THE FABLE OF THE BEES

INTELLECTUAL works which have won lasting recognition usually owe their importance to the influence they have exerted, at least for a time, on sympathetic readers. The Discourse on Method, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and The Origin of Species all had to fight their way against the lethargy and even hostility which await most new ideas, but they succeeded, nevertheless, in winning acceptance and changing the course of men’s thinking. In some cases, of which the Discourse Concerning Method is an instance, this acceptance was followed by rejection from a later generation; yet the effect of an idea, once it has been adopted, is beyond calculation. In some form, modified almost beyond recognition, it survives the change in fashion which overtakes thoughts as well as things.

A few intellectual works, however, owe their importance far more to the controversy they excited and the opprobrium they earned than to any proselytes they were able to win. One thinks particularly of three works of this kind whose notoriety is the best measure of their influence: The Prince, the Leviathan, and The Fable of the Bees. By acting as irritants which contemporary readers found impossible to ignore, each of these books stimulated men to re-examine their ways of thought in order to justify their exasperation. In England, indeed, for a period of 200 years the authors of these three books appeared as successive embodiments of the Faust legend. Machiavelli for the Elizabethans, Hobbes for the subjects of Charles II, and Mandeville for eighteenth-century Englishmen became, each in his turn, a continuing figure of the perverse seeker after knowledge who serves the Father of Lies. For John Brown, author of the famous Estimate, Hobbes and Mandeville were ‘Detested Names! yet sentenc’d ne’er to die; / Snatch’d from Oblivion’s Grave by Infamy!’¹ John Wesley, reading The Fable of the Bees for the first time, wrote in his journal: ‘Till now I imagined there had never appeared in the world such a book as the works of Machiavel. But de Mandeville goes far beyond it.’² To an anonymous eighteenth-century poet, indeed, his contemporary was Anti-Christ: ‘And, if GOD-MAN Vice to abolish came, / Who Vice commends, MAN-DEVIL be his Name.’³

Surprisingly little is known about the private life of the man who gained so much notoriety through his writings. Bernard Mandeville was born in Rotterdam in 1670, attended the Erasmian School there, and entered the University of Leyden in 1685, where he pursued the study of philosophy and medicine. In 1691 he received the degree of Doctor of Medicine and began practice as a specialist in the ‘hypochondriack and hysterick passions’, or what would be called today nervous diseases. Within a few years Mandeville resolved to learn the English language, visited London for this purpose, and decided to settle there. Resuming the practice of medicine, he married an Englishwoman in 1699 and remained a successful and respected London physician until his death in 1733. But his ambition to master the English language, which had first brought him to his adopted land, had meanwhile offered him the opportunity of following a second career as a writer, and it was in this role that he was to win lasting fame.

With such notoriety in his adopted country, it was not long before Mandeville’s book became a cause célèbre on the Continent as well. It was translated into both French and German and in France it was ordered to be burned by the common hangman. As foreign interest in the Fable increased, the attacks multiplied, and by the close of the century allusions to Mandeville had become as common in Continental books as they were in the writings of Englishmen.

Seldom has a satirist earned so much abuse while pursuing his traditional avocation of condemning vice and ridiculing folly. When Mandeville described himself to Berkeley as ‘an Author, who dares to expose Vice’ and who discloses ‘the false Pretences, which are made to Virtue’,⁶ he spoke no more than the truth, for the pride, hypocrisy, and ineradicable selfishness of his countrymen are a constant burden of The Fable of the Bees. But when he went on to complain to the bishop that this was ‘the true Cause of the Malice, and all the Clamours against me’ and to declare that ‘my reprehending, lashing and ridiculing Vice and Insincerity, have procured me infinitely more Enemies than all the pretended Encouragement to Vice and Immorality they can meet with,’ he was being less than candid.⁷ The role of the moral satirist is akin to that of the preacher, and as long as he is content to denounce vices for violating accepted morality, he can launch his jeremiads as safely from the press as from the pulpit. But this was not Mandeville’s method. He condemned not only the vices of pride and hypocrisy which he found all about him, but also some of his countrymen’s most cherished beliefs, which, he suggested, were responsible for these vices and represented the principal follies he set out to expose. It was his refusal to accept the conventional norms of the moral satirist and his insistence on substituting others of his own that earned him the enmity of his contemporaries. Most of the complaints against him can be reduced to three charges. By examining each of these separately, we can come to understand Mandeville’s position in The Fable of the Bees.

THE DEFENCE OF VICE

‘Vice and Luxury have found a Champion and a Defender, which they never did before,’ John Dennis wrote of Mandeville in 1724.

There have, indeed, been several champions for Infidelity, Champions for Deism, for Arianism, for Socinianism, and for a Thousand Sorts of whimsical and fanatical Enthusiasm: Yet all these Champions have declared loudly for Moral Virtue, and all of them, the Deist only excepted, have declared for Revealed Religion; But a Champion for Vice and Luxury, a serious, a cool, a deliberate Champion, that is a Creature intirely new, and has never been heard of before in any Nation, or any Age of the World.⁸

Setting aside the hyperbole characteristic of ‘furious Dennis’, as Pope called him in The Dunciad, this charge is a common one among Mandeville’s critics. It was encouraged by the famous paradox which he adopted in 1714 as the subtitle of the Fable, ‘Private Vices, Publick Benefits’, and which, then as well as now, has been associated with his name by thousands who have never opened The Fable of the Bees. But the foundation for this charge was laid nine years earlier in The Grumbling Hive, with which we ought to begin.

In his verse fable, Mandeville describes a flourishing bee-hive which is like the England of his own day in every respect, even to the unique advantage of being ‘happily governed by a limited Monarchy’. The most noticeable characteristic of this beehive, or nation, is its addiction to vice, especially to ‘Fraud, Luxury, and Pride’. Its population includes, in the first place, large numbers of avowed criminals:

As Sharpers, Parasites, Pimps, Players,

Pick-Pockets, Coiners, Quacks, Sooth-Sayers.

