Imagine a beehive. The inhabitants are nasty little issues: venal, egocentric, and corrupt; greedily buzzing round guzzling honey and flaunting their stripes. Even so, the hive prospers. Then, in the future, by a sudden act of God, the bees clear up their act. They change into virtuous. And earlier than they understand it, the hive is in free-fall. With out vainness, there is no such thing as a want for trendy clothes. With out delight or luxurious, the development trade falls aside. With out gluttony or boozing, cooks and vintners are out on their ft. With out crime, the police twiddle their thumbs. And with out fraud and deception, the lawyer-bees (we’re actually stretching the metaphor right here) are put out of enterprise: who wants contract regulation when everyone seems to be so damned trustworthy? Now set that story to wince-inducing doggerel, add some explanatory notes and an introductory essay, and you’ve got your self The Fable of the Bees, Bernard Mandeville’s shock-success of 1714.
Born in 1670 to a household of rich Dutch physicians, Mandeville obtained his medical coaching within the Netherlands earlier than establishing his personal apply in London in his 20s. It was an unlikely background for a social and political theorist, however an advantageous one. As John Callanan exhibits in his entertaining and enlightening new ebook, Mandeville’s background as a doctor instilled in him the sense that one couldn’t comprehend the basic mechanics of society with out first grappling with what made people human. To grasp the hive, you wanted to know the bee. Because of this, Mandeville devoted simply as a lot effort and time to investigating issues comparable to hypochondria and intercourse as he did to sociological evaluation. All this stuff have been related. Society was formed by human behaviour and human behaviour was ruled by base animal intuition. Whereas this perception had, to an extent, been anticipated by theorists comparable to Thomas Hobbes, Mandeville’s capability to hyperlink human psychology with broader socio-economic patterns was genuinely and radically new, anticipating the fashionable discipline of behavioural economics by almost three centuries and the concepts of Adam Smith by a era.
The ethical of Mandeville’s fable is apparent sufficient: a steady and affluent business society depends on a level of behind-the-scenes rule-twisting and aggressive excessive jinks. The notion that greed could be good is maybe not so offensive on this age of financial liberalism, but it surely was deeply stunning on the time. The backlash was excessive. He was, in line with his enemies, a ‘Man-devil’ despatched from hell, worse even than the notoriously unprincipled Machiavelli. Not till the center of the 18th century, lengthy after Mandeville’s dying, was he taken severely as a thinker on society, economics, and human nature.
Though critics discovered a lot to denounce within the substance of The Fable of the Bees, the ebook’s model gave equal offence. Mandeville made his arguments not with the muscular quasi-scientific reasoning of Bayle or Hobbes, however slightly in prose that’s teasing, scandalous, and infrequently laugh-out-loud humorous. As an example, when Mandeville argues that ‘vice proceeds from the identical origin in males, because it does in horses’, he’s making a severe declare. Simply as essentially the most energetic of stallions could be strapped to a cart and put to work, so we should always harness the basic qualities of human nature for the better good of society; to attempt to quash the essence of what makes us human (or what makes a horse a horse) could be futile. On the similar time, although, there’s something deeply outrageous within the comparability of human beings to horses. Jonathan Swift would make hay with the identical thought in Gulliver’s Travels (1726), the place the equine Houyhnhnms are the embodiment of chilly rationality whereas the humanoid Yahoos symbolize the depravity of mankind.
Extra stunning nonetheless was Mandeville’s willingness – certainly, enthusiasm – to dispense with the whole framework of morality and advantage. You wouldn’t count on horses to behave in line with an externally imposed ethical compass – why ought to people be any totally different? As Callanan summarises it: ‘Ethical advantage itself was a con, an invention of politicians to maintain the herd of society adequately docile.’ Reissuing the Fable in 1723, Mandeville added new essays attacking the priggish stoicism of ‘Cato’, the nom de plume of the Whig pamphleteers John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, and, with typical contrarian aptitude, charity colleges. Callanan marshals the proof fantastically and demonstrates that this line of thought was totally in step with the broader Mandevillian mission: ‘It’s requisite that nice numbers needs to be ignorant in addition to poor. Data each enlarges and multiplies our needs, and the less issues a person needs for, the extra simply his requirements could also be provided.’ And but, studying these essays, one can’t shake the sensation of being taken for a experience. It’s the kind of assertion that one may count on from Swift’s modest proposer, together with his scheme for promoting the kids of the Irish poor for meat. As ever with Mandeville, he states absurdities with a straight face whereas parroting stale ethical pieties with a wink and a nudge.
I think it’s Mandeville’s mixture of caustic prose with penetrating sociological and psychological evaluation that makes him so tough to put. He’s a kind of uncommon figures who you’re simply as more likely to encounter in an undergraduate seminar on the historical past of concepts as on a level in English literature. He’s each a thinker and a satirist. Disentangling the one from the opposite is like attempting to separate a stiff gin and tonic into its part elements. Callanan isn’t any idiot and, not like a few of his predecessors within the discipline of Mandeville research, his ear is finely tuned to his topic’s sense of humour. He will get it. Maybe the broader lesson of this very good ebook is that satire, when correctly performed, shouldn’t be a matter of sinking guffawing into the ocean, however of diagnosing, like a doctor, the basic illness of mankind. It may be – needs to be – profound, thought-provoking, a spur to motion. Mandeville was a dire poet however, by that criterion, a superb satirist.
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Man-Satan: The Thoughts and Occasions of Bernard Mandeville, the Wickedest Man in Europe
John J. Callanan
Princeton College Press, 328pp, £30
Purchase from bookshop.org (affiliate hyperlink)
Joseph Hone is writer of The Paper Chase: The Printer, the Spymaster, and the Hunt for the Insurgent Pamphleteers (Chatto & Windus, 2024).
