Frank Palmeri (University of Miami)

Bernard de Mandeville and the Shaping of Conjectural History

In the seventeenth century, Natural Law theorists of the origins of human society such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke posited that at some unspecified point in the distant past, human beings emerged from a primitive condition and formed themselves into a society by means of a contract entered into among themselves. A century later, conjectural history had become a prominent and distinctive Enlightenment genre exemplified in works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse Concerning Inequality), David Hume (Natural History of Religion), Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations, Book 4), and Adam Ferguson (Essay on the Origin of Civil Society). Tracing the origins of society back before the existence of documents and other evidence, conjectural history, unlike natural law theory, focuses on long historical development rather than a single founding moment of contract. Conjectural narratives presume that human actions often have unintended consequences, that humans make their history but without knowing in advance what course that history will take. The form adopts a naturalistic, non-providential explanation of early social forms that usually falls into stages. I will argue in this paper that Bernard de Mandeville first made the shift from Natural Law to conjectural history, bringing together the major elements of the new form in a single work, The Fable of the Bees. Mandeville revises and greatly expands his account of the origins of social institutions from Part 1 of the Fable of the Bees (1714), in the dialogues between Cleomenes and Horatio that constitute Part 2 of the Fable (1729). In Dialogue Five, he provides not just a brief, cynical, and anti-clerical provocation (like the “Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue” in Part 1), but a plausible reconstruction of the beginnings and earliest development of social institutions, including language, religion and morals, kinship, poetry, and music. Rather than ahistorically imagining a founding contractual agreement, he expands the temporal dimension to take into account that hundreds of generations must have elapsed from the tentative beginnings to the gradual consolidation of any social institutions. Like Vico, who believed early men expressed their awe of thunder in their language and beliefs, Mandeville speculates that early humans must have been motivated by fear of large animals to form groups in their own defense, as well as a system of signs with which to communicate and a set of beliefs with which to make sense of a threatening world. Although the Fable of the Bees, Part 2, does not delineate a clear set of stages through which human societies progress to modern commercial society, it makes use of all the other characteristic strategies of the conjectural histories, elaborating an extended historical process caused by men who do not foresee the results of their actions, but who through their responses to their environment take the first laborious and tentative steps toward the institutions of society.