But the crimes of such individuals as these, if more open, are hardly less serious than those practised by their more respected neighbours:

These were called Knaves; but, bar the Name,

The grave Industrious were the Same.

All Trades and Places knew some Cheat

No Calling was without Deceit.

The lawyers in this kingdom bilk their clients, the physicians are only interested in extorting fees from patients whom they cannot cure, while the clergy, ignorant and lazy, pursue the methods of Tartuffe. Similarly, the merchants defraud their customers, the judges accept bribes, and the ministers of the crown rob the public treasury. Finally, the entire population, without exception, gratify their pride and indulge their appetite for luxury.

Up to a point this sounds very much like any Juvenalian satire that rails against the vices of the age to the applause of all good citizens. But there are several important differences which indicate, from the outset of his career, Mandeville’s refusal to adopt conventional satiric norms. In the first place, instead of condemning the bees for their vices, he goes to great lengths to show that the happiness and prosperity of the hive depend directly on these very faults.

Thus every Part was full of Vice,

Yet the whole Mass a Paradice,

he declares in a line which was the forerunner of his more famous phrase, ‘Private Vices, Publick Benefits’. The explanation for this paradox is that full employment, which is the basis of national prosperity, and a brisk trade, which is necessary to its continuance, are the immediate consequence of immorality. The commission of crime, for example, is responsible for keeping whole multitudes at work: lawyers, gaolers, turnkeys, sergeants, bailiffs, tipstaffs, locksmiths,

and all those Officers,

That squeeze a Living out of Tears.

As for the vices of luxury, avarice, prodigality, pride, envy, and vanity displayed by the more respectable members of the community, these promote trade by creating wants which it is the business of merchants, tradesmen, and manufacturers to supply.

Furthermore, the denouement of Mandeville’s fable seems at first sight to betray the expectations we bring to a moral fable, in which the vicious are punished for their crimes. Under ordinary circumstances we might expect that the wicked bees, in spite of temporary prosperity, would ultimately come to grief as a result of their numerous sins. But while misfortune does become their lot, this reversal comes about when the knaves are suddenly turned honest. With the ensuing absence of crimes that create employment and of vices that foster trade, the professions decay, commerce dwindles, thousands of unemployed emigrate, and the hive’s prosperity comes to an end.

The members of this wicked community do, therefore, become the victims of divine chastisement, but for a totally unexpected reason. These creatures, at the height of their prosperity, have been accustomed to deplore with apparent aversion the vices of the hive from which all of them derive some benefit. ‘Good Gods, had we but Honesty!’ is the everlasting complaint of this wicked, flourishing, yet grumbling hive. And it is to punish their hypocrisy that

Jove, with Indignation moved,

At last in Anger swore, he’d rid

The bawling Hive of Fraud, and did.

Their fate is to have their insincere petition granted and to be forced to accept as a blessing the honest poverty which is their secret aversion. ‘Then leave Complaints,’ advises the ‘Moral’ to the poem,

Fools only strive

To make a Great an honest Hive.

As Mandeville was to explain later, the satire of The Grumbling Hive was written

to expose the Unreasonableness and Folly of those, that desirous of being an opulent and flourishing People, and wonderfully greedy after all the Benefits they can receive as such, are yet always murmuring at and exclaiming against those Vices and Inconveniencies, that from the beginning of the World to this present Day, have been inseparable from all Kingdoms and States that ever were fam’d for Strength, Riches and Politeness at the same time.

In defending the necessity of vice both in The Grumbling Hive and in numerous remarks in The Fable of the Bees, Mandeville is concerned exclusively with its importance to one particular kind of state. ‘What Country soever in the Universe is to be understood by the Bee-Hive represented here,’ he explained later, ‘it is evident… that it must be a large, rich and warlike Nation’; and in the remarks themselves he repeatedly describes this kind of state in such terms as ‘a populous, rich, wide, extended Kingdom’, ‘a large stirring Nation’, ‘a trading Country’. He is concerned, in other words, with the great world powers of his day and with those economic conditions which ‘are requisite to aggrandize and enrich a Nation’. He recognizes another kind of state, however, which he describes in such terms as ‘a frugal and honest Society’, ‘a small, indigent State or Principality’, a ‘pitiful Commonwealth’. Such countries are exempt from his concern and have no need for the vices he describes. There is considerable justice, therefore, to Mandeville’s reiterated assertion that he is not championing vice for its own sake when he insists on its importance to the emerging capitalist economy. If he argues that the economic prosperity of great nations is dependent on the vices of their inhabitants, he avoids expressing any open preference for rich countries over poor ones. He gives the recipe for national greatness without recommending the product.

There are really two different kinds of vice which Mandeville considers inseparable from national prosperity. The first kind, which he describes by the general term ‘fraud’, receives the greatest emphasis in The Grumbling Hive. Most of the vices described there are such ‘cheats’ as robbery, swindling, extortion, bribery, embezzlement, and other ways of plundering money which, when detected, are regarded as violations of the law. So prevalent is this kind of vice among the bees that the appearance of the single virtue opposed to it, honesty, is sufficient to rid the hive of its evils, but also of its prosperity, since the elimination of so many occupations concerned with the prevention or punishment of dishonesty gives rise to unemployment and subsequent emigration.

By the time he published The Fable of the Bees, however, Mandeville seems to have come to consider such crimes as unavoidable evils which accompany prosperity without necessarily promoting it. Only in Remark G does he discuss the economic advantages of dishonesty, when he argues that even highwaymen encourage trade by spending lavishly what they have stolen. More often he alludes to such vices as ‘Inconveniencies’ which are present in every ‘great and flourishing Nation’. So in Remark A he shows that such socially undesirable occupations as are followed by cardsharpers, pickpockets, and counterfeiters are inevitable in a society large enough to include the lazy and the fickle and varied enough to provide such people with opportunities of gaining a dishonest livelihood. But the consequence need not be anarchy. Even in The Grumbling Hive ‘Vice is beneficial found’ only ‘When it’s by Justice lopt, and bound.’ Let the laws be rigorously enforced and crimes punished with alacrity, Mandeville urges, but do not dream of eradicating the drones to be found in every flourishing hive. Such loathsome vices, he explains in the preface to the Fable, are like the dirt and litter that filled the streets of eighteenth-century London. Wise men will bear such inconveniences cheerfully, for

when once they come to consider, that what offends them is the result of the Plenty, great Traffick and Opulency of that mighty City, if they have any Concern in its Welfare, they will hardly ever wish to see the Streets of it less dirty.

