The title of John Callanan’s Man-Devil: The Mind and Times of Bernard Mandeville, the Wickedest Man in Europe is not an exaggeration since Mandeville (1670-1733) was truly the most scandalous writer in the Enlightenment period. The ambition of Callanan’s book is to take Mandeville seriously as a thinker. Notwithstanding all his satire and jokes, the book claims that Mandeville put forward a unified worldview, one that we ignore at our peril.

It was particularly through The Fable of the Bees (1714) that Mandeville became one of the most notorious men in Europe. The essential idea of the Fable was that conventional vices—drunkenness, gluttony, luxury consumption, and materialism in general—were all part and parcel of a modern economy based on market exchange. Eliminating such traditional vices would only lead to economic stagnation and less prosperity, which would ultimately weaken states such as Mandeville’s native Dutch Republic and his adopted England. The Fable’s core argument is succinctly captured by its subtitle: Private Vices, Public Benefits.

As Callanan deftly shows, Mandeville addressed the relationship between economics and morality, and gave an answer that no one wanted to hear: “On the one hand, [he] agreed that increased commercial activity would bring about benefits for society. However, it would not—in fact, could not—do so by eliminating individual vice.”

Against Utopianism

The Fable was based on a poem called The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves turn’d Honest, which Mandeville published in 1705. This poem tells the fable of a beehive as a microcosm of a booming commercial society, in which the vice-ridden but prosperous bees were deeply unhappy in their wealth, constantly “grumbling” about their immorality, while being envious of the most successful among them. This was crucial to their economic success: as the bees were always discontented with their lot and hungry for the latest luxuries, the poor benefited as a result of the industries needed to keep up with demand. But when their god, Jove, answers their prayers by removing all vain and depraved behavior and turning the bees honest, the beehive’s economy fails as all industries and institutions associated with immoral behavior and its corrections become superfluous. As the weakened beehive looks ripe for the taking, it is attacked by a foreign enemy, and most bees are killed. As Mandeville wrote:

Then leave complaints: fools only strive / To make a great and honest hive. / To enjoy the world’s conveniences, / Be famed in war, yet live in ease, / Without great vices, is a vain / Eutopia seated in the brain. / Fraud, luxury and pride must live, / While we the benefits receive.

With a nod to Thomas More, Mandeville was clear that “utopias” were literally “no wheres,” only possible as the figment of someone’s imagination. Callanan usefully compares Mandeville’s recommendation for society with Machiavelli’s The Prince. Without necessarily recommending vice over virtue in general, Machiavelli had encouraged his readers not to mistake political expedience for moral rectitude. In a similar vein, Mandeville suggested that we should not conflate a prosperous society with a morally upright one. Just as Machiavelli was convinced that the prince could lose his state if he pursued virtue instead of expedience, Mandeville believed that society could disintegrate if it obsessed with perfecting the morals of its citizens.

Infamy

It would be wrong to think that this message would have been readily accepted in England. Despite the country being a commercial nation and a rising financial hub, much of the English reading public was, in fact, outraged by Mandeville’s message. When the second edition of the Fable was published in 1723, it was put on trial in Middlesex for attempting to “debauch the nation” and “run down religion and virtue as prejudicial to society, and detrimental to the state.” Although he was acquitted, the public outcry persisted. A few months later, the Bishop of London’s chaplain, Robert Burrow, targeted in a sermon “men, who strike at the foundation of virtue and morality.” In 1732, an anonymous author compared Mandeville to the Antichrist, from which Callanan takes his title: “And if GOD-MAN Vice to abolish came, / Who Vice Commends, MAN-DEVIL be his Name.”

Without being an intellectual biography, Man-Devil does an excellent job of situating Mandeville in his cultural milieu. His philosophical inheritance included such eminent figures as Erasmus, Montaigne, Spinoza, Pierre Bayle, and La Rochefoucauld, among others. A nice touch of the book is that each chapter begins with an epigram from La Rochefoucauld’s witty Maxims, whose importance for Mandeville’s thought is unmistakable. A few of them stand out, including: “Hypocrisy is a kind of homage that vice pays to virtue.”

One of the highlights of Man-Devil is the rich reception history of Mandeville and the Fable. Literary giants such as Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, and Samuel Johnson all had a view of Mandeville, as did the philosophers George Berkeley, David Hume, Adam Smith, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant. The Methodist founder John Wesley’s reaction was rather typical. “Till now I imagined there had never appeared in the world such a book as the works of Machiavelli,” he wrote in his journal. “But de Mandeville goes far beyond it [sic].”

