Jonathan Israel (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton)

Mandeville's Dutch Background. How important was it in shaping his intellectual, religious and political views?

Mandeville continued to read in Dutch, as well as French and Latin, whilst working as a physician in London and among other authors cited Aitzema, van Dale and Bayle in his English writings. He was also given to providing Dutch examples to underline some of his points. He thought it hard, for example, to ' name a city better govern'd than that of Amsterdam ' not least owing to the lack of authority allowed to preachers. The Dutch Revolt against Spain and Dutch economic success were also pointed to by Mandeville as valuable exempla for others. This raises the question of how important Mandeville's background was for understanding his general outlook and views and the question of his relationship to Spinoza and Bayle.

Sir Malcolm Jack

Men become sociable, by living together in Society: re-assessing Mandeville’s social theory

Mandeville’s analysis of the origin and nature of society is a central concern of his writing and is prominent in both parts of the Fable of the Bees, as well as in his other works. In the first part of the Fable of the Bees, Mandeville’s emphasis is on developing a passionate theory of man in society, greatly influenced by his reading of French sceptical literature, mediated through his mentor, Pierre Bayle. That analytical tradition provided a psychological theory of man as an egotistical creature pursuing his need for recognition, respect and pre- eminence as much as one who must fight for survival in the Hobbesian state of nature. Mandeville distils and uses the central, sceptical notions of amour propre and amour de soi même to explain why men act in certain ways, including ways that may be labelled altruistic. This kind of analysis is made from first principles, although its principles are claimed to be derived from observation of the human condition. A second strand in the Mandevillean analysis is not fully developed until Part 2 of the Fable of the Bees. Here Mandeville becomes interested in the origin and progress of society, much in the mode that came to dominate Scottish Enlightenment thought in writers such as Adam Ferguson and Lord Monboddo. Mandeville’s treatment of the origin of language is particularly interesting in this context. While this “conjectural history” is alleged to be based on empirical observation, it can also be seen as a logical construct, a model which is used to explain the historical evolution of society from primitive barbarism to the polite, commercial refinement of eighteenth-century Europe. In this paper I will explore the nature and meaning of Mandeville’s different focuses on the nature and origin of society and consider in what ways they contribute to the great eighteenth-century debate about progress. The two strands of his thought may be seen as a link between the sceptical literature of seventeenth century France and the eighteenth- century conjectural history of the Scottish Enlightenment. I hope by this re-assessment to show the central importance that he played in the development of eighteenth-century social theories which ultimately underlay the emergence of modern, social science.

Alessandro Chiessi – University of Bologna

Humorism a posteriori: Fables and dialogues as a Method in Mandeville’s thought

Reading The Fable of the Bees and the other writings of Bernard Mandeville, it is possible to find a lot of different literary genres, spacing from fables and poems to dialogues and essays, through pamphlet and treatises. In this paper I would show how Mandeville’s literary experimentalism seems to be the consequence of an epistemological aim: the objectification of the case study. Taking seriously Mandeville’s statements about the “Reader’s Diversion” (Fable of the Bees) in a “Good Humor’d manner” (Letter to Dion), it is possible to see an explicit aim with an explicit method, which brings to another purpose: the estrangement from themes and arguments described or, in other words, from the object analysed. Here, came out a particular outline of empiricism that, besides essays and treatises, uses also fables and dialogues to explain Human Nature and its expressions in society. Specifically, giving glimpse to the poetical writings, fables and burlesque poems are genres used for the estrangement and the objectification of their literary subjects. This purpose, in fables, is obtained with a neutral style and a humble theme, where the parallelism between animal and men creates a moral pattern, and so its objectification. On the other side, in burlesque poems, a trivial style utilised for describing epic themes, produces a stylistic and thematic mismatch, which, at the end, causes to the same estrangement and objectification. Mandeville achieves these similar effects, in dialogues, through the play and struggle of different point of view. Here the rhetoric strategy of characters shows their opposite positions and conflicting argumentations: so their distances. If fables and dialogues are specific instruments of an empirical method, why it is possible to talk about ‘Humorism a posteriori’? First of all, because good humour, diversion and amusement are the result of Mandeville’s stylistic choices, so coming after reading: a posteriori; secondly, because Humorism is the effect of figures of speech as irony and literary solutions as satire. In this perspective, Humorism can be considered an experimental method adopted for the empirical description of Human Nature.

Andrea Branchi Courage and chastity in a commercial society Mandeville's point on male and female honour

A central theme in Mandeville's writing is the analysis of contemporary rituals of polite sociability, of male and female codes of honourable behaviour. Concurring with those Continental writers who stressed the components of hypocrisy and modish deceit implicit in the tradition of civility, Mandeville sees the rules of honour and politeness as the progressive outcome of a spontaneous balance of selfish passions in forms compatible with refined commercial sociability. For the Dutch Doctor, human behaviour, in its apparent variety of motivations, can be traced back to the passion of self-love, its effects and the efforts carried out to control, hide and gratify it. The desire for praise is a constant property of human nature that assumes different shapes in different historical contexts. In this perspective Mandeville carefully distinguishes between the constant and universal mechanism of human passions and the forms it takes, that is between honour in a general sense, as a technique for reciprocal gratification, and the early 18th century British ideal of gentlemanliness, Modern Honour.

The aim of this essay is to offer a survey of the uses developed by Mandeville of the notion of honour in his philosophical project, focusing on the role played by ‘Modern Honour’ in his conjectural account of the civilizing process. In particular, the issues of duelling and of the position and role of women in society are two parallel perspectives to look at Mandeville's provocative account of male and female 'points of honour'. Unlike his contemporaries, Mandeville does not consider the culture of honour and its most extreme expressions, such as the practice of duelling, simply as an absurd atavism that oddly survived in 18th century British polite society. His effort to explain the popularity of 'Modern Honour' plays an important role in his larger philosophical project of scientific, unprejudiced analysis of human nature. For Mandeville the vitality of duelling, especially among those polite gentlemen who are supposedly better equipped with moral and civic virtues, is proof that the true motivations of man’s behaviour are to be found in pride, vanity, and self-liking rather than in benevolence. The standards of female honour too, are a revealing perspective. The issue of women's role in society is for Mandeville a field that magnifies the incoherencies and hypocrisies of the ‘Moralists & Reformers’. The courtship rituals, the different forms of education allotted to men and women, the harsh reality of conjugal life, the profound inequality of women's condition, all this demonstrates how society is based not on rational ideals of virtue or on a supposed natural benevolence, but rather on a balance between selfish passions. Locating the history of male honour and female respectability in the perspective of his philosophical anthropology, Mandeville is able to show that the rituals of Modern Honour are an exemplary expression of that spontaneous, artificial order stemming out of a natural disposition of human passions.

Béatrice Guion (Université de Strasbourg)

The Fable of the Bees: proles sine matre?

The motto chosen by Montesquieu in his captatio benevolentiæ for De l'esprit des lois could easily be applied to Mandeville's Fable of the Bees : from a literary point of view, the work is a mixture of genres. My premise is that formal choices are not only formal, but say something about Mandeville's intents, and are not without relevance as to the variegated interpretations given to the Fable. The first version, The Grumbling Hive, appears as a poem that can be inscribed within the satirical verse tradition, which was well represented in England at the turn of the 17th and the 18th centuries, and which assumes a political and social aim. The second version, whose title explicitly refers to the genre of the fable, adds to the social and political dimension a concern for moral unmasking, much in the manner both of La Fontaine's Fables, which Mandeville translated in English, and of the 17th century French Augustinian Moralists : it echoes the writings of French Moralists in the claim of « anatomizing the invisible part of man » (Remark N). It adds prose remarks, which can recall the remarks of Bayle's Dictionary. As for the second part of the Fable, it takes on the form of a philosophical dialogue. Mandeville's indebtedness toward the French Moralists was noticed – often to be denounced – by the first readers (and censors) of the Fable of the Bees : Mandeville was accused of plundering Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, Jacques Esprit, Pierre Bayle. The affinities between his portrayal of human nature and that of the French Moralists are well known, especially the prominence given to self-love and passions. What I would like to consider is not so much the commun motifs as how it can be associated with a specific kind of writing. It is no coincidence that similar questions were raised about Mandeville and about both La Rochefoucauld and Bayle ; and that such a wide range of contradictory interpretations have been given of these authors : all of them have been accused of being immoral and cynical, all of them have also been labelled (namely by modern scholars) as rigorist Augustinians. Such questions never arose either for Jacques Esprit or for Pierre Nicole, despite the similitudes of their views on human nature. This is why it matters to take into account the kind of writing : not only Mandeville in the Fable dismisses the theological background, just as La Rochefoucauld does, whereas Pascal, Nicole, Jacques Esprit do not conceal either their theological premises or their apologetic intent, but, furthermore, he shares with La Rochefoucauld the refusal of a systematic thinking and, consequently, of systematic writing. They both put forth a writing which is deliberately ironical, paradoxical, and leading to aporia. The use of paradox is not only inherent in La Rochefoucauld's Maxims and Reflections, but also in the writings of French free thinkers : one can remind the works of La Mothe Le Vayer, as well as the Exercitationes paradoxicae of Gassendi. The same could be said about the choice of the philosophical dialogue form, often used by La Mothe Le Vayer ; it is significant that Mandeville in the Preface to the second part of the Fable chose to place his formal choice under the patronage of Gassendi, stating he would « never have ventur'd » upon this manner of writing without such precedent. Last but not least, when in the « Remark T » he says that he does not write for the multitude, but for « the few that can think abstractly, and have their minds elevated upon the vulgar », one is bound to think of the exact same claim made by La Mothe Le Vayer (and more generally the French free thinkers of the first half of the 17th century). As Kaye noticed, Mandeville is a conscious stylist. He is also, as Hundert pointed out, a self- conscious member of the Republic of Letters : his formal choices, – generic, rhetorical and stylistic –, and their grounding in well known traditions of writing (at least on the continent), are not devoid of significance, and may help understand intents that the text of The Fable of the bees carefully blurs.