A second kind of vice, which receives rather scant attention in The Grumbling Hive, is referred to there as ‘pride and luxury’. A few stanzas mention its prominence among the bees and the disastrous consequences of its disappearance, but it is overshadowed in the poem by the attention given to fraud and its antithesis, honesty. By the time he came to publish The Fable of the Bees, however, Mandeville had arrived at the realization that national greatness depends much less on crime than on other, more prevalent, vices which, while exempt from the law, are condemned by religion. Fully half the remarks in the Fable are concerned with this subject. Some, such as Remarks I, K, and M, argue the importance of avarice, prodigality, pride, and similar sins in insuring that the demand for consumer goods will always equal or exceed the supply. Others, such as Remarks L, P, and Y, insist that luxury, although accounted a sin, is responsible for most of the consumption which creates full employment and increases national wealth. Still others, such as Remarks Q, S, V, and X, suggest that frugality and the other ascetic virtues are the true enemies of national prosperity to a far greater degree than the honesty which destroyed the opulent hive. ‘What I call Vices,’ Mandeville was to explain later in A Letter to Dion, ‘are the Fashionable Ways of Living, the Manners of the Age, that are often practis’d and preach’d against by the same People.’⁹ A truly virtuous society, he argues repeatedly in the Fable, would be like that of the Spartans: frugal, abstemious, free of pride, luxury, prodigality, and the other vices, but also devoid of every comfort and pleasure that Englishmen have come to regard as no more than their due. Yet where is the man, he asks, who would be willing to pay such a price for virtue, or to forego the public benefits of vice? On every side, men dream of a Golden Age they could never endure for a single day, while they condemn the opulence that provides them with their most precious enjoyments.

Nothing Mandeville had to say on the subject of vice proved as offensive to so many as his identification of luxury with the national interest and his dismissal of frugality as ‘an idle dreaming Virtue that employs no Hands, and therefore very useless in a trading Country’. To most of his countrymen luxury was the most glaring example of a private vice which, if it became prevalent, could lead to public disaster. Preachers were fond of reminding their congregations that every previous civilization had been destroyed by the growth of luxury among its citizens; the depravity of the late Roman empire and its subsequent fate offered a lasting reminder of the wages of self-indulgence. But the moralists were not alone in attacking luxury. They received strong support from many economists.

One of the most prominent aspects of the mercantilist economics which prevailed until the time of Adam Smith was the concern for insuring, through government regulation, a favourable balance of trade with other nations. The economic goal of many mercantilist writers was a state of affairs in which, encouraged by restrictive tariffs, Great Britain would export more of her products to each country with which she traded than she found it expedient to import, so that foreign countries must be forced to make up the deficit with payments of gold and silver. In this hopeful situation the demand for British goods on the world market would be so great as to insure constant production and full employment at home, while at the same time domestic consumption of foreign products would be kept at a minimum, the consequence of which must be a steady annual flow of foreign bullion to British shores and an endless increase of the national wealth.

Some mercantilist writers even dreamt of an ideal market in which the traffic of goods would be all in one direction. ‘If we export any value of our manufactures for the consumption of a foreign nation’, a writer in The British Merchant assured his readers in 1713, ‘and import thence no goods at all for our own consumption, it is certain the whole price of our own manufactures exported must be paid to us in money, and that all the money paid to us is our clear gain.’¹⁰

The theory was an attractive one and it easily lent itself to the attacks on luxury which moralists were accustomed to making. Luxury, they were quick to point out, encouraged a taste for costly delicacies which shunned the simplicity of domestic manufactures in favour of exotic products from foreign lands. Patriotism lent new overtones of disapproval to the word ‘luxury’ when it was coupled with the epithet ‘foreign’. ‘Haughty Chloe’ in The Grumbling Hive boasts furniture ‘Which th’ Indies had been ransack’d for.’ The wants of the fastidious must be supplied by contributions from every quarter of the globe, like the ‘various Off’rings of the World’ displayed on Belinda’s dressing table in The Rape of the Lock, published the same year as The Fable of the Bees:

This Casket India’s glowing Gems unlocks,

And all Arabia breathes from yonder Box.

The Tortoise here and Elephant unite,

Transform’d to Combs, the speckled and the white.¹¹

A nation of Chloes and Belindas, satisfying their own taste for luxury at the expense of the nation’s economy, must jeopardize the favourable balance of trade by their insatiable demand for foreign products. The sanctions against luxury, like the rewards of frugality, were apparently economic as well as moral.

Mandeville, however, has nothing but contempt for the popular notion that economics and morality are natural allies. ‘Religion is one thing and Trade is another’, he declares in ‘A Search into the Nature of Society’. So far are these two from any harmonious alliance that they actually contradict each other. The ideals proclaimed by religion and morality, he insists in Remark Q, would, if adopted, produce a ‘State of slothful Ease and stupid Innocence’ incompatible with national prosperity, since ‘all the Cardinal Virtues together won’t so much as procure a tolerable Coat or a Porridge Pot among ’em’. It is a popular fallacy, he points out in Remark M, to suppose ‘that without Pride or Luxury, the same things might be eat, wore, and consumed, the same number of Handicrafts and Artificers employ’d, and a Nation be every way as flourishing as where those Vices are the most predominant.’ A people must choose between moral virtue and economic greatness, Mandeville insists without presuming to direct their choice, and having decided in favour of one alternative, they ought not to lament the absence of the other.

