 254). To make his point that the response of pity is universal so that if charity were synonymous with pity even an “Highwayman, an House-Breaker, or a Murderer” would be charitable, Mandeville presents the extraordinary instance of a man locked in a room being forced to watch a “nasty over-grown Sow” devour a very young child without being able to help the child: “To see her widely open her destructive Jaws, and the poor Lamb beat down with greedy haste; to look on the defenceless Posture of tender Limbs first trampled on, then tore asunder; to see the filthy Snout digging in the yet living Entrails suck up the smoaking Blood, and now and then to hear the Crackling of the Bones, and the cruel Animal with savage Pleasure grunt o'er the horrid Banquet; to hear and see all this, What Tortures would it give the Soul beyond Expression!” (I, 255). The comic exuberance of this description which is gleefully concrete—“smoaking Blood,” “the Crackling of the Bones”—the reversal of man eating animal to animal devouring man, and the concreteness of the immediate situation to counter the abstractions and clichés of organized philanthropy which will be present later in the essay, all conspire to vex the reader of tenderly exquisite—and phony—sensibility. If pity is a universal passion and if charity is merely pity, then such undiscriminating universal charity would be absurd and meaningless. Mandeville asserts that although pity “is the most amiable of all our Passions,” no “Pity does more Mischief in the World than what is excited by the Tenderness of Parents, and hinders them from managing their Children as their rational Love to them would require” (I, 260). Mandeville's point is identical with Swift's indictment of “fondness” in Book Four of Gulliver's Travels: “They [the Houyhnhnms] have no fondness for their colts or foals, but the care they take in educating them proceedeth entirely from the dictates of Reason.” “Fondness” meaning foolish affection was meant by Swift to be pejorative in the context of the Houyhnhnms, who try to raise their offspring by rational principles.

Mandeville proceeds next to show how false charity, i.e., pity, is exploited by the professional beggar and then goes on to show how conspicuous charity in the form of the Radcliffe endowment to Oxford is really a clever manifestation of pride. Finally, he reaches his main target, the charity schools, a form of organized philanthropy which promotes “Sloth and Idleness” and which destroys “Industry” (I, 267). After carefully stipulating that he believes in “sufficient Hospitals for Sick and Wounded” and in tender care for “Young Children without Parents, Old Age without Support, and all that are disabled from Working,” Mandeville argues that all of the rest of the poor “should be set to Work.” This unpopular position is contrary to the “Enthusiastick Passion for Charity-Schools” that has “bewitch'd the generality” so that he who “speaks the least Word against it” it branded “an Uncharitable, Hard-hearted and Inhuman, if not a Wicked, Prophane and Atheistical Wretch” (I, 269). After defining this mock-villain role in the simplistic idiom of a charity-school fanatic, Mandeville proceeds to play the role to the hilt.

The charity schools participated in the social compromise in that the middle class purported not only to teach morals to the aristocracy but to teach morals and manners to the children of the poor. Unintentionally, the London charity schools were molding a small minority of the children of the poor into the narcissistic image of the prospering urban middle class, and there can be no doubt at all that Mandeville spends much of his essay attacking the charity schools as a middle-class phenomenon and as an urban phenomenon.¹³ When Mandeville maintains that true “Innocence and Honesty” are most generally characteristics of the “poor, silly Country People,” “poor” and “silly” mimic the patronizing of country folk by the urban gentility. Mandeville refuses to patronize the laboring poor when he tartly asserts that it “is not Compliments we want” of the “Labourious Poor” but rather “their Work and Assiduity” (I, 270). Furthermore, it will not be the charity schools that will prevent crime through moral education because those poor parents who care about their children will keep their children off the streets at night and will make their children “do something or other that turns to Profit” (I, 270). There is some historical evidence to suggest, as we have noted earlier, that the rapid growth of London and the increase of urban poor was caused by the Financial Revolution and by the need of country gentry to be near the center of eighteenth-century English commerce. The urban middle class's support of charity schools to control crime is a pathetically puny attempt to cope with the symptom rather than the cause. To control the children of the urban poor by educating them just enough—but not too much—to be servants and obsequious clerks is rank hypocrisy. It would remain for Charles Dickens to show how such efforts could backfire in his portrayal of the 'umble Uriah Heep. Mandeville's satire, however, goes directly to the heart of the matter.