Mandeville’s contradictory engagement with dialogue: strategic action and communicative reason in The Fable of the Bees

Dialogue dominated the cultural life of eighteenth-century Britain, both as the spirit of what Jürgen Habermas calls ‘communicative reason’ and as a genre. That spirit was facilitated by the institutions described in Habermas’s earlier work on the public sphere. Formal dialogues on almost every subject proliferated and had a new-found sophistication. Like many of his contemporaries, Bernard Mandeville chose to write in this genre, in which he proved particularly adept. The principal examples are The Virgin Unmask’d, A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions, Part II of The Fable of the Bees, and An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour. This would suggest a commitment to dialogic values, but dialogues themselves can be more or less dialogic; they can be unbalanced or abusive, or dialogic in a formal sense only, with exchanges that are catechistical rather than discursive.

Mandeville’s theory of the origin of language and his aesthetics, as outlined in The Fable, posits a primal dialogue between previously isolated human beings at the dawn of society. Mandeville sees the origin of language in serving strategic action. However, Habermas, in his later work, proposes that there is a primary tendency towards mutuality and communicative reason; strategic action is the distortion of this faculty. And yet here, and elsewhere, Mandeville does display a considerable commitment to dialogic values, especially as regards the inclusion of women in public debate.

The aesthetic Mandeville favours is a democratic one—and it is dialogic, inviting debate and judgement in contrast to the monological rhetoric of grand opera or Italian painting, whose luxuriousness is suspect (despite Mandeville’s notorious defence of vice and luxury elsewhere). This aesthetic is itself revealed through dialogue—significantly, with the added voice of a woman, Fulvia, in the exchanges between Horatio and Cleomenes. But the dialogicity is modulated by satire, which may be said to breach the conditions of mutual, reasoned discourse. Looking at these arguments, and at the feminist, anti-authoritarian rhetoric of The Virgin Unmask’d, I will show the shifting modes in Mandeville’s work and his ambivalent relationship to dialogue—an ambivalence that lies at the heart of early capitalist society itself over the relationship between the individual and sociality.

Dr Bill Hughes

Mandeville and the diagnostic and therapeutics of melancholic passions. Cláudio Carvalho (University of Coimbra)

Despite Mandeville’s personal unwillingness to exercise clinical practice, in his 1711 Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions one can find an innovative approach to illness, both concerning the diagnostics and therapy. That extensive work, assuming the dialogical form and inserted in the complex transition from the still prevalent humoural theory to the modern clinic, grants the patient with an important role in the description and interpretation of the symptoms. Hypochondria and Hysteria were two classical variants in the nosography of melancholic temperament and illness, distinct by their respective incidence on the mental and the body and with different prevalence on men and women. Both conditions epitomize the growth of diseases whose aetiology is related with the development of urban lifestyle and new personal and social demands. This incidence of Hypochondria and Hysteria cannot be dissociated from the so-called “English Malady”, related to the generalization of the cult of sensibility in various domains of social life. Medical practice becomes less restricted to the treatment of fractures, simple manias and pure apoplexies predominant in rural life. Modern clinic develops a new awareness of the complex web of physiological, psychic and social causes of disease, trying to grasp features that menace individual integrity and, eventually, society itself. So it is natural that we find traces of Mandeville’s understanding of melancholic diseases in the Fable of the Bees, not so much concerning nosography nor therapeutic methods, but the causes and social inscription of various disturbances in passions of the soul. The physician stands at a particularly privileged site to grasp the way in which society is affected and reacts to passions grounded on physiology, but also how social relations have come to develop new spheres of passion, resulting in feelings of joys and sufferings always subjected to social normativity. The physician holds the compass of individual health or integrity, but in some cases, it could apply it to measure the level of social organization or deviance. However, Mandeville seems not interested in extending unnecessarily the analogy between the treatment of the individual body by the art of medicine and the governance of the social body by Political Power. Philoperio, the physician of the Treatise, “weights” the complains of his patients in order to access their present state and restore their vigour or, at least, ameliorate their health. The pragmatic valuing of experience and the unadorned prescriptions, resorting to individualized dietetic and physical exercises -refusing medical speculation and superfluous reasoning- are the hallmark of the Treatise.

Edmundo Balsemão Pires (Department of Philosophy, Communication and Information, Faculty of Letters, University of Coimbra)

Mandeville and the eighteenth-century discussions about Luxury

The two contemporary authors that decisively contributed to the renewal of the theoretical premises of the Political Economy, J. M. Keynes and F. A. Hayek, have both recognized the crucial importance of Bernard de Mandeville’s work. In the “Short Notes Suggested by the General Theory”, “10. Notes on Mercantilism…” J. M. Keynes applauded B. Mandeville’s ideas about the role of luxury and consumption in the commercial and industrial development of the Nation contrasting such ideas with the moral doctrines of former Economists centred on the praise of frugality, self-denial, or private and public saving. F. A. Hayek’s Law, Legislation and Liberty defined the epistemological profile of the Social Sciences and a third type of order, neither natural nor intentional, the so-called social spontaneous order. The author acknowledged the leading role of Mandeville and Hume in the explanation of the social spontaneous order, especially in the distinction between social order and intentional moral actions. I would argue that Keynes’s and Hayek’s reassessments aren’t conflicting. Both describe the formation of the modern autonomous Economic discipline, its connection with established descriptions of modern society, the sunset of the traditional philosophical foundations of moral reasoning and the evolution of the so-called “commercial society”. B. Mandeville’s views on the theme of luxury and overconsumption in his Fable of the Bees and other writings is a privileged starting point for the explanation of these aspects of the path to the autonomy of the Economic discipline. I will envisage the three mentioned aspects from a combined semiotic and systemic perspective through my reading of Mandeville’s texts and other contemporary textual sources on the topic of luxury. Mandeville’s work and the other sources of the luxury debates, D. Hume’s essay on Luxury, J. F. Melon’s Essai Politique sur le Commerce, Montesquieu’s L’Esprit des Lois, Voltaire’s Le Mondain, J. F. Saint-Lambert’s “Luxe” in the Encyclopédie, and others, will assist in the illustration of the XVIII century descriptions of society focused on the imaginary conditions of the social order and interaction. Luxury entails a public differentiating use of objects and commodities which is grounded on the overlapping of the spending with commodities and the ostentation of perceptible signs stimulating social imitation. In the XVIII century, the debates on luxury emphasized the importance of the scrutiny of the power of imagination as intimately related to the contagious and mimetic character of the use of luxury objects. Thus, “luxury” represents a conceptual and, more generally, a semantic momentum in the evolution of the description of the society grounded on the influence of imitation. The several textual testimonies of the luxury debates in the XVIII century, including Mandeville’s contribution, attest the epistemological perplexity regarding the status of the psychic side of the definition of commodities, or economic goods, as utilities responding to specific human needs: the escalade of the emulation in the acquisition of luxury objects seems to deny any relevant connection of luxury to basic needs. This justifies the reference to imagination as the psychic source of the needs connected to luxury consumption and the absence of a direct correspondence between luxury goods and needs. The Physiocrats and J. J. Rousseau have deplored the ambitions of an artificial society made of artificial needs far from the natural rhythms of the agrarian production, but they followed a line of critique already present at the end of the XVII century, in the popular, satirical, use of the terminology related to “luxury” or in the writings of J. F. du Tramblay or Fénelon, for example. But the expansion of the international trade and the early development of the world economic system brought to Europe the raw materials for the manufacturing and commerce of vanity goods with increasing economic importance. The international trade of luxury commodities and associated raw materials created the conditions for new habits of consumption and public behaviour as well as a curiosity for the exotic accompanied by all sorts of fiction, especially those related to the Oriental habits and way of live. These marks of the evolution of the global trade may be seen as the general conditions for the “commercial society”, as the ground for what I called the epistemological perplexity about the new placement of the wants for economic goods in the notion of the economic utility and for the generation of the modern concept of taste. The modern idea of taste, illustrated in the conceptual problems of E. Burke and A. Gérard, is acclimatised in the “commercial society” along the evolution of the semantics of luxury, reflecting similar conceptual instabilities. Indeed, the discussion of the role of the imagination on taste formation is directly linked to the luxury debates about the role of imagination in the transformation of the needs. In my contribution, I will emphasize the mutual correspondence of the autonomy of the aesthetical categories and the autonomy of the economic explanation of spending, regarding the ancient support of the decorum and utilitas in the exclusive psychic definition of the needs, wants and desires. The importance gave to the imagination in the aesthetical perception of Art and in the formation of the aesthetical category of taste is a counterpart of the progress to an order based on the rules of sympathy, conversation, property and imitation of the polite which are also the rules of a proper luxury consumption and of the tasteful behaviour in society. But the knowledge of these rules is not equivalent to the understanding of the human soul. It demands the perception of the social norms of imitation. I will argue that the debates on luxury unlocked the way to the affirmation of society as a domain structured through its own elements, which the XVIII century described as mimetic and imaginary elements. This represents an essential aspect of the semantic constellation of the European Enlightenment as a movement of intense exchange of semantic and conceptual trends. The historical importance of B. Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees and his disconnection of society and moral reasoning may be scrutinized from this standpoint.