The mistake of the bullionists who condemn foreign luxury in hopes of achieving a favourable balance of trade, Mandeville argues in Remark L, is that they expect other nations to tolerate an unfavourable balance of trade with Great Britain which would soon lead them to national bankruptcy. No country can long afford to trade with the British at a disadvantage, paying with gold and silver for what they import because the British refuse to reciprocate by importing an equal number of foreign products. Faced with such a situation they must inevitably abandon the British market and turn to other nations which are willing to trade with them on equal terms. ‘Buying is Bartering,’ he reminds his readers,

and no Nation can buy Goods of others that has none of her own to purchase them with.… We know that we could not long continue to purchase the Goods of other Nations, if they would not take our Manufactures in Payment for them; and why should we judge otherwise of other Nations?

In rejecting the ideal of a favourable balance of trade, however, Mandeville does not abandon the mercantilist belief in the importance of government intervention. If a favourable balance of trade is impracticable, in his view, an unfavourable balance would create a gold drain which would be disastrous. To avoid such a calamity, the government must carefully regulate commerce by means of tariff laws.

Good Politicians, by dextrous Management, laying heavy Impositions on some Goods, or totally prohibiting them, and lowering the Duties on others, may always turn and divert the course of Trade which way they please,

he writes in Remark L.

But above all, they’ll keep a watchful Eye over the Ballance of Trade in general, and never suffer that all the Foreign Commodities together that are imported in one Year, shall exceed in value what of their own Growth or Manufacture is in the same exported to others.

To Mandeville, then, the balance of trade is as vital a matter of government concern as it is to the bullionist, but he attaches a different meaning to the term. It is not an excess in favour of exports by which Great Britain is left with a credit balance at the end of the year, but an equilibrium of trade between the British and their foreign customers. On these terms, the more his countrymen import from abroad, the more their neighbours can afford to buy from them; trade will increase and prosperity will follow. As long as

the Imports are never allow’d to be superior to the Exports, no Nation can ever be impoverish’d by Foreign Luxury; and they may improve it as much as they please, if they can but in proportion raise the Fund of their own that is to purchase it.

Mandeville’s belief in the importance of government intervention is not limited, however, to the regulation of trade. ‘Trade is the Principal, but not the only Requisite to aggrandize a Nation’, he points out in the same remark. ‘There are other Things to be taken Care of besides.’ Here, as well as in Remarks Q and Y, he is careful to explain that the economic benefits to be derived from private vices are not a matter of spontaneous growth but of careful pruning. It is the care of the legislator and the vigilance of the magistrate that ‘make a People potent, renown’d and flourishing’. Those vices which promote the prosperity of the nation must be condoned and encouraged. Others which need proper direction must be diverted into such channels as insure the maximum economic benefit for all. Still others, which grow into crimes and threaten harm to the community, must be rigorously discouraged and severely punished. But in all these cases the criteria of the politician must be those of economics and national policy rather than of religion and morality.

THE DISPARAGEMENT OF VIRTUE

‘The Province you have chosen for your self,’ William Law declared to Mandeville in 1726,

is to deliver Man from the Sagacity of Moralists, the Encroachments of Virtue, and to re-place him in the Rights and Privileges of Brutality; to recall him from the giddy Heights of rational Dignity, and Angelick likeness, to go to Grass, or wallow in the Mire.¹²

This charge that he denies mankind its most estimable qualities, virtue and reason, and tries to reduce it to the level of the beasts was frequently raised against Mandeville by hostile critics. The accusation does not refer to the stand he takes against such virtues as honesty and frugality which he finds detrimental to the economic well-being of a trading country. It was occasioned instead by a second thesis of Mandeville’s which did not originate in The Grumbling Hive, but in ‘An Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue’, the essay which stands alongside his earlier poem at the beginning of The Fable of the Bees.

Although the title of the book implies that it is concerned exclusively with the theme of The Grumbling Hive, this second thesis is equally important in the Fable, for it is the subject not only of the ‘Enquiry’ but of some of the remarks as well. All of the remarks are ostensibly notes to The Grumbling Hive, of course, and each of them is headed by a verse taken from the poem; but Mandeville has two ways of converting some of them into commentaries on the ‘Enquiry’ whenever it suits his convenience. In Remarks N, O, and R he employs the method of selecting a verse containing some word (‘envy’, ‘pleasures’, or ‘honour’) which he promptly extracts from its original context in the poem and uses as the subject of an essay related to the thesis of the ‘Enquiry’. In Remarks C and T he uses another method of beginning with a brief commentary on some verse of the poem and then suddenly digressing into an essay which brings him back to the ‘Enquiry’. Although such remarks are few in number they are among the longest in the book, occupying, in fact, half the space devoted to the remarks, so that the ‘Enquiry’ receives fully as much attention in the Fable as does The Grumbling Hive.

In this other part of The Fable of the Bees Mandeville continues to explore the benefits of vice, but in a different context. Instead of considering the economic advantages of vice to large, rich, and war-like nations as opposed to small, indigent communities, he is interested here in its use to any ‘Civil Society, where Men are become taught Animals and great numbers of them have by mutual compact framed themselves into a Body Politick,’ as distinct from the state of nature. ‘All untaught Animals,’ he begins his ‘Enquiry’, ‘are only Sollicitous of pleasing themselves, and naturally follow the bent of their own Inclinations, without considering the good or harm that from their being pleased will accrue to others.’ Man is the most instinctively selfish of all animals, and therefore the least naturally sociable; yet he is also the most teachable and can therefore be made fit for society by education. His selfish passions are too powerful to be subdued by reason, it is true, but since they are not all of equal vigour, his weaker passions can be overcome by those which are stronger. The business of the moralist is to render man sociable by playing off his passions against each other.