Mandeville’s defense against his many critics was that he did not encourage vice but only pointed out its permanence. In this way, he placed himself alongside Neo-Augustinians such as La Rochefoucauld, who viewed human nature as fallen. As he responded to his critics: “I am far from encouraging vice, and should think it an unspeakable felicity for a state, if the sin of uncleanness could be utterly banished from it; but I am afraid it is impossible.” Because of the lack of evidence, Callanan highlights that we cannot say for certain whether this was indeed Mandeville’s sincere view. Callanan speculates, however, that Mandeville, after having long labored in obscurity, may have been delighted by the notoriety he attained in the final years of his life.

Mandeville’s posthumous reception among philosophers was more complicated. Hume included Mandeville as one of the thinkers who had laid the foundation for his “science of man,” yet argued that Mandeville’s “selfish philosophy” was “contrary to common feeling and our most unprejudiced notions.” Smith, though overtly critical for similar reasons as his friend Hume, could find anticipations of both the division of labor and the invisible hand in Mandeville’s Fable. Rousseau engaged with Mandeville in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755), whereas Kant listed Mandeville as a crucial figure in the history of ethics.

Intentions and Innovations

Mandeville often purported that the Fable was purely meant as entertainment. But Callanan identifies that he acknowledged that his writing had wider ambitions:

If you ask me, why I have done all this, cui bono? and what good these notions will produce? truly, besides the reader’s diversion, I believe none at all; but if I was asked what naturally ought to be expected from them, I would answer, that, in the first place, the people who continually find fault with others, by reading them, would be taught to look at home, and examining their own consciences, be made ashamed of always railing at what they are more or less guilty of themselves; and that, in the next, those who are so fond of the ease and comforts, and reap all the benefits that are the consequence of a great and flourishing nation, would learn more patiently to submit to those inconveniences, which no government upon earth can remedy, when they should see the impossibility of enjoying any great share of the first, without partaking likewise of the latter.

This is a revealing but rare glimpse into Mandeville’s intentions. As Callanan notes at the outset, we know very little about Mandeville’s life, and we do not even know what he may have looked like. We do know, however, that he was a daytime physician, and one of the book’s rather novel aspects is the stress it places on Mandeville’s medical background for his conception of human beings. In 1711, Mandeville published what he took to be his magnum opus, A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Diseases in Three Dialogues. In this work, written after he had been a practicing doctor for twenty years, Mandeville argued that though many may have opted for a medical career with the aim of caring for others, we should recognize that such motives were often mixed with more selfish ones, including fame and remuneration.

Building on much recent scholarship on Mandeville, Callanan holds the second volume of the Fable of the Bees, published in 1729—not to be confused with the second edition from 1723—as especially innovative. It was here that Mandeville introduced his influential distinction between self-love and self-liking. Whereas self-love relates to straightforward self-interest, self-liking is a more complicated passion that is concerned with our capacity to value ourselves higher than others. It is self-liking that makes us fond of approbation and approval. As Callanan puts it, because of self-liking, Mandeville believed that human beings, in contrast to other creatures, “live and die not for the preservation of their lives but for the preservation of their good name.”

According to Mandeville, self-liking is an extremely powerful passion, even if we are usually unaware of its sway. “When we are applauded for extolling the virtues of fairness, impartiality, equality, and self-sacrifice,” Callanan writes, “we achieve the intended result of securing the admiration of others while covering up our true motives, even to ourselves.” This self-regarding passion, often hidden, Mandeville saw as the driver of social norms and indeed sociability itself, which emerges spontaneously. If human beings had been naturally benevolent, society would have developed very differently, and government would have been unnecessary. Because of his understanding of the importance of spontaneous order in human affairs, Friedrich Hayek celebrated Mandeville as one of the “master minds” of social theory, despite conceding that the Anglo-Dutchman may not have been an original thinker on technical economic topics.

Man and Society

Mandeville’s most radical insight, Callanan suggests, was that he saw through the intuitive idea that what is good behavior at the level of the individual will also be good at the societal level. As such, he presented a challenge to Kantian philosophy before it had been formulated. His actual targets were moral philosophers such as the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, who projected individual morality onto the group, indeed the universe. The idea that private vices could be public benefits was thus not just an eye-catching subtitle, but central to Mandeville’s unsettling philosophy. 

We need not endorse Mandeville’s entire philosophy to recognize that the questions he posed are as pertinent as ever. Is it possible to be morally good in a commercial society? Is there space for individual virtue in a market society? Are private vices really public benefits? Modern politics remains centered on the economy, as kitchen-table issues determine elections, populations clamor for growth and rising living standards, and global economic competition intensifies. But as thinkers from Smith to Joseph Schumpeter and Ludwig von Mises have shown, capitalism, despite all its obvious success, can be painful for the individual. Perhaps there is no coincidence that scattered evidence points to an ongoing religious revival among young people in the West, which, if sustained, means that the tension between wealth and virtue could become even more apparent. Wherever we happen to stand, this makes Mandeville an inescapable thinker for our time.