______Emanuela Scribano (Università di Siena)

Mandeville et Smith sur la “main invisible”

Mandeville a été parfois indiqué comme la source de la théorie visée par Adam Smith sous la métaphore de la “main invisible”. La métaphore est utilisée par Smith dans la Theory of moral sentiments comme dans l’Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations. Dans le premier ouvrage la main invisible est dirigée par la providence, une référence qui ne revient pas dans The Wealth of Nations. Ce changement relève moins d’une “laïcisation” de la métaphore que d’un choix par rapport aux stratégies de maîtrise des analyses des mécanismes sociaux menées par Mandeville.

Eric Letonturier (Université Paris Descartes Sorbonne/CERLIS/ISCC)

B. Mandeville: contrat social et sociologie des mœurs

La présente communication se situera dans le prolongement d’une recherche antérieure visant à faire de Mandeville un pionnier d’une tradition sociologique attachée aux rôle et place de l’action individuelle dans les situations collectives. Au risque de l’anachronisme, on s’emploiera ici à montrer le caractère authentiquement sociologique des raisonnements développés dans La Fable des abeilles tant au niveau de l’analyse des mœurs qu’il propose qu’au niveau de sa conception du contrat social. Sa sociologie passe par l’abandon des grands concepts et des couples d’opposés que la philosophie a forgés. Inaugurant l’entrée dans le monde de la raison, le contrat est habituellement pensé, dans les différentes théories politiques qui s’y rapportent, comme un moment de rupture avec l’état de nature et les passions humaines. Or, pour Mandeville, « on peut être sûr que ce qui reste en l’homme, c’est la nature », soient ses passions et ses intérêts, sur lesquels il ne s’agira pas de statuer moralement. La raison n’est pas appréhendée philosophiquement, comme une catégorie abstraite ou comme une disposition innée, mais dans ses conditions et modalités concrètes d’exercice. De la raison on passe alors à la rationalité, et de l’homme à l’individu, à ses actions et à ses mobiles. En renonçant à l’hypothèse d’un avant/après contrat et en postulant l’idée d’une permanence anthropologique, Mandeville est alors conduit à faire une sociologie des passions en montrant les divers ressorts et moyens que les individus déploient, sans menacer l’ordre social, pour les satisfaire en société. Le contrat social signe moins un acte fondateur et l’abandon des prérogatives de chacun que « l’insociable sociabilité » de tous, en exacerbant, comme le montera Kant plus tard, la double tendance à l’association et à la séparation qui travaille tout individu. Il révèle les conditions nouvelles d’une liberté que Mandeville analysera d’un point de vue dynamique et dans ses modalités concrètes de réalisation, à travers les négociations et ajustements que chaque individu opère entre ses passions et inexpugnables inclinations et les moyens sociaux et moraux disponibles qui constituent l’environnement normatif et contraignant pour y parvenir. L’espace de la sociabilité sera le terrain de prédilection de ces arbitrages en devenant un « ordre de la dissimulation » où chacun joue, détourne à ses propres fins et sous des formes extérieures honorables une partie des règles collectives au moyen des opportunités que leur plastique et flou offrent. En cela réside la « ludique sociale » (Simmel) qui concilie l’impératif de l’interdépendance et de coopération sociale tout en préservant, au sein même de la société, une sorte d’état de nature où chacun réalise ses finalités personnelles. ______Eugene Heath, State University of New York at New Paltz

As Free for Acorns as for Honesty: Mandeville and the Ethics of Commerce

Bernard Mandeville is one of the most significant theorists of the morals of commerce. This statement will surprise. After all, we know that for Mandeville commerce has no morals! A bustling commercial society requires egoism—from private vices, public benefits. So what contribution might Mandeville make to a discussion of the ethics of commerce (or business ethics, as it is typically called)? Setting aside his egoist perspective, Mandeville offers important insights into the nature and dynamics of society and commerce. I re-articulate these insights as heuristic postulates relevant to investigations into commercial ethics, explain their basis in Mandeville’s works, and explore their implications for business ethics more generally. In the following paragraphs, I summarize these postulates.

(i) Through his colorful portrayal of commercial society, Mandeville seeks to render explicit its anatomy. His portrait reveals how assumptions about markets may structure and affect one’s overall outlook. So I set forth a first postulate: moral and political critics must bring to awareness their own assumptions (figurative or theoretical) and thereby anatomize any implicit model of markets.

(ii) The ethicist of business must also take seriously the ways in which (as Mandeville often suggests) beneficial social patterns might emerge unintentionally—at least if certain background or framing conditions are present. Therefore, in examining a particular ethical problem or scenario, a consideration of the underlying conditions of commerce may prove as important a subject as the actual scenario.

(iii) In delineating a theory of the evolution of morals and manners, Mandeville suggests that normative resolutions may arise within rather than from outside the system. As a third postulate I suggest that an examination of an ethical problem in business must take into account whether repeated interaction would allow individuals to affect and to learn from one another, thereby generating norms and conduct from within.

(iv) One aim of the business ethicist is normative—to encourage moral conduct among companies and individuals. However, Mandeville casts doubt on the motivating power of rational counsel, suggesting instead that experience and practice are essential to improvements in both techniques and behavior. Therefore, another postulate testifies as to how moral knowledge is, in part, derivative of moral practice.

(v) According to Mandeville, to enjoy a productive and wealthy society, one must allow for egoistic pursuits. Critics charged that Mandeville was supporting vice. Against their indictments, Mandeville maintained that he sought not to support vice but to reveal the incompatibility of prosperity with the practice of a moral ideal. Such an insight, if generalized, points out the importance to business ethicists (and moralists of all stripes) of analyzing principles with an eye to the compatibility of moral ideal and empirical reality.

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.

Gonçal Mayos Solsona (Universitat de Barcelona, Spain)

Neither lions nor lambs, the era of bees

The Fable of the Bees shows, explicit and crudely, the new capitalist and bourgeois values. Mandeville exemplifies those values through the metaphor of a hive: industrious bustle, collaborative and competitive at the same time, where everyone drives and feeds from everyone. The whole hive-world is tied by basic passions (at the same time consubstantial with man and expressed prominently in XVIII century society) which refer to the complex Spinoza´s conatus.

The self-love is linked mainly to the self-preservation of Hobbes and we can associate it with typical Darwinian evolution, more mechanical-biological, individual and egoist. The self-liking is also innate and instinctive, but linked to human cultural sociability, to the “eusocial” evolution (E.O. Wilson) and -by including the desire to be recognized and valued- it may generate effects where selfish would end in altruistic results.

Mandeville opposes his conception of humanity (largely unconscious of their dependence on bourgeois values) to those of the feudal or military aristocracy (bravery, courage, honor, vital excess, strength, hierarchy, distinction...) and to those of the clergy (asceticism, poverty, celibacy, spirituality, antimundanity, charity, turning the other cheek...). While the claim of the industrious "honeycomb" it’s not a legitimizing idealization, Mandeville thinks he has revealed the stark reality and that this is enough for a wise reader (which includes the political elite of the state). Significantly Mandeville is fascinated (as it was Francis Bacon) with the power of the more creative bees (they produce something new for themselves), compared with ants (mere gatherers) and with the less gregarious and socially dependent spiders. Anticipating and being more radical than David Hume and Adam Smith, Mandeville shows how the virtues and dialectics of the beehives and human societies (which have little to do with the heroic or ascetic virtues) are crucial for building the wealth of nations and the power of the States. As “eusocial” collaboration of humans includes many private vices, anticipating Kant's anthropological duality.

This way, bees and bourgeoisie become more useful to the State, compared with the two greater classes that traditionally were closer to it: the warrior aristocracy and the legitimizing Church. Surprisingly the humble bee (more industrious and therefore more vicious) beats the lion and the lamb (classic symbols of power and emblems of the two traditional ruling classes).

