The Enlightenment’s Fable: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society (Ideas in Context Book 31) by E. J. Hundert (PDF)

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The apprehension of society as an aggregation of self-interested individuals, connected only by bonds of envy, competition, and exploitation, is a dominant modern concern, but one first systematically articulated during the European Enlightenment. The Enlightenment’s ‘Fable’ approaches this problem from the perspective of the challenge offered to inherited traditions of morality and social understanding by the Anglo-Dutch physician, satirist and philosopher, Bernard Mandeville. Mandeville’s infamous paradoxical maxim ‘private vices, public benefits’ profoundly disturbed his contemporaries, while his Fable of the Bees had a decisive influence on David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant. Professor Hundert examines the sources and strategies of Mandeville’s science of human nature and the role of his ideas in shaping eighteenth century economic, social and moral theories.

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⭐In a volume of exemplary scholarship, E. J. Hundert provides the reader with a clear and exceptionally well documented account of the influence of Bernard Mandeville’s work in his own (eighteenth) century as well as that work’s reemergence as a subject of scholarship in the twentieth century. “Mandeville was a dangerous author,” explains Hudert, “because his argument threatened to subvert the historically moralized structures of deference and obedience upon which traditional society rested.” His “genealogy of morals,” he continues, “threatened to expose as incoherent both Christian and humanist principles of moral responsibility.” After falling into decline, the significance of Mandeville’s once scandalous work, The Fable of the Bees, reasserted itself in the twentieth century as an early expression of right-wing social philosophy and the ethos of trickle-down economics. F.A. Hayek, reports Hundert, credits Mandeville with developing “all the classical paradigmata of the spontaneous growth of orderly social structure.” Hayek, he says, believed Mandeville, “was the first in a great line of theorists to consider society solely from Hayek’s own individualist and evolutionary perspective, in which persons, freely following their inclinations, inadvertently established the most efficient social institutions.” Hundert traces the sources of Mandeville’s fundamental ideas and explores the vehement reactions of his critics to his claim that morality is a tool the elite employ for ensuring commercial progress by retaining the working poor in their place—ignorant and poor. He stresses throughout, Mandeville’s assertion that the path to commercial progress requires the elite to maintain control by framing moral discourse. Mandeville, he says, “saw in the rhetorical agility of those in command a renewable ideological resource that could be used to tame the passions of men by playing on their need for self-regard.”

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