If the urban middle class opts for the affluence which is the result of London's rapid growth, then it will have to accept the consequences of the “enormous Crimes” which are the result of density of population: “One of the greatest Inconveniences of such vast over-grown Cities as London or Paris” is that they harbor “Rogues and Villains as Granaries do Vermin” (I, 272). Just as a sociologist would see the charity schools as an urban phenomenon designed by the middle class to cope with the large masses of children of the urban poor, so Mandeville also sees the growth of crime as stemming from the complexity of urbanization itself: “It is manifest then that many different Causes concur, and several scarce avoidable Evils contribute to the Misfortune of being pester'd with Pilferers, Thieves, and Robbers, which all Countries ever were and ever will be, more or less, in and near considerable Towns, more especially vast and overgrown Cities” (I, 274). Mandeville goes to great pains to show the middle-class origins of the charity school in a kind of mock case-history of how such a school is founded. They are started by not very successful “young Shop-keepers.” In contrast, “Men of Worth, who live in Splendor” and “thriving” business men are “seldom seen among” the organizers of the charity schools. Mandeville was to write in 1724 a sarcastic dedication to the “Gentlemen” of the Societies for the Reformation of Manners,”¹⁴ and he mingles them with the charity-school supporters when he refers to those “diminutive Patriots” who enlist the support of “stanch Churchmen” and “sly Sinners” at meetings where they declaim on “the Misery of the Times occasion'd by Atheism and Profaneness” (I, 279). The underlying motive for many who attend is “Prudentially to increase their Trade and get Acquaintance.” The “Governours” of this school once it is organized are “the midling People” (I, 280), and their real motive for serving in such a capacity is for the sheer “Pleasure in Ruling over any thing”—particularly over “the Schoolmaster himself!” (I, 280-81). In a really stunning insight into the structure of his society Mandeville notes that the middle-class supporters of the charity school take particular pleasure in their vicarious ownership of ‘Our Parish Church” and ‘Our Charity Children” (I, 282): “In all this there is a Shadow of Property” [italics mine] that tickles every body that has a Right to make use of the Words, but more especially those who actually contribute and had a great Hand in advancing the pious Work” (I, 282). Here Mandeville himself is looking at the genteel ideology of his own society and observing that it is grounded in possessive individualism. Macpherson's thesis could hardly be more effectively vindicated.

When Mandeville follows with a relatively straightforward analysis of how charity schools are a smokescreen which cover up a failure to solve the problem of the poor, there is little ambiguity in what he is saying. But when he writes that charity schools interfere with the market economy by incapacitating the children of the poor for “down right Labour” and that the “Proportion as to Numbers in every Trade finds it self, and is never better kept than when no body meddles or interferes with it” (I, 299-300), we are wrong to infer that Mandeville believed in a laissezfaire economy (a nineteenth-century development).¹⁵ On the contrary Mandeville sees the charity schools as an ill-conceived, unilateral attempt which educates the children of the poor for jobs which are not necessarily in any real demand. Within the context of this essay Mandeville's argument is for continuation of a planned economy—the kind Walpole was running—and, indeed, he later writes that “the Conveniency of the Publick ought ever to be the Publick Care” (I, 319) and that it is “the Business of the Publick to supply the Defects of the Society, and take that in hand first which is most neglected by private Persons” (I, 321). When read within the context of the eighteenth-century debate over the problem of the laboring poor, Mandeville's essay is not cynical. In fact his proposal to solve the problem of the poor by keeping them employed was a radical one as he himself suggests: “The Fearful and Cautious People that are ever Jealous of their Liberty, I know will cry out, that where the Multitudes I speak of should be kept in constant Pay [italics mine], Property and Privileges would be precarious” (I, 319).¹⁶

Mandeville's attack on charity as a form of self-delusion founded on the passion of a pejorative kind of pity brought the economic debate over the problem of the poor into the center of literary consciousness. Fielding's concern with the true meaning of charity, Goldsmith's satire on universal benevolence, and Johnson's refusal to accept the status quo of the poor, all reflect different aspects of the same humanitarian concern. After Mandeville, no serious writer could employ “charity” without testing the meaning of the term in the realm of experience. For Fielding “charity” was a genuine virtue and not a mere empty word, but only empirically in the fictitious world of Tom Jones is the term reinvested with its true significance.