The most inveterate of man’s passions is his pride, and therefore his pursuit of honour is insatiable, while he will go to any length to avoid shame. If men are to be made fit for society they must learn to associate selfishness with shame and the pursuit of the public interest with honour. Hence ‘the Moralists and Philosophers of all Ages’ invented the distinction between vice and virtue. They pursuaded their fellow men

to call every thing, which, without Regard to the Publick, Man should commit to gratify any of his Appetites, VICE; if in that Action there could be observ’d the least prospect, that it might either be injurious to any of the Society, or ever render himself less serviceable to others: And to give the Name of VIRTUE to 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.

Observing that those who were public-spirited and given the name of virtuous were held up to honour and praise while those who were selfish and labelled vicious were the objects of shame and detestation, men were forced by pride to curb their predatory impulses. Thus mankind owes its sociable qualities, Mandeville writes, not to nature, but to

the skilful Management of wary Politicians; and the nearer we search into human Nature, the more we shall be convinc’d, that the Moral Virtues are the Political Offspring which Flattery begot upon Pride.

‘This was (or at least might have been) the manner after which Savage Man was broke,’ he concludes. But he is less interested in speculating on the origin of society than in examining the degree to which: h, in his own day, civilized man is moved by new combinations of the same passions found in his savage state, and is no more swayed by reason now than in his former condition. Repeatedly Mandeville examines supposedly virtuous actions in which a man seems to ‘endeavour the Benefit of others, or the Conquest of his own Passions, out of a Rational Ambition of being good’ and shows that in reality they are only what he calls ‘counterfeited’ virtues because they were undertaken out of self interest in order to indulge whatever passion was uppermost at the moment. A soldier shows bravery under fire not because his reason has mastered his fear, but because his fear of shame is greater than his fear of death. The man who saves ‘an Innocent Babe ready to drop into the Fire’ obliges only himself, ‘for to have seen it fall, and not strove to hinder it, would have caused a Pain’ which his self-preservation compelled him to prevent. A man relieves a beggar because his importunities are an annoyance which can be most readily stopped with a coin. ‘Thus thousands give Money to Beggars from the same motive as they pay their Corn-cutter, to walk Easy.’ And so with all the other supposedly virtuous actions Mandeville examines. None is completely distinterested nor immune from some powerful passion.

He is not suggesting, of course, that all human conduct is vicious. None of the actions just described is ‘injurious to any of the Society’ or renders the man who performs them ‘less serviceable to others’. Quite the contrary, in fact. But if they deserve no blame, neither do they merit praise, since those who performed them were only interested in serving themselves. ‘All this I have nothing against,’ he observes in Remark O, ‘but I see no Self denial, without which there can be no Virtue.’ Yet in revealing the ‘Contradiction in the Frame of Man’ in whom ‘the Theory of Virtue is so well understood, and the Practice of it so rarely to be met with’, a discrepancy noticed by most moralists, Mandeville parts company with the preacher by refusing to urge men to greater effort. If they scarcely ever attain the lofty heights they have been taught to aspire to, he suggests, this is because moral virtue is an impracticable ideal at odds with human nature. It was inevitable that his attitude should provoke most of his contemporaries, for it managed to offend at the same time two schools of Christian moralists, although for different reasons.

The older and more rigorous of these traditions was Mandeville’s original target when he published the first edition of The Fable of the Bees in 1714. ‘Most of the ancient Philosophers and grave Moralists, especially the Stoicks,’ he pointed out, had condemned the passions as the source of discontent and had ‘placed true Happiness in the calm Serenity of a contented Mind free from Guilt and Ambition; a Mind, that, having subdued every sensual Appetite, despises the Smiles as well as Frowns of Fortune.’ The theory, subject to one important modification, had proved congenial to many Christian moralists. They agreed with the Stoics in condemning the passions, portrayed them as sinful appetites which are the legacy of fallen nature, and stressed the importance of bringing them under the control of reason. But, mindful of the dangers of Pelagianism, they insisted that reason was powerless to subdue the unruly passions without the assistance of religion. Aided by divine grace, the Christian could reduce his appetites to the government of reason and attain virtue. ‘All our heady and disordered affections, which are the secret factors of sin and Satan’, wrote Bishop Hall, the ‘English Seneca’ of the preceding century, ‘must be restrained by a strong and yet temperate command of Reason and Religion.’ The truly valiant Christian, he declared, ‘is the master of himselfe, and subdues his passions to reason; and by this inward victory workes his owne peace.’¹³

Mandeville’s quarrel with the pagan and Christian Stoics is not against their estimate of the passions. Both sides agree that these appetites are selfish and turbulent. What he rejects is the notion that men’s passions can ever be controlled by reason, a weak and ineffectual faculty, in his view, which is no match against such sturdy rebels. ‘I believe Man’, he wrote in the ‘Introduction’ to The Fable of the Bees, ‘to be a Compound of various Passions, that all of them, as they are provoked and come uppermost, govern him by turns, whether he will or no.’ What is notably absent from this picture of human behaviour is the ‘Rational Ambition of being good’ which is an essential criterion for virtuous action according to the rigorists. ‘Reason is our universal law, that obliges us in all places, and at all times,’ Mandeville’s antagonist William Law wrote in A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, ‘and no actions have any honour, but so far as they are instances of our obedience to reason.’¹⁴ If that is the case, Mandeville replies, your virtue is a chimera of the imagination, demanding reason where there is only passion.

