Mandeville Studies: New Explorations in the Art and Thought of Dr. Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733)

238 Pages·1975·9.93 MB·English

by  Gordon S. Vichert (auth.)

MANDEVILLE STUDIES
ARCHIVES INTERNATIONALES D'HISTOIRE DES IDEES
INTERNATIONAL ARCHIVES OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS
81
IRWIN PRIMER
MANDEVILLE STUDIES
NEW EXPLORATIONS IN THE ART AND THOUGHT OF
DR. BERNARD MANDEVILLE
(1670-1733)
Directors: P. Dibon (Paris) and R. Popkin (Washington Univ., St. Louis)
Comite de redaction: J. Aubin (Paris); J. Collins (St. Louis Univ.); P. Costabe1 (Paris);
A. Crombie (Oxford); I. Dambska (Cracovie); H. de 1a Fontaine-Verwey (Amsterdam);
H. Gadamer (Heidelberg); H. Gouhier (Paris); T. Gregory (Rome); T. E.Jessop (Hull);
P. O. Kristeller (Columbia Univ.); Elisabeth Labrousse (Paris); A. Lossky (Los Angeles);
S. Lindroth (Upsala) ;J. Orcibal (Paris); I. S. Revaht (Paris) ;J. Roger (Paris); H. Rowen
(Rutgers Univ., N.J.); C. B. Schmitt (Warburg Institute, London); G. Sebba (Emory
Univ., Atlanta); R. Shackleton (Oxford); J. Tans (Groningue); G. Tonelli
(Binghamton, N.Y.).
MANDEVILLE STUDIES
NEW EXPLORATIONS IN THE ART AND THOUGHT
OF DR. BERNARD MANDEVILLE
(1670-1733)
Edited by
IRWIN PRIMER
Rutgers University, Newark
•
MARTINUS NIJHOFF / THE HAGUE / 1975
© 1975 by Martinus NijhoJf, The Hague, Netherlands
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t Edition 1975
All rights reserved, including the right to translate or to
reproduce this book or parts thereof in a'!y form
ISBN-13: 978-94-010-1635-3 c-ISBN-I3: 978-94-010-1633-9
DOl: 10. 107/978-94-0 I 0-1633-9
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction Vll
ON SOME OF MANDEVILLE'S MINOR WRITINGS
Bernard Mandeville's The Virgin Unmask'd - GORDON S. VICHERT 1
Mandeville and Europe: Medicine and Philosophy -
G. S. ROUSSEAU 11
"The Great Leviathan of Lechery": Mandeville's Modest Defence
of Public Stews (1724) - RICHARD I. COOK 22
RELIGION AND ETHICS
Religion and Ethics in Mandeville - M. R. JACK 34
Faith, Sincerity and Morality: Mandeville and Bayle -
E. D.JAMES 43
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
Mandeville and the Eutopia Seated in the Brain - W. A. SPECK 66
The Politics of Bernard Mandeville - H. T. DICKINSON 80
MANDEVILLE IN RELATION TO SOME OTHER WRITERS
Mandeville and Wither: Individualism and the Workings of
Providence - J. A. W. GUNN 98
Mandeville and Defoe - JOHN ROBERT MOORE 119
vi TABLE OF CONTENTS
Mandeville and Shaftesbury: Some Facts and Problems -
IRWIN PRIMER 126
Mandeville and Voltaire - A. OWEN ALDRIDGE 142
STYLE, SATIRE AND PARADOX
"What pierces or strikes": Prose Style in The Fable of the Bees -
ROBERT ADOLPH 157
The Cant of Social Compromise: Some Observations on Mande-
ville's Satire - ROBERT H. HOPKINS 168
Mandeville's Paradox - PHILIP PINKUS 193
Selected Bibliography 212
Notes on the Contributors 217
Index 219
INTRODUCTION
For centuries readers have admired the writer who wields his pen like a
sword - an Aristophanes, a Rabelais, a Montaigne, a Swift. Using
ribaldry, satire and irony in varying proportions, such writers pierce the
thick, comfortable hide of society and uncover, predictably, the corruption
and hypocrisy that characterize the life of man in commercial society.
Though a lesser talent than any of these literary giants, Bernard Mande
ville is nevertheless a member of their class. The crucial year in the
emergence of his reputation was 1723, the year in which he added his
controversial Essay on Charity and Charity-Schools to his Fable of the
Bees. From that point on he became one of the most reviled targets of
the public guardians of morality and religion; for some he appeared to
be truly the Devil incarnate, Mandevil, as Fielding and others spelled it.