The most complex treatment of “Charity” and “Pity” occurs in the poetry of William Blake. Blake found pity in the form of organized, institutionalized charity to be perversely depersonalized, a “Human Abstract,” and hence a way for individuals to avoid personal commitment. Jean Hagstrum finds that Blake is “one of the most unrelenting satirists of Pity and Love that England ever produced” and that in “an analysis of social ‘virtues’ worthy of Bernard Mandeville, Blake perceives that Urizenic pity arises from social poverty, Urizenic mercy from a lack of equal happiness.”¹⁷ It is not, I believe, by mere coincidence that Mandeville and Blake are compared. There is every reason to believe that Blake had read Isaac Watts' Essay on Charity-Schools (1728) which, as Vivian de Sola Pinto has shown, reflects a “characteristic dualism of thought” in that Watts sympathizes on the one hand with the children of the poor while defending on the other hand the social structure which assumed the status quo of the poor.¹⁸ Nowhere in eighteenth-century literature is the social compromise with all its limitations so graphically shown as in the concessions which Watts makes to charity school opponents. Watts' original 1727 sermon which was expanded into the 1728 Essay was in fact specifically in answer to Mandeville's attack on the charity schools. Both Mandeville and Blake in his “Holy Thursday” poems are indicting the same genteel compromise, and Mandeville's influence en Blake is more complex than one of direct influence. Rather, Watts, forced by Mandeville to state explicitly all of the unstated assumptions behind the charity-school movement, revealed to Blake all of the hypocrisies of these assumptions. Mandeville's “Essay on Charity and Charity-Schools” and Watts' reply to Mandeville form a kind of eminent domain, the reverberations of which form the texture of Blake's poetic analysis of “Charity” and “Pity.” Mandeville's clarification of the issues involved in these terms—even if written within the limits of the “single Vision”—must have served as a valuable catalyst to Blake's poetic imagination.

“HONOR”—THE USEFULNESS OF CHRISTIANITY IN WAR

Rachel Trickett has shown how honor “had been the ideal of a chivalric military society” and how it was being replaced in the eighteenth century by the ideal of honesty which “epitomized all that was best in a world where peace and prosperity in a well-ordered state was the common aim.”¹⁹ The attempt to redefine an aristocratic mode of secular manners by integrating it with middle-class morality was one of the professed aims of Richard Steele, and such a social compromise may be traced in his work from The Christian Hero to The Conscious Lovers (1722). Such a compromise at its worst tended toward the genteel, toward a reduction of complex tensions to a simplistic middle-class solution. Swift's contribution to the reformation of manners, A Project for the Advancement of Religion and the Reformation of Manners (1709), need not be interpreted as anything but straightforward, but his method of proceeding towards such a reformation is highly original. Instead of a hypocrisy which allows one to profess Christianity while expediently living by a set of secular values, Swift proposes a hypocrisy whereby nonbelievers both profess and practice Christian values. As Claude Rawson observes, whereas “Fielding and Chesterfield both seek to narrow the gap between morals and manners, Swift makes use of a logic which inexorably widens this gap until the whole social basis of the compromise is reduced to nullity. In an absolute morality, there can be no chartable point where gallantry ends and infamy begins.”²⁰

