Table Of ContentTHE SOCIAL THOUGHT OF BERNARD MANDEVILLE
THE SOCIAL
THOUGHT OF
BERNARD
MANDEVILLE
Virtue and Commerce in Early
Eighteenth-Century England
THOMAS A. HORNE
c Thomas A. Horne 197 8
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1978 978-0-333-23110-4
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Horne, Thomas A
The social thought of Bernard Mandeville
1. Mandeville, Bernard
I. Title
300'.92'4 B138l.Z7
ISBN 978-1-349-03560-1 ISBN 978-1-349-03558-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-03558-8
This book is sold subject to the standard conditions of the Net Book Agreement
TO E. T. R. and K. C. H.
Contents
Preface Vlll
Introduction IX
1. Mandeville and the Reformation of Manners 5.
2. Mandeville and the French Moral Tradition 19
3. Mandeville and Shaftesbury 32
4. Mandeville and Mercantilism 51
5. Mandeville and His Critics 76
Conclusion 96
Notes 99
Bibliography 110
Index 121
Preface
I have been fortunate to have studied and worked with many people
who were kind and patient enough to pass on to me ideas and attitudes
I have found indispensable. Among those I would particularly like to
thank are Professor Peter Bachrach of Temple University, Professor
Milton Cummings of The Johns Hopkins University, and Mr. David
Wise.
I discovered Mandeville in a seminar taught by Professor Julian
Franklin and I would like to thank him and Professor Herbert Deane
for their guidance throughout graduate school as well as their all too
justified criticisms of this manuscript. Professor Maurice Goldsmith of
the University of Exeter was kind enough to bring the Female Tatter and
the Reformation of Manners to my attention. Mr. Jesse Goodale
provided thoughtful comments on chapters 1 and 2. Most of all, I
would like to thank my wife, Kathryn, for her help and infinite
patience.
The reader will note that the capitalization has been modernized in
all quotations from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Introduction
Until the eighteenth century, there was a general (though not un
animous) agreement among social theorists that the proper operation
of the social organism depended upon the wide dispersion throughout
society of virtue- most generally, the ability to recognize a public in
terest and act upon it - and that the goal of any social organization had
to be the creation and nurturing of virtuous men. It was also generally
agreed that economic activity, unless strictly limited, constituted the
most dangerous threat to the virtuous life. While virtue depended upon
the willingness to adopt a public stance, commercial activity tended to
change legitimate concerns for the self into selfishness, to enlarge
private concerns and diminish the awareness of public needs. Bernard
Mandeville, writing in the first years of the eighteenth century, and
fully aware of the conflict between virtue and commerce, still chose
without flinching the world of commerce. Because of this choice he was
driven to develop a wholly nonmoral interpretation of social organiza
tion and development. Moreover, his particular formulation of the an
tagonism between virtue and commerce deeply influenced English
social theorists of the eighteenth century and compelled them to find
new ways of thinking about their society.
The early eighteenth century in England was acutely aware of the
importance of virtue in society and government through the strength of
a tradition - now generally referred to as civic humanism 1 -
particularly active at the time. The 1688 revolution, thought by some to
be a moral as well as a political revolution, the anxiety caused by the
death of Anne and the establishment of the House of Hanover in 1714,
the continued strength of the Jacobites which seemed to threaten the
stability of England, and the South Sea Bubble of 1720 with Robert
Walpole's attempt to screen those responsible-all occasioned renewed
stress on the importance of virtue and public spiritedness for the con
tinued cohesion of society. At the same time, early eighteenth-century
England witnessed considerable economic changes, which seemed to
many to be corrupting influences. 2 Moreover, this period faced the
X The Social Thought of Bernard Mandeville
problem of a large, idle, surplus population-seen by many as political
ly unstable and economically unproductive - which seemed to require
the introduction of moral discipline.
The two primary categories of civic humanism, virtue and corrup
tion, had their origins in the modern world in the thought of Niccolo
Machiavelli, especially in his work The Discourses. The tradition passed
into English thought during the English Civil War in the works of
James Harrington and later in the century in the works of men like
Algernon Sidney. In the early eighteenth century John Trenchard and
Thomas Gordon carried on the tradition in their Cato 's Letters, written in
1720-23, which held before their readers the glory of the Roman re
public that "conquered by its virtue more than its arms ... "3 and the
fall of that republic because of magnificence, luxury, and pride, which
corrupted the manners of the people. The polemics of Trenchard and
Gordon were clearly directed against the ministry of Robert Walpole.