He was not alone in rejecting such rigoristic views. Many Christians of Mandeville’s day rebelled against the dispassionate severity of moralists who preached an asceticism which was felt to be inconsistent with humanity. ‘For two years I have been preaching after the model of your two practical treatises,’ Wesley protested to Law in 1738, ‘and all that heard have allowed that the law is great, wonderful, and holy. But no sooner did they attempt to fulfil it but they found that it is too high for man.’ ¹⁵ The tradition which has come to be known as benevolism began long before the rise of Methodism, however. Since the middle of the seventeenth century Latitudinarian clergymen of the Church of England had been preaching this pleasant doctrine, and it had already gained wide popularity by the time The Fable of the Bees appeared. Reacting against the severities of Christian Stoicism, such churchmen insisted that the truly good man is not a coldly righteous individual who stifles his affections but one whose feelings spontaneously solicit him to virtue. ‘Our Reason has but little to do in the forming of our minds, and bringing us to a Vertuous Religious Life,’ wrote Bishop Hickman, a contemporary of Mandeville’s, ‘ ’tis our Passions and Affections that must do the work.’¹⁶

Such a view, of course, is based on a very different estimate of the passions than the one we have been examining. These churchmen strongly reacted against the doctrine of total depravity which pictures human feelings as so many sinful appetites. Even worse, in their view, was Hobbes’s attempt to reduce all human motivation to selfish passions directed toward our own gratification. Instead, they taught that man is naturally inclined to live in society and endowed with benevolent feelings towards his fellow creatures. The famous Isaac Barrow spoke for many of his church when he referred to

that general sympathy which naturally intercedes between all men, since we can neither see, nor hear of, nor imagine another’s grief, without being afflicted ourselves. Antipathies may be natural to wild beasts; but to rational creatures they are wholly unnatural.¹⁷

The idea that man’s sociableness arises from his natural feelings awakened a ready response among Englishmen and was propagated by the third Earl of Shaftesbury, who died the year before The Fable of the Bees made its initial appearance.

Mandeville did not respond to benevolism at first. His attention in 1714 was wholly taken up by his crusade against rigorism for exalting reason and emphasizing the conquest of the passions. A few years later, however, he read Shaftesbury’s Characteristics, and when he added new essays and remarks to the Fable in 1723 it was clear that he had found a new target. ‘The Generality of Moralists and Philosophers,’ he begins ‘A Search into the Nature of Society’,

have hitherto agreed that there could be no Virtue without Self-denial, but a late Author, who is now much Read by Men of Sense is of a contrary Opinion, and imagines that Men without any trouble or violence upon themselves may be Naturally Virtuous.

This author’s mistake is not that of the rigorists, who advocate an asceticism beyond human capacity, but it is just as great an error. ‘This Noble Writer,’ he explains,

(for it is the Lord Shaftsbury I mean in his Characteristicks) Fancies, that as Man is made for Society, so he ought to be born with a kind Affection to the whole, of which he is a part, and a propensity to seek the Welfare of it.

To be virtuous, he need only indulge his benevolent feelings.

Without modifying in any way the analysis of human behaviour he had presented nine years earlier in his ‘Enquiry’, Mandeville could now argue that men’s actions are no more virtuous by the standards of the benevolist than by those of the rigorist. The newer ethics had rejected obedience to reason, which was the criterion of virtuous behaviour for Christian Stoics, and replaced it with disinterested feeling as the essential ingredient. Let a man ‘in any particular, act ever so well,’ Shaftesbury writes in the Characteristics,

if at the bottom it be that selfish affection alone which moves him, he is in himself still vicious. Nor can any creature be considered otherwise when the passion towards self-good, though ever so moderate, is his real motive in the doing that to which a natural affection for his kind ought by right to have inclined him.¹⁸

On those terms, Mandeville replies, all men must be vicious, for they are always and everywhere motivated by self-esteem.

As he clearly recognized, benevolism posed a more serious threat to his central thesis than rigorism; indeed, ‘two Systems cannot be more opposite than his Lordship’s and mine’. For if men are naturally sociable, civil societies are a spontaneous outgrowth of men’s deepest instincts, whereas Mandeville insists that they are artful contrivances shaped from the most unlikely materials. His famous paradox applies in fact to men’s social as well as their economic condition. It is from his vices of pride and self-love, man’s most hateful and destructive qualities, that politicians have laboriously constructed a congenial society. ‘The Power and Sagacity as well as Labour and Care of the Politician in civilising the Society,’ Mandeville writes in Remark N,

has been no where more conspicuous, than in the Happy Contrivance of playing our Passions against one another. By flattering our Pride and still encreasing the good Opinion we have of our selves on the one hand; and inspiring us on the other with a superlative Dread and mortal Aversion against Shame, the Artful Moralists have taught us chearfully to encounter ourselves, and if not subdue, at least so to conceal and disguise

these passions that we can live in harmony with each other.

The two theses of The Fable of the Bees are therefore really two angles of vision from which Mandeville considers the same problem. Considered as an economic state or as a civil society, it is the same Leviathan which the art of the governor has fashioned from discordant elements. This is the true sense, to which he returned in his final sentence, of ‘the seeming Paradox, the Substance of which is advanc’d in the Title Page; that Private Vices by the dextrous Management of a skilful Politician may be turn’d into Publick Benefits’.

THE ATTACK ON CHARITY SCHOOLS

‘The first Impression of the Fable of the Bees, which came out in 1714, was never carpt at, or publickly taken Notice of,’ Mandeville wrote in his ‘Vindication of the Book’,

and all the Reason I can think on why this Second Edition should be so unmercifully treated, tho’ it has many Precautions which the former wanted, is an Essay on Charity and Charity-Schools, which is added to what was printed before.

When the avalanche of attacks on the Fable began in 1723, they certainly were not addressed to this particular essay alone. But Mandeville may have been right in suggesting that it was his attack on the charity schools which triggered public reaction, for in this essay he assaulted an institution, more cherished than any system of ethics, in which a large sector of the British public had made a financial as well as an emotional investment.

What Mandeville called ‘the Enthusiastick Passion for Charity-Schools’ was one of those phenomena in which an entire nation eagerly adopts some project which it supports for a generation or two before turning its attention to a more novel interest. It began in the closing years of the seventeenth century, caught the public imagination at once, and had reached the peak of its success just at the moment Mandeville published his essay attacking it. The movement was popularly regarded as a panacea for the vice and destitution to which the children of the dependent poor were bred in eighteenth-century Britain. A large and growing population existing on marginal incomes were unable to support their numerous children, who were suffered to run the streets when they did not become a charge upon the parish. Bred up to no useful occupation and deprived of religious instruction, many turned to beggary and stealing, becoming an economic burden as well as a moral scandal to the rest of the nation.