While Addison and Steele continued to rework honor in genteel terms, Mandeville proceeded to destroy its use in such a sense so that it could not easily be used as a reifying concept. “Remark (C)” with its conclusion that “Good Manners have nothing to do with Virtue or Religion,” directly challenges the aims of the Societies for the Reformation of Manners. For Mandeville, like Swift, there can be no real compromise between absolute morality and gallantry: “Virtue bids us subdue, but good Breeding only requires we should hide our Appetites” (I, 72). Mandeville's satiric strategy here as elsewhere in his works is to cite illustrations of his shocking paradoxes that are “low” in subject matter. This technique of burlesque which gave his enemies the opportunity to call him “coarse” is a form of proof in its appeal to everyday experience bluntly and concretely described as well as a means of satirizing genteel insipidity which by an implicit censorship of language and content devitalizes literary discourse. Thus Mandeville demonstrates his distinction between virtue and good breeding by a ludicrous contrast between the “fashionable Gentleman” and the “brutish Fellow” who both have violent inclinations to a woman. The “fine Gentleman” by virtue of being “well bred” arrives at his goal of sexual consummation through the courtship ritual culminating in marriage. If he is “hotter than Goats or Bulls,” as soon as the wedding is over he may have at it and “sate and fatigue himself with Joy and Ecstacies of Pleasure” (I, 73). Better yet, he will even have a cheering section in that “all the Women and above Nine in Ten of the Men are of his side” (I, 74). Mandeville's marvelous Rabelaisian exuberance here drives home his point that often polite marriages grounded only on sexual desire, although civilly correct, are merely a form of what Defoe termed “conjugal whoredom.”

For Mandeville “Manners and good Breeding” may be merely another means of “flattering the Pride and Selfishness of others, and concealing our own with Judgment and Dexterity” (I, 77), and his habit of asserting such theses absolutely rather than conditionally is another satiric technique which serves to vex the opposition. One can trace throughout the remainder of “Remark (C)” Mandeville's incremental repetition of “well-bred Man” until it becomes a thoroughly pejorative phrase. The undermining of honor continues in “Remark (R)” when Mandeville writes: “Honour in its Figurative Sense is a Chimera without Truth or Being, an Invention of Moralists and Politicians, and signifies a certain Principle of Virtue not related to Religion, found in some Men that keeps 'em close to their Duty and Engagements whatever they be …” (I, 198). In this prose remark it is “Man of Honour” that becomes a key pejorative phrase. Mandeville exploits the animal analogy by comparing the aggressive behavior of men of honor to bulls and cooks in heat. Since modern man's real underlying ethic is determined by the pragmatic ethic of his society, Mandeville chooses to redefine honor as a useful social code based upon pride and fear. Though morally wrong, duelling makes men watch their manners! Mandeville knew very well of the campaign by Collier, Steele, and the Societies for the Reformation of Manners against duelling. His comic reversal which makes duelling useful in this reform can only be read satirically as an attack against the genteel compromise between morals and manners: “If every ill-bred Fellow might use what Language he pleas'd, without being called to an Account for it, all Conversation would be spoil'd” [italics mine] (I, 219).

The genteel attempt to have the best of both possible worlds on watered-down terms will not do for Mandeville. He insists that “modern honour” be recognized as a purely secular code and that to do otherwise is another form of self-delusion. After writing that the “only thing of weight that can be said against modern Honour is, that it is directly opposite to Religion” [italics mine], Mandeville lists the differences:

Religion commands you to leave all Revenge to God, Honour bids you trust your Revenge to no body but your self, even where the Law would do it for you: Religion plainly forbids Murther, Honour openly justifies it [italics mine]: Religion bids you not shed Blood upon any account whatever: Honour bids you fight for the least Trifle: Religion is built on Humility, and Honour upon Pride: How to reconcile them must be left to wiser Heads than mine.

(I, 221-22)

It should be clear from this passage that Mandeville's defense of duelling is a mock one and that in reality he condemns it as “Murther.” Louis Landa has noted the similarity between Mandeville and Swift who was “contemptuous” of the “whole ‘Cant of Honour’” and of efforts by Shaftesbury and others to “construct an independent or secular ethics” and to make a distinction “between true and false honour.”²¹ It is enough that a satirist such as Mandeville demonstrate through his paradoxes the discrepancy between secular manners and Christian morality.