This reputation was attached to his name well into the nineteenth centu
ry. In a diary entry for June 1812 Henry Crabb Robinson recorded the
following conversation with the elderly Mrs. Buller: "She received me
with a smile, and allowed me to touch her hand. 'What are you reading,
Mr. Robinson?' she said. 'The wickedest cleverest book in the English
language, if you chance to know it.' - 'I have known the "Fable of the
Bees" more than fifty years.' She was right in her guess."
1
Only toward the end of the nineteenth century did scholars begin to
realize how seminal an influence Mandeville's writings had exerted upon
the European Enlightenment. In our century F. B. Kaye almost single
handedly revived Mandeville as one of the most important writers of
the eighteenth century. Kaye concluded that "it is doubtful whether
a dozen English works can be found in the entire eighteenth century of
1 Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, selected
and edited by Thomas Sadler, 2 vols. (Boston: Field, Osgood & Co., 1870), I, 252.
Vln INTRODUCTION
such historical importance as The Fable of the Bees." 2 Notwithstand
ing Kaye's significant achievement in re-establishing Mandeville's im
portance, the "revival" of Mandeville has produced only a trickle of
scholarly publications when measured against the explosion of articles
and books on his famous contemporaries Swift, Pope and Defoe. There
are many reasons for his subordinate position, but perhaps the two most
obvious ones are, first, the lack of a tangible personality behind the
writings, and second, the fact that Mandeville's major work does not
attract the reading multitude in the way that they are captured by
Gulliver's Travels, The Rape of the Lock or Robinson Crusoe.
One of the principles behind the popularity of these three works is
simply that readers like and want a story. This Mandeville knew when,
having published some translations he had made from the Fables of
La Fontaine, he set to work on his own animal fable, The Grumbling
Hive (1705). When he added explanatory prose "remarks" to certain of
its lines of verse and renamed the entire work The Fable of the Bees
( 1714), the element of story or plot diminished considerably. Conse
quently, lacking the delicate wit and charm of Pope's elegant verse, the
detailed fantasy of Gulliver's Travels, and the suspense and sustained
realistic adventure of Crusoe's tale of human survival in a savage wilder
ness, The Fable of the Bees cannot compete with these works because it
is a different kind of masterpiece. Though it began as a fable, it was
ultimately the explanatory and digressive prose remarks that generated
the power and reputation of this gradually-evolved miscellany. With
Gulliver and Rape of the Lock it participates in the ancient traditions
and forms of satire. Like Gulliver, The Fable has even been classified
more specifically as Menippean satire, but such descriptions are exercises
in scholarly precision - they are interesting but tell us little about the
concrete appeal or the true power of any literary work.3
The novel as it happened was to emerge as the dominant instrument
for literary expression in our century, a development that Mandeville
could not have foreseen. If Menippean satire was indeed the intended
form for Mandeville's Fable, a supposition which remains conjectural,
his other preferred form was the philosophic dialogue. His elected forms
for literary expression are thus more remote and strange to the con
temporary non-specialist reader than are the forms of Gulliver's Travels
2 F. B. Kaye, ed., The Fable of the Bees (Oxford University Press, 1924), I, cxlvi.
Abbreviated below to "Kaye."
3 See George Hind, "Mandeville's Fable of the Bees as Menippean Satire," Genre,
I (1968),307-15. Hind's interesting essay follows in the path of Northrop Frye's well
known association of Gulliver's Travels with Menippean satire.
