Bernard Mandeville

Dzieła

• 1714The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits (Bajka o pszczołach, czyli Prywatne przywary, publiczne korzyści)

  Bajka wierszowana z 1705 roku („The Grumbling Hive”) rozbudowana o uwagi prozą i eseje (1714, poszerzone w 1723, część druga 1729): zamożny ul, który staje się uczciwy, traci handel, sztuki i potęgę, ponieważ handel żyje pożądaniem, próżnością i zbytkiem.

Stanowisko

Mandeville is on the map as the author of a provocative book of the Enlightenment and a forerunner of theories of unintended social order. “The Fable of the Bees” argues that commercial societies thrive on the very passions moralists condemn: pride, vanity, envy and the love of luxury create demand, employment and the arts, so that “private vices” become “public benefits” when “skilful politicians” channel them. In “An Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue” he claimed that virtue was invented by lawgivers who flattered human pride to make people restrain their appetites. If virtue is defined strictly as self-denial, almost nothing in a flourishing society is virtuous – a rigorism whose ironic intent is still debated. His “Essay on Charity and Charity-Schools” (1723), which argued that educating the labouring poor would unfit them for hard work, caused a public scandal. The book provoked replies from Hutcheson, Berkeley, William Law and many others; Adam Smith called it a “licentious system” but took up much of its analysis of commerce, Kant counted Mandeville among the heteronomous moralists, and Marx quoted him with respect. Twentieth-century economists such as Hayek and Keynes rediscovered him as an early theorist of spontaneous order and of demand.

Życie i kontekst

Bernard Mandeville was born in Rotterdam in November 1670 (baptised on 20 November) into a family of physicians and civic officials. He studied philosophy and medicine at Leiden, where he defended the Cartesian view that animals lack feeling in a disputation of 1689 and took his medical degree in 1691 with a thesis on digestion. His family was caught up in the Rotterdam tax riot of 1690, after which his father was banished from the city. In the 1690s Mandeville went to London, where he settled as a physician specialising in “hypochondriack and hysterick passions”, married in 1699 and wrote in English. His verse fable “The Grumbling Hive” (1705) grew into “The Fable of the Bees” (1714); the enlarged edition of 1723 was presented by the Grand Jury of Middlesex as a public nuisance. He died in Hackney on 21 January 1733.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves Turn’d Honest (1705)
• A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions (1711)
• The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits (1714; enlarged 1723; Part II, 1729)
• An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, and the Usefulness of Christianity in War (1732)