Why then did Mandeville feel compelled to write his last and perhaps most neglected treatise, An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, and The Usefulness of Christianity in War (London, 1732)? I believe that the answer is in Francis Hutcheson's refusal to accept the implications of Mandeville's satire and in fact to reify honor as a kind of moral sense in a work which cited The Fable of the Bees as an adversary in the title: An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue; in Two Treatises. In which the Principles of … Shaftesbury are … defended against … the Fable of the Bees (London, 1725). Hutcheson was later to claim in 1730 that in his Inquiry he had provided ample “Proofs and Illustrations of a moral Sense, and a Sense of Honour.” But other than mere repetition and assertion, Hutcheson's primary proof is a circular argument that the “Determination to love Honour, presupposes a Sense of moral Virtue, both in the Persons who confer the Honour, and in him who pursues it” and that we possess “by NATURE, a moral Sense of virtue … antecedent to Honour” (pp. 225, 231). Hutcheson's treatment of honor explains the opening of the third dialogue in Berkeley's Alciphron which deals with honor for several pages even though the dialogue is supposed to be directed towards Shaftesbury. Berkeley clears away the debris on honor created by Shaftesbury's chief disciple before he directs himself to his main target. Alciphron begins the dialogue with a definition of honor as “a noble unpolluted source of virtue, without the least mixture of fear, interest, or superstition” which is to be “found among persons of rank and breeding.” When Euphranor asks if “a man of honour is a warm man, or an enthusiast,” Alciphron is reduced to protesting that the “high sense of honour which distinguished the fine gentleman” was a “thing rather to be felt than explained.” Unfair as Berkeley may be to both Mandeville and Shaftesbury in Alciphron, there can be no doubt that he sees the emphasis on “modern honour” to be pretentiously genteel.

Mandeville's Origin of Honour once and for all seeks to discredit the compromise between honor and Christian morality. Mandeville's mock defense of duelling as an aid to manners is now extended to an ironic defense of the “usefulness” of Christianity in fighting a war. As we have shown earlier in The Fable Mandeville had reversed the traditional relationship of ethics and politics to show that in the modern world politics and the market govern the ethical behavior of both individuals and nations. Now the pattern of reversal is repeated to claim that politicians use a “Gothic” notion of Christian honor—a contradiction in terms—to encourage soldiers to fight well in battle.

According to Jeremy Collier in his essay “Upon Duelling” duelling was not characteristic of classical civilization nor of primitive Christian culture, but was derived from the Lombards, Saxons, and Normans. This thesis was developed far more elaborately in John Cockburn's The History and Examination of Duels, Shewing Their Heinous Nature and the Necessity of Suppressing them (London, 1720), a book owned by Henry Fielding and to which Fielding was probably indebted in his treatment of duelling, war, and the spectrum of Gothic honor in Tom Jones. Cockburn identifies the custom of duelling with the Gothic custom of trial by ordeal and with the encouragement of this custom by the Church of Rome. This equation of Gothic honor with Popery forms a large part of Mandeville's Origin of Honor. Rather than merely showing the incompatibility between war and Christian virtue, Mandeville argues that by means of army chaplains quoting from the Old Testament rather than the New, Christian doctrine is useful in preparing soldiers to fight courageously in battle. Thus under the banner of “Honour” Christianity in the new society is converted from an end to a means. With this reductio ad absurdum Mandeville's final corrosive treatise on honor posed a formidable barrier to any future attempt to fuse honor and Christian value.

It is true that skepticism about honor was pervasive in the eighteenth century and much earlier, Falstaff's speech being a good case in point. But Mandeville's Fable and Origin of Honour were so vigorously written and so shocking to the age, that every major writer was forced to find the answers to the questions which he put to posterity. It is not within the province of this essay to show, for example, how profoundly Mandeville influenced Fielding. When, however, the Lieutenant in Tom Jones exclaims, “I love my religion very well, but I love my honour more” (Bk. VII, ch. xiii), it is hard to see how Fielding could not have been painfully aware of Mandeville's Origin of Honour. If Tom Jones begins with the question of what is true honor, it ends by scrapping honor altogether and replacing it with Christian goodness. One can make a strong case for one of the differences between Tom Jones and Amelia being Fielding's increasing awareness that it was a Mandevillian world, and no longer possessing the resilience to transcend that realization in style and artistic choice.²²