Işıl Çeşmeli (Middle East Technical University, Ankara / Turkey, Department of Philosophy)

Is Adam Smith heir of Bernard Mandeville?

In the eighteenth century, sociability, sympathy, benevolence and self-love constituted the main themes of moral discourse. Francis Hutcheson’s, David Hume’s and Adam Smith’s philanthropic approaches resulted in theories of moral sense viz. benevolence, fellow feeling and sympathy. These philosophers principally focused on the fact that moral sentiments could not be offspring of self-interest. Conversely, Bernard Mandeville attempted to annihilate social ethic by asserting self-love as a primary motivation of man. His notoriety among eighteenth century moralists was due to his famous motto “private vices cause public benefits”, his undaunted confession of self-love as a basic motive of human nature and its beneficial effects for a prosperous society. Many philosophers and moral theorists concentrated on his “selfish hypothesis” by offering counter arguments and justifications about origin of human nature, character of moral virtue and explanation of moral judgments. In his earlier work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS), Adam Smith defends the mechanism of sympathy as a ground of moral sentiments and draw attention to altruistic characteristic of human nature. Although Adam Smith designates Mandeville’s thesis as “licentious system” in TMS by propounding sympathy or fellow feeling at the basis of morality, it is very surprising that he uses self- interest principle in The Wealth of Nations (1776) as a basic motive of human beings. Is Smith heir of Mandeville? Is Smith’s system a reconstruction of Mandeville’s moral and social appraisal? I will discuss whether Smith’s moral theory is successful to overcome Mandeville’s selfish principle or he successfully reconciles sympathy and self-love or not.

Joaquim Braga (University of Coimbra, R&D LIF – Language, Interpretation, Philosophy)

Satire and Society. Mandeville's Expressivist Moral Imperative

It is our belief that a theoretical reading of Bernard Mandeville’s Work without the consideration of the satirical elements that compose it, is an incomplete and equivocal reading, and may also lead to a distorted view of the Mandevillean morality. The satirical forms have at their core a peculiar discursive expressiveness that distinguishes them from other narrative genres. It is a double expressiveness, not only formal, because its moral content, almost always supported by the binomium “virtue-vice”, has firstly as social referent the externalization ways (the character) of human beings. The caricature arises therefore inevitable. It is precisely this second aspect that is very present in the satirical intent of Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees. As a symptom of the commercial society, Mandeville realizes the enormous moral incongruity – “hypocrisy”, according to the author – between action and expression, between individual practices and moral defense of collective values. He begins by satirizing man's hypocritical moralist discourse, since it corresponds to an ethics without empirical content, without any equivalence in terms of individual action of man in the modern society. Thus, our main goal is to analyze the Mandevillean fundamentals of the relationship between satirical discourse and moral transparency, intending to show at the same time, that the “expressivist moral imperative” which emerges from Mandeville’s satire is the solution proposed by him to modern morality – in our view, however, this solution never ceases to be itself satirical.

John J. Callanan, King’s College London

Mandeville on Pride and Animal Nature

Mandeville’s first publication – the thesis Disputatio Philosophica de Brutorum Operationibus (1689) – advocated the Cartesian position that both denied feeling and sensation, let alone thought, to non-human animals and stressed the inherent distinctiveness of the conscious sensory and inferential capacities of human agents. Yet his later writings subscribed to a directly opposed Enlightenment position. His translation of La Fontaine’s Fables of course drew human and animal comparisons throughout, and by the time of the Fable of the Bees, Mandeville was clearly in the camp stressing the continuity of human and non-human animal nature, a tradition following Hobbes, Montaigne and La Rochefoucauld, and later to include Helvetius, de la Mettrie and Hume. The function of pride in Mandeville’s metaethics is examined in terms of this debate, framed by Bayle’s famous ‘Rorarius’ entry in his Dictionary. The theological motivation for the denial of continuity is unsurprisingly maintained by dualists such as Descartes and Gassendi (otherwise opposed in so many ways) but also later by French materialists such as Condillac in his Traité des Sensations. With this background in place, Mandeville’s claim regarding the psychological of pride as the ‘other Recompense…[of] the vain Satisfaction of making our Species appear more exalted and remote from that of other Animals’ is then discussed. It is suggested as a critique of Shaftesbury’s discussion in the Characteristics relating to changes in animal nature in response to abundance of resources as well as to Shaftesbury’s various comments on the distinction between human and animal nature.

Julio Seoane-Pinilla (Universidad de Alcalá, Spain)

Mandeville-Hutcheson: a strange couple with the same religious concern

Mandeville and Hutcheson are obviously opposed authors. The second is released to the world with a critique of the first, and Mandeville, in turn, composed his Fable of Bees as opposed to Shaftesbury’s model –who was the Hutcheson’s inspiration. But between the two, and this is the basis of my work, is outlined the Modernity which understand the religion in a non-deistic mode, I mean without an initial assumption of God as a guarantee of our rationality, but in a way that reaches the religion as a result of having previously submitted the mere world of men.

I am interested in these two positions because (a) they don’t require God to its constitution (which, in this way, is radically human), but (b) both introduce him because they can't imagine the world without the Deity, or better, because they consider that mankind lives better with the feeling of God as an expression of benevolence, in the case of Hutcheson, or with the belief in a dark predestination beyond words in the Mandeville’s case. The issue I would like to remark is about the way both authors understand the religious role not only as a part of our liberal and capitalist societies, but also, and above all, as an important piece in order to compose such societies after having established them in a raw human way.

“After”: I think the place where God is situated into the thought of Mandeville and Hutcheson is very important; and I would like to talk about such apparently trivial issue because it is the way Deity could be incorporated to our human societies –not as a last reference to our civil order, as the guarantor of our law and rules, but as a fellow, a comrade who gives calm and relief to our concerns (giving us the necessary comfort to face a changing world led for the human interest –yes, I think this is also the case of Hutcheson as his clever student, A. Smith, noted).

What it could be gained with this strange couple? Simon Chritchley’s last book, The Faith of the Faithless, argues that the Enlightenment forged our world with an allegedly secular speech claiming to eschew God, but that this flight from God was fictional because beneath the secular concepts religious belief lies hidden and, consequently, our Politics become a Theological Politics (which causes tremendous distortions in our present because we have been founding religious politics under the mask of secular democracies and this generates a democracy which is not an authentic democracy). On this point I think that from Hutcheson and Mandeville we learn that faith can write a faithless discourse, and because this is a discourse forged with the comfort of the faith which is coming after our bet for a merely human society, it doesn’t drive us to a world full of hidden assumptions of faith (avoiding distortions of democratic life).

Laura J. Rosenthal (University of Maryland, USA)

Mandeville, Smith, and Sentimental Drama

In the eighteenth century, Mandeville was attacked for both his economic theory and for his assault on conventional morality, a dichotomy that has continued to shape Mandeville criticism. Yet, Adam Smith addresses Mandeville most extensively not in his Wealth of Nations, but in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, which not only responds through philosophy rather than economics, but also departs from the reliance on Christian scruples found in the period’s most visible anti-Mandeville moralists. In this paper, I will discuss Smith’s analysis of Mandeville as way to gain insight into the kind of challenge Mandeville posed. Smith, who frequently turns to the theater for examples of moral sentiments, responded to The Fable of the Bees through recourse to sympathy at the same moment that a new kind of sentimental drama was flourishing in the theater. E.J. Hundert was right, I believe, to note that Mandeville created such a stir because he identified a new social and economic mode that was distinctly modern and that had not been fully accounted for yet by moralists or economists. Certain practices once considered sinful, such as usury, had now become the foundation of a new economy. From an economic or even a moral perspective, then, Mandeville’s argument was profoundly disturbing and difficult to dismiss. Perhaps because of this, sentimentalism, rather than moral or economic analyses, became the response that may have gained the most traction in the long term and that attracted audiences to the theater. Sentimentalism became popular in the theater well before it made its way into fiction and philosophy. To be sure, we cannot credit Mandeville with inspiring 18th-century sentimental drama. But sentimentalism, I will suggest, rose at least in part in response to the kinds of contradictions that Mandeville identified. (Thus, prominent sentimental plays tell economic stories, commonly exploring global trade, business, and gambling.) Mandeville presents a world devoid of sentiment in the same moment that playwrights were remaking the literary landscape by rejecting the harsh cynicism of Restoration drama and drawing crowds through the exploration and inspiration of emotions. For Mandeville, feelings remain grounded in physiology, a view that makes possible his radical stance on prostitution as a commercial exchange little different from any other. The true scandal of his solution to the problem of sexual irregularity in his Modest Defense of Publick Stews (1724) may have been less the acceptance of sexual activity outside of marriage than his representation of sentimental attachment as potentially irrelevant to sexual relations, a possibility that sentimental drama seems designed to refute. Debuting only two years before the initial publication of the Modest Defense, Richard Steele’s blockbuster sentimental comedy, The Conscious Lovers, hinges on whether Bevil Junior’s financial support of Indiana implies prostitution, charity, or restrained romantic passion. Respecting Indiana’s sexual virtue would have satisfied moral demands, but in itself would not have satisfied audiences. Sentimentalism itself, as Ann Jessie Van Sant has discussed, had strong roots in bodily response, and certainly much attention to sentimentalism and sensibility concentrated on physical reactions to particular kinds of stimulation, including those that were unfiltered and outside of the framework of moral choice. The most interesting responses to the Mandevillian challenge, I believe, hinge on the distinction between an understanding of sentimentalism and sensibility as essentially visceral, or alternatively as a set of responses that can be shaped, cultivated and controlled. Within Steele’s Conscious Lovers and Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, both models appear. In order to demonstrate the potential transition from visceral responses to moral sentiments, Smith turns to the theater as a model, which was nevertheless itself continually haunted by Mandevillian possibilities.