The charity schools were designed to alleviate the sufferings of these children while instilling sound habits of religion and morality. Between the ages of seven and twelve or fourteen, they were fed and clothed by these institutions, drilled in their prayers and the church catechism taught to read the Bible and The Whole Duty of Man, and given the rudiments of writing sufficient for copying passages from the Scriptures. On leaving the school they were apprenticed to some trade or entered service in a household. The immediate benefits expected from this course of instruction concerned the children’s religious welfare, but economic advantages could be expected to follow also. A child who had acquired habits of sober diligence and honest effort from a charity school would not only escape the fate of Hogarth’s Idle ’Prentice, but might be expected to reap some of the earthly rewards of his Industrious ‘Prentice.

A typical charity school of the early eighteenth century was founded and maintained by the spontaneous enthusiasm of the members of a parish, who retained local management of the institution while following guide lines provided by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Unlike other foundations the charity schools did not enjoy an endowment and were supported by voluntary subscriptions from the parish members. The precarious means by which they were financed was actually one of the reasons for their popularity. Thousands of middle-class Englishmen who were in no position to endow a hospital or found a college could become one of the benefactors of a charity school at comparatively little cost. The broad basis of support for these institutions became a matter for frequent congratulation, testifying to the benevolent feelings of eighteenth-century Englishmen. Addison, writing in the Guardian, thought charity schools ‘the glory of the age we live in’,¹⁹ while Steele in the Spectator proclaimed them ‘the greatest Instances of publick Spirit the Age has produced’.²⁰

For Mandeville, on the other hand, the charity school movement offered a practical application of both the theses of The Fable of the Bees. In the first place, the public spirit and open-handed charity supposedly inspiring the movement were to him a perfect example of self-interest masquerading behind counterfeited virtue. ‘Pride and Vanity have built more Hospitals than all the Virtues together’, he declares, and the same egoistic passions are ‘the real Source of this present Folly’ of charity schools. The conducting of these institutions satisfies the ‘strong Inclination to Govern’ found in all men at the same time that it offers them the opportunity to appear charitable at small expense to their purses or their private passions. Secondly, the charity-school movement was to Mandeville an egregious instance of the meddlesome interference of religion and morality in the affairs of economics which he everywhere deplored.

It was a common maxim of eighteenth-century mercantilism that people are the riches of a nation. By ‘people’ was meant the working poor, and by ‘riches’ the national wealth to which they contributed by their labour without receiving any considerable dividend in return. The more labourers there were in a nation, the more products manufactured; the more products, the greater the trade and the higher the profits. But a flourishing trade and large profits depended on the ability of manufacturers to keep their costs as low as possible. The mercantilists envisioned, therefore, a dense population of labourers who would be fully employed, but employed at the lowest possible wages so that their products could be offered at a competitive price on the foreign market.

The promoters of the charity-school movement had no intention of interfering with this system. Their purpose was not to rescue their charges from the necessitous condition into which they had been born, but to give them a religious upbringing which would reconcile them with their continued poverty. ‘There must be drudges of labour (hewers of wood and drawers of water the Scriptures call them) as well as Counsellers to direct, and Rulers to preside,’ the Bishop of Norwich preached in a charity-school sermon.

These poor children are born to be daily labourers, for the most part to earn their bread by the sweat of their brows. It is evident then that if such children are, by charity, brought up in a manner that is only proper to qualify them for a rank to which they ought not to aspire, such a child would be injurious to the Community.²¹

But no such outcome need be feared from the charity schools, whose products, rendered religious and obedient by their careful training, would cheerfully return to take up the hard lot for which nature had intended them.

To Mandeville, however, the hard economic necessity that demands a large working force in a trading nation was totally at odds with the ‘unreasonable Vein of Petty Reverence for the Poor’ running through the charity-school movement. ‘In a Free Nation where Slaves are not allow’d of,’ he agrees with the other mercantilist writers, ‘the surest wealth consists in a multitude of Laborious Poor.’ But while his countrymen were paying lip service to this maxim, they were busily contradicting it as they increased the number of charity schools.

Going to School in comparison to Working is Idleness, and the longer Boys continue in this easy sort of Life, the more unfit they’ll be when grown up for downright Labour.

A child who has been taught to read and write will no longer be willing to undertake the ‘Abundance of hard and dirty Labour’ that must be done. The consequence must be an artificial overstocking of trades and a dearth of common labourers. Where the supply of necessary labour is scarce, wages must rise and foreign trade, the basis of national prosperity, decline. The ‘two Engines’ by which labour is made cheap, Mandeville writes, are ‘discouraging Idleness’ among the poor and ‘bringing them up in Ignorance’. Where this is the case ‘we must infallibly out-sell our Neighbours; and at the same time encrease our Numbers. This is the Noble and Manly way of encountring the Rivals of our Trade, and by dint of Merit outdoing them at Foreign Markets.’ But the supporters of charity schools, like the foolish bees in The Grumbling Hive, have forgotten these truths and are pursuing economic disaster under the names of morality and religion.

THE SATIRE AGAINST HUMAN FOLLY

Some awareness of these matters of controversy between Mandeville and his contemporaries is necessary in order to understand The Fable of the Bees in its historical setting. It will not account, however, for the unmistakable appeal the book has for Mandeville’s modern readers. The economic, ethical, and social theories Mandeville took for granted were not noticeably more enlightened than those of his contemporaries whom he attacked. He was no Bacon leading an assault on old-fashioned ideas in the name of progress. He accepted far more of the mercantilist economics of his time than he ever criticized, and his ethical attitudes look backwards to Hobbes and Bayle more often than they anticipate the moral philosophy of a later day. On social questions Mandeville was no liberal or humanitarian, and his attitude towards the poor was sometimes considered harsh even by the rough standards of his contemporaries. He took for granted a class society in which ‘some Body must do the work’ while another enjoys the fruits of his inferior’s labour. He considered the poor a shiftless and idle lot who would work only intermittently if their wages ever rose above the level of mere subsistence to provide them with a discretionary income. He neither foresaw the welfare state nor would have welcomed the prospect if he had. In all these respects he was a man of his age and cannot claim—nor would he seek—the honours of a social reformer such as William Wilberforce or Hannah More.