It is here that we confront a complex difficulty in our understanding of Mandeville. To his contemporaries he was “man-devil,” a cynical disciple of Hobbes. In answering Mandeville such writers as Fielding and Pope were forced to reinvest stale terms with earned meanings and to clarify their own ideas in significant literary ways. But if my interpretation of Mandeville's satire is valid, we are obligated as twentieth-century readers to see how much in common Mandeville had with some of his illustrious adversaries in attacking the same satiric targets. It seems to me that his contemporaries owed much to Mandeville in his refusal to allow language and experience to be censored and devitalized by the Societies for the Reformation of Manners, by the genteel “Christian Hero” ideology of Addison and Steele, and by the reifying deistic optimism of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. Mandeville deliberately sought out key phrases that carried the semantic burden of these genteel ideologies and then proceeded to deflate their flatulences by mimicry, low burlesque, and shockingly asserted paradoxes. Insofar as Mandeville put his contemporaries on their mettle by forcing them to redefine, and thus earn the right to use, some of these key-words, his adversary role in the foreground of eighteenth-century English literature is a positive gain. But I should like to hope that ultimately Mandeville's relevance as a perceptive satirist of the genteel compromise and of the contradictions and hypocrisies of our own “liberal” compromise, shared in a common historical heritage, will allow his work to be recognized as a substantial achievement in its own right.

Notes

1. Swift and the Satirist's Art (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1963), p. 25. See Phillip Harth, “The Satiric Purpose of The Fable of the Bees,” ECS, 2 (1968-69), 321-40; and “Introduction,” The Fable of the Bees, ed. Harth (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books Ltd.), pp. 7-46. All references to The Fable of the Bees in this essay will be by volume and page number in the text to The Fable of the Bees, ed. F. B. Kaye (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924).

2. Elias J. Chiasson, “Bernard Mandeville: A Reappraisal,” PQ, 49 (1970), 504.

3. Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1968), p. 201, p. 303, fn. 40. The phrase is that of P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Finance (London: Macmillan, 1967).

4. “Ideas of Nature,” TLS, Dec. 4, 1970, p. 1421.

5. Long ago F. W. Bateson interpreted Swift's “Description of the Morning” as an implicit satire on “the laissez-faire individualism of urban capitalism” implying the Christian point “that we are members of one another.” See English Poetry: An Introduction (London, 1950), p. 177. I hope to show that the phrase “possessive individualism” is both more appropriate and historically accurate than Bateson's phrase. The urban nature of this capitalism has been ably discussed by John Loftis, Comedy and Society from Congreve to Fielding (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 1-19. Swift's poem appeared in The Tatler, a periodical slanted towards the middle and upper classes most involved in the development of urban capitalism. As is well known, The Spectator attempted to effect a social compromise by improving the morals of the aristocracy and the gentry while refining the manners of a growing middle class. In its level of style, its didacticism of purpose, and its eschewal of potentially risqué or coarse subject matter and language, The Spectator tends in retrospect to be genteel. That is to say, it self-consciously simplifies the complexity of eigtheenth-century experience by means of a class-consciousness so that its imagination is limited by that consciousness. Addison and Steele tended to romanticize the monied interest and to emphasize only the affirmative aspects of the Financial Revolution. Mandeville satirizes this genteel consciousness by a deliberately coarse style and by stressing the negative aspects of the Financial Revolution. F. B. Kaye was struck by the literary resemblances between The Spectator, No. 69 and a passage in Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees but then noted that Addison, unlike Mandeville, had “made little attempt to deduce economic principles” (I, 357, n. 1). I believe that Mandeville's satire is directed towards the negative aspects of this social compromise including both its political and economic implications insofar as it is based upon an optimistic view of human nature.

6. I believe that Mandeville's “State of Nature” is a deliberately loaded phrase used for satirical effects, that Macpherson is the first to show an almost identical usage in Hobbes's use of the term, and that Macpherson's critics have tended to react to Macpherson's interpretation too narrowly in their interpretation of this term. If we admit that Hobbes was satirizing a growing possessive individualism in his society without necessarily providing a justification for it, as Macpherson seems to insist, Macpherson's interpretation of “State of Nature” is still valid. For examples of the spectrum of critical opinion about Macpherson's book see Christopher Hill's review, Past & Present, No. 24 (1963), 86-9, and Sir Isaiah Berlin's critique, Political Quarterly, 35 (1964), 444-68.