Mandeville and Smith on the problem of moral order

Luís Oliveira

Unidade I&D LIF - Universidade de Coimbra Grupo “A Individuação na Sociedade Moderna”

The discussion over the concept of Moral Virtue in Bernard Mandeville’s opus caused an impact in XVIII Century British Moral Philosophy as a critique to the rationalist conception of an immutable idea of the good and the bad, virtue and vice. In the commentary to the poem Fable of the Bees titled as An Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue1, Mandeville interprets the concept of Moral Virtue as an outcome of a process where lawgivers and the powerful took conscience that pride is the passion at stake in governance, and that the emulation of mankind’s rationality - as the superior human faculty over what it is possible to do the moral distinction between the good and the bad, virtue and vice – is the argument that better serves Civilization, and the possibility for a few to govern the vast majority, reaping the fruits of their work and self-denial. This process is scrutinized by B. Mandeville in An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour2. In this scrutiny the heart of the argument is dominated by the concept of Self-Liking, the main passion in individual motivation, and the concept of Honour, the primary mean that the author identifies in advanced societies to bring individuals to commit determined acts, functioning

1 MANDEVILLE, Bernard - «An Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue», in The Fable of the Bees or Private Vices, Publick Benefits, 2 vols. With a Commentary Critical, Historical, and Explanatory by F.B. Kaye (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1988), Vol. I, PP 77-84; 2 MANDEVILLE, Bernard – An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour and the Usefulness of Christianity in War (Londres: John Brotherton, 1732). [edição fac-similada]; by the effect that it has over the passion of Self-Liking. In this conceptualization works a distinction between what Mandeville identifies as the two systems that could establish moral order in society: the system of Honour and the system of Virtue. Thus, this work first purpose would be to clarify Mandeville’s critique of the concept of Moral Virtue presented in An Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue, under his late essay An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour. The second purpose would be to analyze the The Theory of Moral Sentiments3 Adam Smith´s critique to Mandeville´s moral system over the definition of virtue, where the Scottish author intends to identify, in the first place, what would be Mandeville´s main fallacy sustaining the thesis «The Moral Virtues are the Political Offspring which Flattery begot upon Pride»4, but also what in that licentious moral system «bordered the truth». Here, this work´s third and final purpose would be to compare Mandeville´s elaboration of the two systems that could establish social order, with Adam Smith’s discussion in The Theory of Moral Sentiments of the problem of social order. To sum up, this work´s objective would be to see how the scrutiny of An Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue main thesis, that sustains the paradox «Private Vices, Publick Benefits», leads Mandeville to a distinction between what would be the best system for the definition of individual conduct, Virtue, and the best system to establish moral order in society, the system of Honour. More so, this work intends to clarify how Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments synthesizes over a single concept, sympathy, the foundation of moral order in the individual as in the society, deepening the mandevillian movement of the relative independence between the action´s deliberate end, and its objective consequences, both as regard to individual, as, most notably, to legislative action.

Martin Otero Knott Authority and Reverence: Mandeville and Temple on Governability

Bernard Mandeville’s provoking treatment of authority and reverence developed straight from his analysis of the savage family in the third dialogue of The Fable Part Two. Forming a pivotal part of his conjectural history, Mandeville developed this aspect of his account following Cleomene's

3 SMITH, Adam – The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie, vol. I de The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982); 4 MANDEVILLE, Bernard – «An Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue», in The Fable of the Bees or Private Vices, Publick Benefits, Vol. I, P 80; thought-experiment depicting a bunch of unruly and belligerent savages, an account tailed to demonstrate the dangers of excessive self-liking. Situating the problem of political philosophy as a means of finding a solution to the desire for recognition – what for Mandeville was the problem of pride – Horatio attacked Cleomenes' highly speculative account and accused him of ‘thinking abstractly indeed’. Had society really emerged from this state of atomistic and angry individuals? Breaching a gap between the standard accounts of the social contract, Cleomenes replied that ‘Societies were never made that Way.' Revealing a ‘great Delight in dwelling on the Behaviour of Savages’, furthermore, Cleomenes developed his discussion by suggesting that it was ‘highly probable, that most Societies, and Beginnings of Nations, were form’d in the Manner Sir William Temple supposes it; but nothing near so fast’.

Although Mandeville’s indebtedness to Temple has been recognised in relationship to his views on the economy,5 scholarship has neglected the pivotal role played by Temple in Mandeville’s conception of governability. While his account of (unsociable) sociability sought to explain how society came into existence, governability sought to elucidate why individuals remained within society once it came into existence. Mandeville's dialogue with Temple is crucial to understanding how he came to develop a more robust conception of governability in The Fable Part Two. This neglected relationship is even more striking considering the explicit presence of Temple’s text in the second instalment: aside from The Fable of the Bees Part One, Temple’s An Essay upon the Original and Nature of Government (Essay of Government) (1672) was the only other work explicitly referred to and read during Mandeville’s fictional dialogue. Cleomenes described Temple’s essay to Horatio as ‘worth your hearing’ and, towards the end of the fourth dialogue, confessed that he had cited large chunks from the essay ‘to make some use of it.’ In order to explore this fruitful dialogue, I will first provide an overview of Mandeville's account of governability. To understand his use of Temple's essay and to explore its significance, I will then address the British diplomat's discussion of authority. Following this, I will show how Mandeville, though drawing from Temple’s ideas, recast his pivotal observations into a more historically sensitive conjectural framework, thereby providing a powerful conduit for exploring the emergence and continuation of government from the principle of authority.

In pursuing this issue Mandeville offered not one, but two subtly distinct explanations of how unbridled and selfish brutes became tame, domesticated and governable. He first set out to describe the ways in which society and morality were invented by ‘cunning politicians’, who were adept in the arts of twisting and moulding individual self-interest by rewarding other-regarding behaviour with laudatory praise and tokens of affection. Selfless and benevolent activity was only possible for fallen men, Mandeville observed, under conditions of social existence when it became possible for selfish knaves to compete for psychological tokens in exchange for the repression and denial of their base

5 Bick, “Bernard Mandeville and the ‘Economy’ of the Dutch.” passions. Since men were, to borrow Lovejoy’s apposite expression, ‘desirers and fearers of adjectives’, men could be set to work for the pursuit of what Mandeville called ‘the invisible Wages’, those ‘airy Rewards’ that were ‘so ravishing to Mortals’. As a result of the barrage of criticism and ‘manifold clamours’ that were raised against this voluntaristic discourse of the artificial and relativistic account of the origins of morality, Mandeville recast these observations into a sophisticated conjectural scheme, where the mechanism of the manipulating politicians was eschewed in favour of a depersonalised and evolutionary account of the politics of mankind, laid out in his three famous steps to society. With a physicians eye for scrutiny, he paid close attention to man’s desire for recognition and esteem and presented the genesis of politics as the unplanned consequence resulting from the interaction of man’s anti-social qualities and their desire for a peaceful, commodious and psychologically fulfilled form of existence. While the passion of self-love explained mankind’s attempt to ameliorate their condition and improve their wellbeing, it was their inability to like themselves, by themselves — what Mandeville called ‘self-liking’ — that rendered them fit to become governable in the way that grapes could be turned into wine. For Mandeville, a truly governable subject has not only submitted to authority, but has also found ‘his own Ends in Labouring for others.' Persuading subjects that submission to government was in their best interest, whilst at the same time continually securing their allegiance by providing ample means for procuring employment in a flourishing polity, was key to creating and promoting governability. Governable subjects do not only do as they have been bid; they do it solicitously and eagerly, for they have been trained to replace their primordial inclinations with artificial desires that render them optimistic and cheerful in pursuing the ends of society in order to further their own. By connecting the problem of governability to commerce and labour, Mandeville’s sophisticated account of the genesis of voluntary servitude was therefore directly linked to his account of commercial sociability. Commerce and exchange instilled a logic of reciprocity that fomented an identification between the care of one’s self and the care of others; the trick was to create circumstances by which this self-care could be pursued to the advantage of society, and turn individual selfishness (a private vice) into communal prosperity (a public benefit). According to Mandeville, man’s desire to ‘supply his Wants’ and his constant attempt to ‘meliorate his Condition upon Earth’ fuelled progress. In the state of nature, however, these propensities for improvement were held in check: savages could not divide their labour effectively since their natural fondness for imitation created a uniformity of behaviour. Once the emergence of government had introduced a modicum of security — a state of affairs where men ‘enjoy Quiet, and no Man needs to fear his Neighbour’ — Mandeville argued that humans could exploit their potential for self-improvement by learning to ‘divide and subdivide their Labour.’ Describing the ‘great Art’ that produced the happiness and wealth of nations as consisting in ‘giving every Body and Opportunity of being employ’d’, Mandeville not only sketched the foundation for a flourishing economy, but also hinted to the ways in which the division of labour enlarged the prospects for cooperation. As labour became increasingly divided, more opportunities were opened for finding employment and rendering life on earth more commodious and refined. The development of this process, moreover, tightened the fabric of society since more men stood in need of each other in what he called the 'Superstructure' comprised of the ‘reciprocal Services, which Men do to each other’. This encouraged the socialising agent released by commerce and cooperation which inadvertently rendered man more sociable and gregarious. Forming a cobweb of social relationships, mutual dependence made cooperation an essential attribute of the good life and forced everyone to improve the lives of others in order to benefit their own. While some would decry this as a hellish nightmare that jeopardised the autonomy of men and institutionalised inequality under the blanket of liberty and progress,6 Mandeville was characteristically ambiguous, teasing and testing his readers by exhibiting how these natural and moral evils were indispensable to producing great and powerful nations.