INTRODUCTION ix
and Robinson Crusoe. The form of The Fable is more difficult for the
modern reader because it is neither a sustained narrative nor a continuous
treatise on man and society. If we couple this with the paucity of bio
graphical information about Dr. Mandeville, we can better understand
what has prevented him from being as widely read and admired in later
times as Swift, Pope and Defoe. All three had been close to political
figures in government and left a trail of publications, private correspond
ence and other documents that have enabled us to plot the courses of their
lives with great detail. All that we know of Mandeville in this regard is
that after he had earned his M.D. at Leyden he emigrated to England
before 1700 and liked it enough to marry and settle there. In addition to
this medical practice (about which we are informed mainly by his
Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions, 1711), he also
devoted his time to writing and publishing in verse and prose. By the
second decade of the eighteenth century he had apparently cultivated the
patronage of Sir Thomas Parker, first earl of Macclesfield. A surviving
letter from Mandeville to the eminent physician and collector Sir Hans
Sloane indicates that they were on friendly terms. The rest is a small
collection of anecdotes, not a biography. It is clear that the Mandeville
who wrote Free Thoughts on Religion, the Church, and National Happi
ness (1720) was a Whig, but, apart from his association with Lord
Macclesfield, what other Whigs had he met and known? 4
Unless a major body of new biographical evidence appears, it is only
the works of Mandeville and not his life that we can hope to know. The
biographical entry which was published by Dr. Birch in the 1738 volume
of A General Dictionary five years after Mandeville's death supplies very
few personal details. It is almost entirely a bibliographical record of
Mandeville's literary career and of the heated controversy sparked by the
1723 edition of The Fable of the Bees.5 F. B. Kaye did find more bio-
4 Though Mandeville in his later career was clearly a Whig writer and took po
sitions often similar to those of Trenchard and Gordon in Cato's Letters and in the
Independent Whig, he apparently was not, for Professor Caroline Robbins, one of the
eighteenth-century commonwealthmen. In her excellent study, The Eighteenth Centu
ry Commonwealth man (Harvard Univ. Press, 1959; Atheneum paperback, 1968), she
cites him twice, in both places only incidentally. The dearth of information regarding
his political activity and acquaintance may well have led Dr. Robbins to conclude
that he was not sufficiently in the mainstream of English liberal thought. But in view
of the evidence of his rather positive attitude toward Shaftesbury in his Free Thoughts
(1720) and on the basis of his political outlook in that book, it seems to me that he
deserved ampler attention in her comprehensive survey of a major stream of political
thought.
5 Thomas Birch, ed. and co-author, A General Dictionary, Historical and Critical,
in which a new and accurate translation of that of the celebrated Mr. Bayle ... is
included. . .. (London, 1734-41; 10 vols.), VII, 388-95. Birch himself wrote the
article on Mandeville.
x INTRODUCTION
graphical data, but nothing of a magnitude that would warrant a sepa
rate book-length life of Mandeville.6 Through whatever intended or
accidental causes, the life of Mandeville has been virtually obliterated
from history. We miss both the practicing physician and the writer in his
medical, literary and political milieu. The milieu is known in great detail
but we cannot see clearly how Mandeville fits into the pattern.
As a result, Mandeville seems to stand alone, and his apparent sepa
ration from most other eminent Augustans is an important factor in his
reputation (though Pope did include Mandeville as one of the targets of
his Dunciad, that does not identify Mandeville as a member of a literary
political clique or group). It is difficult to say how much his Dutch back
ground or his medical profession may have to do with his apparent iso
lation, but it is quite possible that our impression of his isolation results
from the outspoken, radical element in his writings. For prudential rea
sons he generally withheld his name from the title pages of his non
medical English works. Hence the Presentment of the Grand Jury of
Middlesex in 1723 against the evils allegedly propagated by The Fable
of the Bees had to be directed not to the author but to his publishers.7
It was legally impossible to implicate Mandeville, just as it was "im
possible" to prove in a courtroom that Swift had written A Tale of a Tub
or The Drapier's Letters. Swift, however, had his eighteenth-century
apologists and defenders, including his friend Pope. Because Mande
ville's defenders were few and barely visible in print, he gives the im
pression of maintaining a lonely, isolated position. Whether or not that
was indeed Mandeville's lot during his literary career, the lack of publish
ed support did not affect the popularity of his Fable of the Bees, which
was reprinted at intervals until 1806. Not only Dr. Johnson but Fielding,
too, had studied him carefully.s Mandeville's major work was a book of
strong ideas and pungent satire, and what kept it alive throughout the
eighteenth century was mainly its status as a subversive document - a
book of impiety and immorality. It had to be very superior in its kind to
survive as well as it did. The serious thinkers who grappled with his
paradoxes - Adam Smith, among others - came away often enough
with an indelible impression of the Mandevillean framework of ideas that
6 Kaye, I, xvii-xxxii.
7 See Kaye, I, 383-86.
S In Amelia Fielding set up a weak parody of the Mandevillean view of man's
nature in order to have the pleasure of shooting it down. On the other hand, Dr.
Johnson, as Boswell reports, did not bear down as heavily on Mandeville as one might
have expected but instead delivered a tempered assessment of him. See Boswell's Life
of Johnson (Oxford Standard Authors edition), 948; the entry is for 15 April 1778.