7. Vice and Luxury Publick Mischiefs: or, Remarks on a Book intituled, the Fable of the Bees (London, 1724), p. 30. Dennis interprets Mandeville's usage much as Macpherson has interpreted Hobbes's usage as a logical rather than historical condition. As literary critics, we may see both meanings as simultaneously present in Hobbes's and Mandeville's “State of Nature.”

8. See John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1967), Bk. II, ch. ii, “Of the State of Nature,” pp. 287-96. For an essay which seems to me to be directed against Macpherson's interpretation of Locke although Macpherson is never mentioned, see Hans Aarsleff, “The State of Nature and the Nature of Man in Locke,” John Locke: Problems and Perspectives, ed. John W. Yolton (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 99-136. I find, like David Hume, considerable “ambiguity and circumlocution” in Locke in spite of Aarsleff's argument to the contrary.

9. The Palace of Wisdom: Studies in Order and Energy From Dryden to Blake (New York, 1964), p. 114.

10. The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), I, 296, fn. 2.

11. “The Other Face of Mercantilism,” Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., 5th Ser., 9 (1959), 81-101. See also David Owen, English Philanthropy (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965); and Charles Wilson, Mercantilism, Hist. Assoc. Pamph., No. 37 (London, 1958).

12. See M. G. Jones, The Charity School Movement: A Study of Eighteenth-Century Puritanism in Action (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1938), p. 113. This valuable study is essential for any real understanding of Mandeville's “Essay on Charity,” but Miss Jones treats the “Essay” apart from The Fable and yokes it with the “Cato” attack on charity schools (The British Journal, June 15, 1723) as a two-prong Whig attack (p. 123). This is sheer conjecture and requires considerably more support to be accepted as valid.

13. In The Guardian, No. 79, 1713, Steele had deplored the fact that “only the middle kind of people” seemed to be concerned with teaching the young or with charity. See also Dorothy Marshall, English People in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1956), p. 161. Cultural historians now seem generally agreed that “middle-class” is an attitude of mind rather than a rigidly economically or quantitatively defined category. For a very commonsensical discussion of the use of “class” in historiography see the preface to E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books Ltd., 1968), pp. 9-12.

14. A Modest Defence of Public Stews (London, 1724).

15. See Nathan Rosenberg, “Mandeville and Laissez-Faire,” JHI, 24 (1963), 183-96. The late Jacob Viner rightly insisted that Mandeville, like the other major satirists of the century, accepted the “then-existing economic structure of society.” “Satire and Economics in the Augustan Age of Satire,” The Augustan Milieu: Essays presented to Louis A. Landa, ed. Henry Knight Miller, Eric Rothstein, G. S. Rousseau (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 95.

16. It is this proposal which for me distinguishes Mandeville from Addison and Steele and gives his “Essay on Charity Schools” an almost visionary quality.

17. “‘The Wrath of the Lamb’: A Study of William Blake's Conversions,” From Sensibility to Romanticism, ed. Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), p. 316; and William Blake: Poet and Painter (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1964), p. 84.

18. “Isaac Watts and William Blake,” RES, 20 (1944), 214-23.

19. The Honest Muse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 118.

20. “The Character of Swift's Satire,” Swift, ed. C. J. Rawson, “Focus” series (London: Sphere Books, 1971), p. 44.

21. Jonathan Swift, Irish Tracts 1720-1723 and Sermons, ed. Herbert Davis with Introd. and Notes by Louis Landa (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1948), pp. 114-16.

22. For analysis of Mandeville's impact on Fielding's art see Glenn Hatfield, Henry Fielding and the Language of Irony (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1969) and C. H. K. Bevan, “The Unity of Fielding's Amelia,” Renaissance and Modern Studies, 14 (1970), 90-110. Both of these studies tend to accept a pejorative view of Mandeville even while recognizing his considerable influence as an adversary on Fielding.