Matteo Revolti « Remarks upon that wonderful chapter7»: the controversy about luxury between Mandeville and Dennis

On 9th April 1724 the Daily Courant published the advertising of a book entitled Vice and luxury publick mischiefs: the author of the book was the sixty-four year John Dennis, English critic, who was engaged in those years in a literary controversy with Alexander Pope. The work came out some months after the early attacks moved by Law and Fiddes against the Fable of the Bees: unlike those authors, the criticism of Dennis concerned particularly the problem of luxury exposed in Mandeville’s text8. That subject, soon become the Leitmotiv of many critics of the Fable, played an essential role within the public debate in Great Britain at the beginning of the Eighteenth century. Dennis’s contribution to the topic is important for two reasons: the topos of luxury is strongly anchored within his literary productions; moreover his book against Fable symbolized the clash between the values of the ancient Constitution and the new economy model promoted by Mandeville. Born in London from a saddler family in 1657, Dennis attended the Caius College of Cambridge and he received his Master of Art in 1683 at the Trinity Hall. After his degree he began to hang around the Will’s Coffee-house where he met the famous dramatist John Dryden who afterwards became his patron. Dennis was soon known in London for his

6 Rousseau, Rousseau, 100; For this spectre of false consciousness, see J.G.A Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, 2nd ed (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 465–466. 7 Cfr. J. Dennis, Vice and luxury publick mischiefs: or, remarks on a book intituled, The fable of the bees; or, private vices publick benefits, London, printed for W. Mears, at the Lamb, without Temple-Bar, 1724, p. 5. 8 As reported the Monthly catalogue for the year 1724, Law’s Remarks were published in January, whereas Fiddes’s Treatise in February. Concerned the controversy between Dennis and Pope sees Edward. N. Hooker, The critical works of John Dennis, 2 vol (1711-1729), Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins Press, 1943, pp. xxvi-xxx. ferocious reviews against some contemporaries authors such as Blackmore, Steele and Gay. The same Mandeville in his Letter to Dion described him as «a noted Critick, who seems to hate all Books that sell, and no other[…]9». Dennis was engaged not only in literary works but he also filled institutional appointments: in 1701 the Duke of Marlborough procured him the place of one of the Queen’s Waiter in the Custom-house. During that experience Dennis published an essay entitled A Proposal for putting a speedy end to the war about the conflict between England and France, where he proposed to boycott the French maritime commerce and to strengthen the power of the English fleet on international waters10. Particularly in the Proposal Dennis sketched his theory about the English independence from foreign costumes and commerce: he advanced the idea that English merchants could have had the monopoly of the market, financing the English fleet against their foreign competitors. During the years of the debate on Fable, the old critic was loosing the ancient prestige: he was on the margins of the literary environment and he lived isolated in his lodging near Charing Cross. The shock raised from Fable appeared for Dennis a good occasion to redeem his reputation: first of all with Vice and Luxury he intended to rehabilitate his literary position from the aspersions of Scriblerus Club’s members. Secondly, that essay offered him the opportunity to treat some arguments close to his interest. Vice and Luxury was cataloged by the first Dennis’s biographer as «a religious controversy11», whereas H. G Paul in 1911 marked it as «his last and longest political tract12»; this complicated classification of Dennis’s work can be solved through the analysis of its title, and especially paying attention to the word “luxury” contained in it. As many studies demonstrated, in England at the end of seventeenth century that topic was disconnected from the moral dimension: luxury was linked especially with the problem of commerce on the British ground13. According to that approach luxury showed itself through the introduction of

9 Cfr. B. Mandeville, A letter to Dion, occasion'd by his Book call'd Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher, London, printed and sold by J. Roberts in Warwick lane, 1732, p. 46. 10 Cfr. J. Dennis, A proposal for putting a speedy end to the war, by ruining the commerce of the French and Spaniards, and securing our own, without any additional expence to the nation, 1703. 11 Cfr. The Life of Mr. John Dennis, the renowned critik. In which are likewise some observations on most of the poets and criticks, his contemporaries. Not written by Mr.Curll, London, printed for J. Roberts in Warwick-Lane, MDCCXXXIV, p. 53. 12 Cfr. H. G. Paul, John Dennis, his life and criticism, New York, The Columbia University Press, 1911, p. 62. 13 On luxury’s controversy sees at least: J. Sekora, Luxury : the concept in western thought, Eden to Smollett, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977; Christopher J. Berry, The idea of luxury: a conceptual and historical investigation, Cambridge, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994; D. Grugel-Pannier, Luxus: eine Begriffs- und ideengeschichtliche Untersuchung unter besondere Berücksichtigung von Bernard Mandeville, Frankfurt am Main, Lang, 1996; M. Berg, Consumers and luxury: consumer culture in Europe 1650 – 1850, Manchester, Manchester Univ. Press, 1999; R. Reith, "Luxus und Konsum" - eine historische Annäherung, Münster, Waxmann, 2003; M. Berg, Luxury and pleasure in eighteenth-century Britain, Oxford, Oxford Univ. Press, 2005. foreign products in England. Consequently, luxury appeared as the negative effect of commercial activities and its foreign character was the cause of its bad reputation among the inhabitants of the British islands. This argument raised many debates: in his essay Usury at six per cent (1669) Thomas Manley criticized the proposal moved by Thomas Culpeper in his Tract against the high rate of usurie, where he had sponsored the reduction of tax’s interest from ten to six pro cent. Manley answered to Culpeper arguing the reduction would have provoked «the vain consumption of Forraign Commodities, imported by English Money14». This position against «foreign commodities» was stressed especially with the beginning of the war between France and England: the consume of foreign products, especially from France, was perceived as a betrayal against England. This alarm was launched in 1700 by A Proposal for remeeding our excessive luxury, where the anonymous author asserted that «the promoving of our Trade, and amending of our Coin, will not much increase our Stocks, until we amend our Manners: for if Luxurie bring in more Goods that by our Native product and industrie we export15». This idea of luxury as an exogenous element from England appeared in many of literary works of Dennis: in 1705 John argued that luxury had a precisely geographic collocation in French costumes and the following year he identified the music of the Italian opera as a signal of luxury16. Despite the literary attention devoted to luxury, the theme achieved a political meaning only in Dennis's Essay on publick spirits published in 1711. In the thirty-one pages of that essay he denounced the British prostitution toward the continental fashions: this submission was guilty of the death of public spirit, that is «the ardent Love of one’s Country, affecting us with a zealous Concern for its Honour and Interest, and inspiring us with Resolution and Courage to promote its Service and Glory17». According to Dennis the inhibition of this sentiment was provoked by several factors, such as the importation of foreign costumes and the impotency of the Church against the dangerous Free- Thinkers. The solution advanced by Dennis was the introduction of sumptuary laws against luxury; in particular he argued that «If what is here is publish’d is favourably reciv’d, I shall endeavour to shew in a second part the mighty Mischiefs that the introduction of foreign