They were joined in their attack on Walpole by Tory writers such as
Bolingbroke, John Gay, and Jonathan Swift, who, if they did not share
all of the religious and republican ideas of the Real Whigs, did
share their hatred of Walpole and their concern with corruption and
virtue~
The distance between those who maintained the moral interpre
tation of social life and Mandeville is apparent when we consider that
at the same time that moral reformers, through the Societies for the
Reformation of Manners, were helping to arrest men for drinking on
Sundays, Mandeville published in 1724 "A Modest Defense of Publick
Stews," which recommended setting up one hundred legal houses of
prostitution employing two thousand "ladies of easy virtue." And in
the same year of the scandal of the South Sea Bubble, 1720, when Wal
pole was vituperatively attacked as a "skreen," Mandeville wrote:
When we shall have carefully examined the state of our affairs, and
so far conquered our prejudices as not to suffer ourselves to be delud
ed any longer by false appearances, the prospect of happiness will be
before us. To expect ministries ·without faults, and courts without
vices is grossly betraying our ignorance of human affairs. Nothing
under the sun is perfect. 5
Mandeville's most characteristic attack on the philosophy of
public-spiritedness was that it did not understand human nature and
the true motive which moved men - self-interest. However, the impor
tance of Mandeville is not his recognition of self-interest; rather, it is his
attempt to provide a coherent theory of society's development and
operation based entirely on the self-interested actions of men without
recourse to moral forces. Mandeville's view is perfectly summarized in
his statement that
Men are naturally selfish, unruly creatures, what makes them
Introduction XI
sociable is their necessity and consciousness of standing in need of
others' help to make life comfortable: and what makes this
assistance voluntary and lasting are the gains on profit accrueing to
industry for services done to others, which in a well ordered society
enables every body, who in some thing or other will be serviceable to
the pub lick, to purchase the assistance of others. 6
The total rejection by Mandeville of the categories of virtue and
public-spiritedness, which constituted the most characteristic way of
thinking about society in early eighteenth-century England, his sub
stitution of self-interest and commercial wealth for these categories,
and an inquiry into mercantilism and the moral ideas that surrounded
and led from Jansenism as the sources upon which he drew, constitute
the subject of this book. Chapter 1 considers the Societies for the Refor
mation of Manners as the immediate impetus to Mandeville's work and
documents his opposition to these societies. Chapter 2 seeks to find the
origins of some of Mandeville's ideas in the traditions of French moral
thought. Chapter 3 focuses on his own alternative view of society as it
was developed against the work of the third Earl of Shaftesbury.
Chapter 4 provides the economic context of his thought and presents
his views on economics and his prescription for national wealth.
Chapter 5 considers the reaction of his contemporaries, both in the
more obscure pamphlet literature and in the work of more substantial
critics such as Francis Hutcheson and David Hume, and the process by
which the antagonism in Mandeville's thought between virtue and
commerce is overcome by these writers.
Surprisingly little is known about Mandeville's life even though his
works generated enormous controversy and gained him considerable
fame. The most complete account of his life can be found in the in
troduction of F. B. Kaye's edition of The Fable of the Bees.7 Bernard
Mandeville was born in 1670 in Rotterdam. He attended the Erasmus
School in that city until 1685 when he enrolled in the University of
Leyden. There he studied philosophy and medicine, receiving in 1691
the degree of Doctor of Medicine. His practice specialized in nerve and
stomach disorders, the same field in which his father had worked.
In the middle 1690s he took a tour of Europe, which ended in a stay
in London to learn the English language. He found "the country and
the manners of it agreeable to his humour," married in 1698/9, and
remained in England until his death.
Mandeville was apparently a prosperous physician on familiar terms
with Sir Hans Sloane, the founder of the Royal Society, and the Earl of
Macclesfield, an early member of Walpole's government who left in a
scandal in 1725. One of the few glimpses of Mandeville's life is found in
Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography. He describes meeting Mandeville
this way:
