The Social Thought of Bernard Mandeville: Virtue and Commerce in Early Eighteenth-Century England PDF
Preview The Social Thought of Bernard Mandeville: Virtue and Commerce in Early Eighteenth-Century England
THE SOCIAL THOUGHT OF BERNARD MANDEVILLE THE SOCIAL THOUGHT OF BERNARD MANDEVILLE Virtue and Commerce in Early Eighteenth-Century England THOMAS A. HORNE c Thomas A. Horne 197 8 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1978 978-0-333-23110-4 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission First published 1978 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD London and Basingstoke Associated companies in Delhi Dublin Hong Kong Johannesburg Lagos Melbourne New York Singapore Tokyo British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Horne, Thomas A The social thought of Bernard Mandeville 1. Mandeville, Bernard I. Title 300'.92'4 B138l.Z7 ISBN 978-1-349-03560-1 ISBN 978-1-349-03558-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-03558-8 This book is sold subject to the standard conditions of the Net Book Agreement TO E. T. R. and K. C. H. Contents Preface Vlll Introduction IX 1. Mandeville and the Reformation of Manners 5. 2. Mandeville and the French Moral Tradition 19 3. Mandeville and Shaftesbury 32 4. Mandeville and Mercantilism 51 5. Mandeville and His Critics 76 Conclusion 96 Notes 99 Bibliography 110 Index 121 Preface I have been fortunate to have studied and worked with many people who were kind and patient enough to pass on to me ideas and attitudes I have found indispensable. Among those I would particularly like to thank are Professor Peter Bachrach of Temple University, Professor Milton Cummings of The Johns Hopkins University, and Mr. David Wise. I discovered Mandeville in a seminar taught by Professor Julian Franklin and I would like to thank him and Professor Herbert Deane for their guidance throughout graduate school as well as their all too justified criticisms of this manuscript. Professor Maurice Goldsmith of the University of Exeter was kind enough to bring the Female Tatter and the Reformation of Manners to my attention. Mr. Jesse Goodale provided thoughtful comments on chapters 1 and 2. Most of all, I would like to thank my wife, Kathryn, for her help and infinite patience. The reader will note that the capitalization has been modernized in all quotations from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Introduction Until the eighteenth century, there was a general (though not un animous) agreement among social theorists that the proper operation of the social organism depended upon the wide dispersion throughout society of virtue- most generally, the ability to recognize a public in terest and act upon it - and that the goal of any social organization had to be the creation and nurturing of virtuous men. It was also generally agreed that economic activity, unless strictly limited, constituted the most dangerous threat to the virtuous life. While virtue depended upon the willingness to adopt a public stance, commercial activity tended to change legitimate concerns for the self into selfishness, to enlarge private concerns and diminish the awareness of public needs. Bernard Mandeville, writing in the first years of the eighteenth century, and fully aware of the conflict between virtue and commerce, still chose without flinching the world of commerce. Because of this choice he was driven to develop a wholly nonmoral interpretation of social organiza tion and development. Moreover, his particular formulation of the an tagonism between virtue and commerce deeply influenced English social theorists of the eighteenth century and compelled them to find new ways of thinking about their society. The early eighteenth century in England was acutely aware of the importance of virtue in society and government through the strength of a tradition - now generally referred to as civic humanism 1 - particularly active at the time. The 1688 revolution, thought by some to be a moral as well as a political revolution, the anxiety caused by the death of Anne and the establishment of the House of Hanover in 1714, the continued strength of the Jacobites which seemed to threaten the stability of England, and the South Sea Bubble of 1720 with Robert Walpole's attempt to screen those responsible-all occasioned renewed stress on the importance of virtue and public spiritedness for the con tinued cohesion of society. At the same time, early eighteenth-century England witnessed considerable economic changes, which seemed to many to be corrupting influences. 2 Moreover, this period faced the X The Social Thought of Bernard Mandeville problem of a large, idle, surplus population-seen by many as political ly unstable and economically unproductive - which seemed to require the introduction of moral discipline. The two primary categories of civic humanism, virtue and corrup tion, had their origins in the modern world in the thought of Niccolo Machiavelli, especially in his work The Discourses. The tradition passed into English thought during the English Civil War in the works of James Harrington and later in the century in the works of men like Algernon Sidney. In the early eighteenth century John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon carried on the tradition in their Cato 's Letters, written in 1720-23, which held before their readers the glory of the Roman re public that "conquered by its virtue more than its arms ... "3 and the fall of that republic because of magnificence, luxury, and pride, which corrupted the manners of the people. The polemics of Trenchard and Gordon were clearly directed against the ministry of Robert Walpole. They were joined in their attack on Walpole by Tory writers such as Bolingbroke, John Gay, and Jonathan Swift, who, if they did not share all of the religious and republican ideas of the Real Whigs, did share their hatred of Walpole and their concern with corruption and virtue~ The distance between those who maintained the moral interpre tation of social life and Mandeville is apparent when we consider that at the same time that moral reformers, through the Societies for the Reformation of Manners, were helping to arrest men for drinking on Sundays, Mandeville published in 1724 "A Modest Defense of Publick Stews," which recommended setting up one hundred legal houses of prostitution employing two thousand "ladies of easy virtue." And in the same year of the scandal of the South Sea Bubble, 1720, when Wal pole was vituperatively attacked as a "skreen," Mandeville wrote: When we shall have carefully examined the state of our affairs, and so far conquered our prejudices as not to suffer ourselves to be delud ed any longer by false appearances, the prospect of happiness will be before us. To expect ministries ·without faults, and courts without vices is grossly betraying our ignorance of human affairs. Nothing under the sun is perfect. 5 Mandeville's most characteristic attack on the philosophy of public-spiritedness was that it did not understand human nature and the true motive which moved men - self-interest. However, the impor tance of Mandeville is not his recognition of self-interest; rather, it is his attempt to provide a coherent theory of society's development and operation based entirely on the self-interested actions of men without recourse to moral forces. Mandeville's view is perfectly summarized in his statement that Men are naturally selfish, unruly creatures, what makes them Introduction XI sociable is their necessity and consciousness of standing in need of others' help to make life comfortable: and what makes this assistance voluntary and lasting are the gains on profit accrueing to industry for services done to others, which in a well ordered society enables every body, who in some thing or other will be serviceable to the pub lick, to purchase the assistance of others. 6 The total rejection by Mandeville of the categories of virtue and public-spiritedness, which constituted the most characteristic way of thinking about society in early eighteenth-century England, his sub stitution of self-interest and commercial wealth for these categories, and an inquiry into mercantilism and the moral ideas that surrounded and led from Jansenism as the sources upon which he drew, constitute the subject of this book. Chapter 1 considers the Societies for the Refor mation of Manners as the immediate impetus to Mandeville's work and documents his opposition to these societies. Chapter 2 seeks to find the origins of some of Mandeville's ideas in the traditions of French moral thought. Chapter 3 focuses on his own alternative view of society as it was developed against the work of the third Earl of Shaftesbury. Chapter 4 provides the economic context of his thought and presents his views on economics and his prescription for national wealth. Chapter 5 considers the reaction of his contemporaries, both in the more obscure pamphlet literature and in the work of more substantial critics such as Francis Hutcheson and David Hume, and the process by which the antagonism in Mandeville's thought between virtue and commerce is overcome by these writers. Surprisingly little is known about Mandeville's life even though his works generated enormous controversy and gained him considerable fame. The most complete account of his life can be found in the in troduction of F. B. Kaye's edition of The Fable of the Bees.7 Bernard Mandeville was born in 1670 in Rotterdam. He attended the Erasmus School in that city until 1685 when he enrolled in the University of Leyden. There he studied philosophy and medicine, receiving in 1691 the degree of Doctor of Medicine. His practice specialized in nerve and stomach disorders, the same field in which his father had worked. In the middle 1690s he took a tour of Europe, which ended in a stay in London to learn the English language. He found "the country and the manners of it agreeable to his humour," married in 1698/9, and remained in England until his death. Mandeville was apparently a prosperous physician on familiar terms with Sir Hans Sloane, the founder of the Royal Society, and the Earl of Macclesfield, an early member of Walpole's government who left in a scandal in 1725. One of the few glimpses of Mandeville's life is found in Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography. He describes meeting Mandeville this way:
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