14 Cfr. T. Manley, Usury at six per cent. examined, and found unjustly charged by Sir Tho. Culpepper and J.C. with many crimes and oppressions, where of 'tis altogether innocent : wherein is shewed the necessity of retrenching our luxury, and vain consumption of forraign commodities, imported by English money, London, printed by Thomas Ratcliffe, and Thomas Daniel, and are to be sold by Ambrose Isted, 1669. 15 Cfr. A proposal for remeeding our excessive luxury, p. 1. 16 J. Dennis, An essay on the opera's after the Italian manner, which are about to be establish'd on the English stage: with some reflections on the damage which they may bring to the publick, London, printed for, and to be sold by John Nutt near Stationer’s-Hall, 1706. 17 Cfr. J. Dennis, An essay upon publick spirit; being a satyr in prose upon the Manners and Luxury of the times, the chief sources of our present parties and division, London, printed for Bernard Lintott, between the Two Temple Gates in Fleetstreet, 1711, p. 2. Manners and foreign Luxury hath done to his Islands, and to rest of Europe; and the proper Methods that are to be us’d to restrain Luxury, and to retrieve Publick Spirit18». After thirteen years Dennis returned on the topic with Vice and luxury. We do not know whether this work was conceived by Dennis as Essay’s continuation: however many of Essay’s arguments appear in Vice and luxury. This work is divided into three remarks with four letters and a treatise on the excellency of Christianity in appendix. Dennis’s book was dedicated to Thomas Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. This name is significant for two reasons. First, the same Dennis dedicated in 1702 his Essay on the navy to him; second, Pembroke was appealed by Fiddes as the patron, thank to his Treatise against the Fable, two months before Vice and luxury. In his Preface Dennis argued that the origin of his essay was moved from the defence of religion meant as a bulwark of the civil society and British liberty. Particularly Dennis recognized that the current liberty is threatened by infidelity: this phenomenon raised its peak with the Fable «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 World19». In the first remark Dennis offered a semantic analysis of the title of Fable: he believed the private vices did not provoke public benefits, but only public mischiefs. Public benefits are addressed towards liberty, whereas the vices and luxury are caused by public mischiefs, as showed by the recent scandal of the South Sea Bubble. In this perspective Dennis quoted Sidney, Bacon and Machiavelli as champions of virtues and authorities of the republican tradition: Dennis's support to the republican cause was admitted by the author himself, who declared with reference to Sidney’s Discourses «I am be branded with the odious Name of Republican20». The second remark is devoted to the notes about the Inquire into the origin of moral virtues: against Mandeville’s argument about the a-moral genesis of civil society, Dennis refuted that religion and virtues are the basis of society. Particularly the old critic identified in the ancient Romans a prototype of society founded on virtues and civil values: with Machiavelli he recognized that «Roman Virtue was the Effect of their Religion, and not of the Contrivance of wary Politicians21». In the third note Dennis analyzed the famous remark L of the Fable dedicated to luxury: as the English author remembered, this praise on luxury was at the origin of his essay because «it has rais’d so much fresh Indignation in me, that I cannot help bestowing some particular Remarks upon

18 Ivi. p. v. 19 Vice and luxury, pp. xvi-xvii. 20 Ivi. p. 8. 21 Ivi. p. 48. that wonderful Chapter22». In his remark Mandeville supported the beneficial effects of luxury with three reasons: first, it had an arbitrary character because luxury could be considered everything or nothing; second, the importation of foreign luxury did not impoverish the wealth of the nation; at last its presence did not bring negative effects within the army23. Dennis refuted the thesis about the relative meaning of luxury, appealing indirectly to the Aristotelian doctrine of metriotes: according to him moderation was the best canon to identify what is excessive and what is not. As an example to prove his theory, he uses the image of diet, as medium between abstinence and gluttony. But most important Dennis’s consideration on luxury concerned the critic to Mandeville’s laissez-faire model, arguing that the model suggested by Fable’s author forced citizens to spend their savings in foreign products. A significant example of his model was expressed by Mandeville through the commerce between Turkey and England; in his remark the Dutch physician argued that the economic relationship with Turkey was an expression of the laissez-faire and a source of wealth for England24. Dennis answered to Mandeville that if a man, with a 500 £ income spends all his savings in foreign products like wine and oil, he will become poor and the nation will receive no benefits. In addition Dennis criticized Mandeville’s thesis about the impunity of luxury: in Fable the Dutch physician expressed that luxury in itself was not criminal and that corruption and robberies derived only from bad administration. Dennis asserted instead that the political administration was not guilty; for him the State had only a guarantee role and it had to defend the properties of the citizens. In this perspective the State cannot intervene into the private affairs, therefore the presence of corruption is due only to the same luxury. Finally Dennis dealt the argument about the benefits from the circulation of luxury in the military sphere, showing the absolute incompatibility between luxury and army25.

Vice and Luxury portrays a fundamental puzzle within the controversy of luxury raised by Fable: Dennis was the first author to understand Mandeville’s innovation in the economic system, reading his text as the dilation of perverse model which had spin-offs into social episodes like the South Sea Bubble. Against Mandeville’s system he opposed the values of the ancient Constitution and he appealed himself to the republican myth: the constant recovery of the ancient roman’s tradition in his works is the signal of his discomfort towards corruption of

22 Ivi. p. 51. 23 B. Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, ed. F. B. Kaye, 1 vol, Oxford, 1924, pp. 73-85. 24 Ivi. pp. 75-77. 25 Vice and luxury, pp. 59-63. the current society26. This alarm is constantly launched through the defense of civil liberty: according to Dennis, England’s liberty was threatened by its economic and cultural dependence from foreign costumes. This stress on freedom and independence places the same Dennis within the circle of the country-whig, who fought in those years against the Financial Revolution and the moneyed interests. Behind the controversy with Fable, finally Dennis developed a political text showing the contrast between the nostalgia for a virtuous and traditional society and the new economic model promoted by Fable.

Mauro Simonazzi Research Fellow in History of Political Thought at University of Camerino (Italy)

Crime and Punishment in Mandeville’s Thought

In my paper I will analyse Mandeville’s thought on crime and punishment. My first point is the relationship between ethics and law. I will show the fundamental differences between moral law and juridical law, and I will point out how vice, crime and society stay together («So vice is benefical found,/When it’s by justice lopt, and bound»). Eventually, I will make some considerations on what kind of philosophy of law is at the origin of the mandevillean theory of politics. In my second point I will analyse the nature of crime (for example, is crime a direct effect of human nature corrupted by man’s original sin or is it caused by social environment?) and some reform proposals advanced by Mandeville in the Enquiry into the Causes of the Frequent Executions at Tyburn. In conclusion, I will try to underline what is the aim of law (liberty, justice, equality, security) and who is the subject of the theory of punishment (the criminal, the victim, justice itself, society) in Mandeville’s thought.

Mikko Tolonen and Francesca Pongiglione (University of Helsinki)

26 See as for two Dennis’s significant works like Coriolanus, the invader of his country (1720) and Julius Caesar acquitted, and his murderers condemn'd (1722).

Bernard Mandeville and the psychology of poverty

In eighteenth-century discussions of poor relief, problems rising from poverty were often considered as sickness and illness. Daniel Defoe in his Giving alms no charity uses the rhetoric of ‘disease’ and ‘proper cure for it’ when discussing the poor. Bernard Mandeville was a medical doctor whose possible religious convictions did not affect his social or political thinking and who in his profession was directly engaged with the poor. We have Mandeville on the record describing that his method in medicine was to attend the sick patient, to be physically present to aid the patient’s mind and to offer proper empathy. Mandeville was critical of fellow doctors sitting in coffee-shops prescribing magic pills for high cost to poor sick people. Besides being an expert on stomach-based illnesses, Mandeville was also an eager advocate of what we might describe as layman psychology. It is apparent that Mandeville is very much an author on the poor. Poor people are a central feature in the Fable of the bees and if we take a look at the Enquiry into the causes of the frequent executions at Tyburn: and A Proposal for some Regulations concerning Felons in Prison, we realise that this is a proposal about the poor. The work contains sensible suggestions about methods to bring down the number of thieves. The opening is like any regular report or account of poor relief. Often Mandeville’s attitude towards the poor has been seen as cruel in his dismissing of charity-schools. My suggestion to this will be that this is not the case and people simply have not been bothered to place Mandeville’s discussion in the actual charity-school / poor relief context. Another point that is usually made about Mandeville is that his economic ideas are stagnated concentrating on low wages strategy, overstatement of luxury, production instead of consumption and dependence of the rise of the absolute level of living. I do not want to deny that in a sense Mandeville is a mercantile thinker, tied to some strategies that would have been better to be given up, although I will offer one important clarification. But at the same time, when we understand how he sits in his context, what turns out to be interesting is his psychological perspective on the poor and this shall be one of the main concerns of my paper. My hope is that a more analytical approach to Mandeville and the poor will help us to later frame a plausible picture of Mandeville’s place in the development of modern notion of distributive justice. Regarding the larger picture, I am particularly interested about the division into Christian and non-Christian strategies regarding the education of the children of the poor. I believe that when we study this question properly in eighteenth-century Britain, we will find some answers how the conceptual possibility of modern notion of social justice emerged in the Scottish Enlightenment. I believe Mandeville played a crucial role in shaping the discussion. So, in the end the question that I am interested in (after Samuel Fleischacker) are: How to come to the modern idea that all human beings are entitled to certain amount of material goods by virtue of being human beings under the conception of justice? When is it that we may start talking about conceptual possibility of redistribution of property as part of justice?

