|
 Philosopher
of the Month
October
2003 - Bernard Mandeville
Alex
Voorhoeve
Bernard
Mandeville (1670-1733) was a doctor and pamphleteer, whose works
had a large impact on the course of eighteenth century social philosophy.
Mandeville was born and educated in the Dutch Republic. After being
implicated in a popular uprising in his native city of Rotterdam,
he travelled Europe and settled in London.
Mandeville
started a practice as a doctor and soon began to write. In 1705,
he published a poem, The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves Turn'd Honest.
It tells of a wealthy and powerful beehive whose inhabitants act
only in pursuit of gain and esteem. Nevertheless, they espouse an
ethic that condemns this behaviour and frequently lament that their
society is full of sin. Irritated by their constant complaining,
their god decides to make them all virtuous. In a flash, their society
comes to a stop: commerce and industry are abandoned, and the bees
leave their once flourishing hive and withdraw to live simply in
the hollow of a tree. The moral is that virtue can only lead to
a poor, ascetic society, whereas the vices are the necessary engines
of a wealthy and powerful nation.
In
1714, the poem reappeared as part of The Fable of the Bees,
or: Private Vices, Publick Benefits, in which Mandeville
explains and defends the claim that private vices lead to public
benefits. Mandeville does so by examining human nature in the same
meticulous way "a surgeon studies a carcass". This uncompromising
examination leads him to conclude that man is "a compound of
various Passions, that all of them, as they are provoked, come uppermost,
and govern him whether he will or no." The gratification of
these passions, Mandeville writes, is wholly selfish. Mandeville
defines vice as "every thing, which […] Man should commit
to gratify any of his Appetites," and virtue as "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." But, since on Mandeville's
view of human nature, man is a selfish creature, wholly governed
by his passions, people's behaviour will always be vicious, and
true virtue can have no role in managing people's destructive desires.
Should people become virtuous through divine grace, no one would
pursue temporal success and society would go the way of the bees.
Thus, virtue has no connection with maintaining society or worldly
success.
Mandeville
also explains why vice is the key to sociability and material progress.
In a state of nature, people pursue only their own desires, without
thinking of the consequences for others. Happily, however, people
have a characteristic that makes them fit for society. This characteristic
is the value they place on themselves, and their wish to see this
high opinion of themselves affirmed by others. Realising this, leaders
of small bands of men construct an image of a praiseworthy person
who controls his passions in the interest of others. These "skilful
Politicians" then encourage people to conform to this image
by heaping praise on all that act in accordance with it. And, since
it is to everyone's benefit to "preach up Publick-spiritedness,
that they might reap the Fruits of the Self-denial of others,"
everyone readily joins in. Thus, as Mandeville puts it, for the
effort of controlling his destructive appetites, man is paid by
his fellows in the "Aerial Coin of Praise".
Thus,
through flattery, people are instilled with a sense of pride and
shame, the two emotions that ready us for society. Once part of
society, people's desire to see themselves admired and their inexhaustible
desires for goods spur industry and the division of labour, through
which wealth increases. Therefore, it is vanity and all its attendant
vices that, when properly managed, make a society function and prosper.
As Mandeville puts it: "what we call Evil in this World […]
is the Grand Principle that makes us sociable Creatures."
Like
Mandeville's earlier writing, which he admitted "went down
with the public like chopt Hay", the Fable initially
generated little interest. However, after it was presented to the
Court of the King's Bench as a public nuisance on account of its
tendency "to Corrupt all Morals", the Fable became
immensely popular. As new editions rolled off the printing press,
Mandeville produced several new provocative works, and joined the
debate on his book with gusto.
The
Fable proved more than the subject of a temporary scandal.
Mandeville's idea that the pursuit of self-interest, when properly
managed, can have good consequences, and his insights into the way
in which vanity makes people conform to social norms were put to
good use by the principal philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment,
David Hume and Adam Smith. Moreover, the tension Mandeville exposed
between the standards of Christian virtue and the beneficial outcomes
due to the pursuit of self-interest provided an impetus to develop
a new moral idiom that could accord some value to the tamed forms
of self-interest that have beneficial consequences. But old habits
of moral thought die hard, and it is still good to have Dr Mandeville's
prescription at hand to deal with rigoristic pundits.
Suggested
reading
The Fable of the Bees, ed. F B Kaye (Liberty Fund)
A
new philosopher of the month will be featured early November 2003
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