Mandeville’s true genius appears in his role as a critical, rather than a constructive, thinker. His uncompromising realism led him to adopt a tactic of exposure whose effectiveness owes less to his own economic and ethical theories than to his eye for the vulnerability of those he is attacking. He insisted that societies, like individuals, must make hard choices between clearly understood alternatives, and he noticed with amusement that most men have neither the intelligence to recognize their options nor the courage to sacrifice some of them in the course of adopting others. His repeated theme of human inconsistency—‘the Contradiction in the Frame of Man’—expresses his recognition of a perennial human weakness temporarily embodied in those visions of a society both prosperous and virtuous, of human conduct entirely free of selfish passions, and of a panacea offered by the charity schools to which the men of his own time and place had succumbed. But his manner of exposing these contemporary expressions of age-old folly was not so much by dispassionate argument as by irony and ridicule. His opponents, encumbered by their heavy armour, were no match for a derisive satirist who exclaimed: ‘Oh! the mighty Prize we have in view for all our Self-denial! can any Man be so serious as to abstain from Laughter?’ But the same strategy that drove his contemporaries to distraction has become a source of enjoyment for later readers.

Mandeville’s remarkable talent as a satirist emerges as fully in the prose remarks and essays as in the little poem at the beginning of The Fable of the Bees. They show him turning from verse to prose, not in order to abandon satire, but to exploit it with greater freedom. And there is scarcely a page of the Fable where those talents are not displayed in profuse variety. If he introduces a simile with an air of innocence, the effect is sudden deflation. So honour among great families, he explains in Remark R, ‘is like the Gout, generally counted Hereditary, and all Lords Children are born with it’. Or in Remark K he sets out to ‘compare the Body Politick (I confess the Simile is very low) to a Bowl of Punch’ and continues for several pages, finding some equivalent in society for each ingredient:

I could compare the gaudy Trimming and splendid Equipage of a profuse Beau, to the glistning brightness of the finest Loaf Sugar; for as the one by correcting the sharpness prevents the injuries which a gnawing Sower might do to the Bowels, so the other is a pleasing Balsam that heals and makes amends for the smart, which the Multitude always suffers from the Gripes of the Avaricious; whilst the substances of both melt away alike, and they consume themselves by being beneficial to the several Compositions they belong to.

If Mandeville introduces an example to illustrate his thesis, it soon assumes dimensions of its own. It may become a vivid portrait, as in his characters of the ‘cholerick City Captain’, the ‘beardless Ensign’, and the ‘wealthy Parson’ in Remark M, of the ‘worldly minded, voluptuous and ambitious Man’ in Remark O, or of a ‘Man of Honour’ in Remark R. Just as often his example takes the form of a delightful anecdote, as those of Decio and Alcander, the two merchants in Remark B, of the unlucky highwayman in Remark G, of Florio and Cornaro in Remark I, and those of the two lazy sisters, the gentleman and the porter, and the idle man and his Uncle Gripe which follow one another in Remark V. At other time Mandeville will spend whole pages relating an amusing apologue, like the fable of the Roman merchant and the lion in Remark P, or the parable of small beer he tells in Remark T.

These are all instances of the narrative skill Mandeville could command for the purpose of his satire. But his dramatic talents are just as great. Although he is writing as an essayist, he makes frequent use of a device, as old as Horace, of imagining an interruption by an angry reader or a meddlesome bystander. So, in Remark G, the apologist for gin must be heard, while in Remark T an indignant epicure suddenly interrupts him to defend the teachings of Lord Shaftesbury. Sometimes his adversary is not easily silenced and a lively dialogue ensues, as when Mrs Abigail breaks into his discourse on the clergy in Remark O to cry: ‘You unconscionable Wretch, with all your Suppositions and Self denials!’ But perhaps his dramatic talents are best displayed in those ‘Scenes of low Life’ he delights in drawing, such as the conversation between the ‘spruce Mercer’ and a female customer in ‘A Search into the Nature of Society’ or the skit, full of lively dialogue, in which he portrays the various members of a parish going about the establishment of a charity school.

These last are only a few of the ‘digressions’ Mandeville enjoys introducing with a mock apology, begging ‘my Serious Reader that he would for a while abate a little of his Gravity’ or asking

pardon of my Reader for the tiresom Dance I am going to lead him if he intends to follow me, and therefore I desire that he would either throw away the Book and leave me, or else arm himself with the Patience of Job to endure all the Impertinencies of Low Life, the Cant and Tittle Tattle he is like to meet with before he can go half a Street’s length.

These digressions offer oblique support to his argument, but they are also instances of Mandeville’s incorrigible playfulness, like the ‘foolish Trifle’ in ‘An Essay on Charity and Charity-Schools’ where he allows his fancy full play in imagining the vengeance he can expect if he succeeds in banishing charity schools: he will be ‘stuck full of useless Penknives up to the Hilts’, buried alive under ‘a great heap of Primers and spelling-Books’, ‘bruised to Death in a Paper Mill’, drowned in ink, and finally ‘pelted and knock’d o’ the head with little squat Bibles clasp’d in Brass and ready arm’d for Mischief’.

If Mandeville was a philosopher, he was one like Dr Johnson’s old school fellow Edwards, for whom ‘cheerfulness was always breaking in’. Such an author cannot be judged solely on his merits as an economist or a moralist. Mandeville was the contemporary of Swift as well as Shaftesbury and the mention of his work should bring to mind the first of these writers as well as the second. Whatever its other claims on our attention, The Fable of the Bees is an outstanding ornament of the greatest age of English satire.

Introduction

Notes to the Introduction