Peter Knox-Shaw (University of Cape Town)

Mandeville, Pope, and Apocalypse

Some years before the Scriblerians brought a comic realism to bear on the themes of prophecy and apocalypse, Mandeville produced two poems that turn on a burlesque of divine intervention. In Typhon (1704) he departs from his Scarronesque model to show that the furious threats of offended Gods are empty, and in The Grumbling Hive (1705) he has Jove intervene only to reveal that a land free of the offences decried by the pious (’the land must sink’) would indeed be ruinous. At a time when apocalyptic beliefs were the order of the day in both orthodox and non-conformist circles, Mandeville’s initial strategy – prior to his mature critique of civic virtue – was to give millenarians a taste of their own medicine. Similar tactics inform the Scriblerians’ satire, but the resemblance is in some respects ironic. Pope’s God’s Revenge on Punning (1716) is Tory in tenor, whereas The Grumbling Hive includes a nostalgic glance at the Williamite pageantry of Elkanah Settle. These differences partly explain how Mandeville came to be guyed by Gay in his fin-du-globe narrative of 1714, and to feature as the author of social collapse in his ‘Degenerate Bees’ (1738). In Pope, however, and particularly in the work of his middle period, the influence of the Fable runs deep. Even Warburton acknowledged that his pet-hate was a crucial presence in An Essay on Man, and many debts in the Moral Essays are blatant. It is in the Dunciad, however, despite Mandeville’s enrolment there, that the influence of the Fable is most formative. To his unacknowledged mentor Pope owed his ground-breaking representation of a cultural decline that was unordained, the work of social forces emanating from man.

Rogério Arthmar (Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo, Brazil)

Mandeville and the markets: an economic assessment

The debate over the possibility of a general shortage of demand, which occurred in England during the first decades of the eighteenth century, had the merit of anticipating some fundamental elements of the general glut controversy that, a hundred years later, would occasion the emergence of the classical Law of Markets. In order to place the original discussion in its proper context, the previous and contending views on the economic role of luxury consumption, held by a variety of authors during the mercantilist period, are briefly sketched. The early eighteenth century debate as such starts with the publication of The Fable of the Bees, when Bernard Mandeville’s famous and polemic concept of the economic convenience of vices was articulated within the analytical framework of the necessary conditions for the stability of general purchasing power. The book received a barrage of attacks from distinct religious, economic, ethical, and philosophical viewpoints. Among the vast contemporaneous literature on the subject, the particular criticisms of Mandeville’s ideas advanced by George Bluet, Francis Hutcheson, and Bishop Berkeley are scrutinized, because of their explicit arguments dealing with the problem of a potential insufficiency of demand in affluent societies. Mandeville’s rebuttal to some of the critiques is considered next. After that, it is shown how the contest brought forth a number of significant analytical propositions that would later constitute the core of the classical theory of capital accumulation. Finally, some complementary reflections are introduced, with respect to Mandeville, David Hume and Adam Smith’s alternative stances on the relationship between luxury consumption and wealth.

Rui Bertrand Romão (Universidade do Porto (Faculdade de Letras) & Instituto de Filosofia da Linguagem)

Mandeville as a Sceptical Political and Medical Philosopher

Bernard Mandeville, a famous literary Dutch physician and a most brilliant controversialist of the early seventeenth century in Great Britain has been clearly linked by his contemporaries, among other currents of thought to the sceptics, and not only to contemporary sceptics but also to Ancient Pyrrhonians. Nevertheless he became famous for theories not necessarily connected to some form of scepticim. It is also well known nowadays the use he made of a philosopher, who in his age was the best-known skeptical philosopher living in the Netherlands and that greatly influenced him, Pierre Bayle. La Rochefoucauld and other French “moralists” kindred to some kind of skeptical tradition issued mainly from Montaigne have been pointed out as important influences on his thought. However, Mandeville’s affinities with Montaigne have largely been understated and overlooked. But what kind of skepticism was his? In order to characterize it, this paper proposes a reassessment of some of the most celebrated Mandevillean theories and themes (self-liking and self-love, criticism of self-denial, rigorism, the relation of individuals with society, the role of luxury, economic conceptions, and so on) focusing his intertwined inheritance of a medical outlook influenced by several kinds of empiricism and of a skeptical tradition of thought applied to moral and political issues. Thus our paper studies how Mandeville’s own peculiar mixture of individualism, empiricism, conservatism and “rigorism” mixes up with a sort of mitigated skepticism.

Sebastian Mitchell (University of Birmingham)

The Ideal Society in de Mandeville and the British Enlightenment

‘Eutopia,’ as used in the title of W. A. Speck’s 1975 essay on Bernard de Mandeville, is an interesting variant on the more familiar ‘Utopia’, the term coined by Thomas More in 1516 as the name for his imaginative ideal commonwealth, an island roughly the same size as England and situated in the antipodes. In keeping with the Roman tradition of ‘serio ludere’, [serious play] in which he wrote, More combined in his title the Greek prefix ‘ou’ [no] with the noun ‘topos’ [place] and then added a Latin suffix. The initial ‘ou’, however, was clearly intended to pun on ‘eu’ [good], and so the name of the island was ‘nowhere’ with the homophonic suggestion that ‘no place’ was also a fine place. In referring to a ‘Eutopia’ rather than to a ‘Utopia’, Speck stressed the beneficial at the expense of reminding his reader of the impossibility of ever realising the ideal state. It does look, initially at least, to be an unpromising gambit to relate the projection of the perfect society to the author of the Fable of the Bees, given that the majority of contemporary British commentators were hostile to de Mandeville’s suggestion that acquisitiveness and jealous rivalry were the principal drivers of social and economic progress, and that conventional virtues were not capable of achieving the moral goods they identified. However, there are clearly ways in which notions of the ideal can be fruitfully applied to Mandeville’s best-known work. Although he did not develop the idea, the twentieth-century German Marxian philosopher, Ernst Bloch, detected in his magnum opus, The Principles of Hope a latent sense of progressive idealisation in de Mandeville’s text. This paper, drawing upon Bloch’s key distinction between concrete and abstract Utopias, will consider the extent to which The Fable of the Bees can be regarded as a socially idealistic work, and the presentation will close with some observations on the influence of de Mandeville on later accounts of the perfect commonwealth by two authors from opposite ends of the spectrum of British Enlightenment thought, David Hume and Samuel Johnson.

Spiros Tegos (University of Crete) ADAM SMITH’S APPROPRIATION OF MANDEVILLE. The moral caricaturist and the moral portraitist

It has become somehow standard to recall that Mandeville rejects the moralistic reform of manners advocated by early modern British moralists such as Addison and Steele. In this sense, he is often considered as an anatomist that sheds light on the trivial, 'minute' aspect or the dark side of the allegedly venerable moral, literary or socio-political authorities. Thus it can be argued that, while drawing the lesson of the French moralists or early modern skeptics in adopting the method of demystification, he instantiates an idiosyncratic form of savage, iconoclastic satire. Yet it often passes unnoticed that the genre of satire is not only rhetorically more appealing than the prose of idealization but it also has more robust epistemic claims: in moral thought, ‘there is, generally speaking, less truth in panegyricks than there is in satyrs.’27 Thus it seems plausible to call Mandeville a moral caricaturist who attempts to disabuse the emerging middle classes, the ‘middle stations of life.’ The very genre of satire seems to be a pedagogical tool for disabusing modern citizenry in order to feel comfortable with the dark moral side of early modern socio-economic mobility; a price to pay for modern urban denizens to immune themselves against superstition, backwardness and traditional authority’s awe.

27Fable II, 59. Adam Smith seriously confronts this challenge to moral philosophy and grapples with Mandeville’s disabusing and corrosive mindset in a number of ways. It is the core claim of this paper that Smith appropriates though with qualifications Mandeville’s identification of ridicule in commercial life while rehabilitates the importance of anxiety in commercial society that Mandeville lightheartedly downplays. In doing so, he carefully puts forward the salience of the conjunction between moral character and rhetoric of moral prose. Therefore he amends Mandeville’s satire with his own satiric-ironic style in dealing simultaneously with the ridiculous and dramatic aspects of modern urban life. In order to achieve this goal, he sketches characters, a gallery of virtuous, vicious but most importantly ambiguous character’s portraits: the ‘coxcomb’, the vain, the ambitious ‘poor man’s son’ – probably the first sketch of the American dream – but also the enigmatic ‘lover of systems’; Therefore he endorses the role of moral portraitist. In this paper I explore Mandeville’s background before studying I study his appreciation of modern conspicuous consumption and his satire of social mobility; finally I shed light on Adam Smith’s own response to commercial ridicule and anxiety through his gallery of ambiguous moral portraits, focusing particularly on the curious and original ‘lover of systems,’ an interesting twist on the Mandevillean ‘minute philosopher.’