Pride, Manners, and Morals: Bernard Mandeville's Anatomy of Honour 9004194517, 9789004194519

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Pride, Manners, and Morals

Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History General Editor Han van Ruler (Erasmus University Rotterdam) Founded by Arjo Vanderjagt Editorial Board C.S. Celenza, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore M. Colish, Yale University, New Haven J.I. Israel, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton A. Koba, University of Tokyo M. Mugnai, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa W. Otten, University of Chicago

volume 334

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/bsih

Pride, Manners, and Morals Bernard Mandeville’s Anatomy of Honour By

Andrea Branchi

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: Fra’ Galgario (Giuseppe Vittore Ghislandi, 1655–1743), Gentleman with tricorne hat (Gentiluomo col tricorno, 1740). Location: Poldi Pezzoli Museum, Milan. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at https://catalog.loc.gov lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021048695

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 0920-8607 isbn 978-90-04-19451-9 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-42843-0 (e-book) Copyright 2022 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau Verlag and V&R Unipress. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill nv via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 1 Chastity and Courage 1 2 Bernard Mandeville’s Anatomy of Honour 12 Prologue: Rotterdam, Leyden and London 22 1 Mandeville’s Continental Background 22 2 Early Years in London: Translator and Poet 26 3 Be Careful What You Wish For: The Grumbling Hive 30 1 Mandeville’s Female Voices 38 1 The Century of Sex 38 2 The Virgin Unmask’d 42 3 Female Education: “What Girls Should Do with Latin?” 47 2 The Oxford Gentleman and Philopirio 56 1 Living Dead and Public Benefactors 57 2 The Duel of Honour 61 3 Medicine and Philosophy: The Hypp’d Nation 71 3 The Political Offspring of Pride 78 1 Powerful Persuasions 79 2 Men of Fashion, Bullies in Morality 87 3 Natural and Artificial Courage 92 4 Politeness and Virtue 98 1 Mandeville’s Rise to Fame 99 2 Hypocrisy and Self-Deception 103 3 The Ticklish Foundation of Female Virtue 110 5 Cleomenes and Horatio 119 1 Portrait of a Complete Gentleman 119 2 Self-Liking and the Origin of Politeness 125 3 A Conjectural History of Sociability 129

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6 Modern Honour and the Cult of the Self 137 1 Martial Virtue 137 2 The History of Pride 145 3 Mandeville’s Challenge 151 Conclusions 158 Bibliography 163 Index of Names and Subjects 196

Acknowledgments Between May 2012 and October 2015 Bernard Mandeville’s thought was publicly debated at eight international conferences held in Fribourg, Princeton, Coimbra, Wassenaar, Rotterdam, Helsinki, Rome and Riga.1 Since the 1720s Mandeville’s writings had not been addressed with so much attention. The conferences took place to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the publication of The Fable of the Bees (1714). The present volume stems from the ideas heard and discussed during these encounters and from research developed over several decades. My interest in Bernard Mandeville dates back to my undergraduate years. Like many of my colleagues, almost a generation of Italian scholars, my research interests and methods were influenced by the works and the activity of my mentor at the Department of Philosophy of the Università degli Studi di Roma ‘La Sapienza’, Eugenio Lecaldano. Along with his work on the foundations of contemporary ethics – its problems and its solutions – in the eighteenth-century British moral debate and the project of a ‘science of man’, Eugenio offered consistent encouragement over many years. Dario Castiglione, Paola Zanardi, Giancarlo Carabelli, Emanuela Scribano, Tito Magri and Nadia Boccara helped me in my early research on the elusive Dutch Physician and on the context of eighteenth-century British moral philosophy. Eugenio Lecaldano’s and Luigi Turco’s great willingness to discuss and exchange ideas was of great support and encouragement for my PhD dissertation. A milestone in the progression of my work on Bernard Mandeville was my encounter with Irwin Primer in 1998. His unceasing curiosity, generous availability, and effort to create and maintain a community of Mandeville scholars, together with his friendship and tireless support are among the reasons for the very existence of this book. Over the years, I have greatly profited from many 1 Mandeville in Context, Philosophy Department, University of Fribourg, Switzerland (May 25– 26, 2012); Scottish Reactions to Mandeville, Princeton Theological Seminar, Princeton, NJ, (March 2013); Eutopia Seated in the Brain, University of Coimbra, Portugal (November 27–29, 2013); Mandeville’s Moral and Political Thought in its Historical Context, Netherlands Institute For Advanced Study, Wassenaar, The Netherlands (June 3–5, 2014); 300 years Mandeville’s “Fable of the Bees”. Science, Politics, and Economy. The Unintended Consequences of a Diabolic Paradox, Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam, The Netherlands (June 6, 2014); “Unusual emptiness of the title-page” – Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees in Helsinki, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki (June 12–14, 2014); Mandeville in Rome. Mandevillean Readings, Koninklijk Nederlands Instituut in Rome; The American University of Rome (September 4–6, 2014); Mandeville in Latvia. Mandevillean Readings, Riga Business School, Institute for Environmental Solutions, Latvia (October 8–11, 2015).

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conversations about Mandeville with colleagues and scholars: Malcom Jack, Markku Peltonen, Mikko Tolonen, Paul Russell, Atis Zakatistovs, Andrea Gatti, Martin Otero Knott, Spyros Tegos, Rui Bertrand Romao, Joaquim Braga, Emilio Mazza, Francesca Pongiglione, Elena Muceni, Lorenzo Greco and Simone Pollo. Special thanks go to Mauro Simonazzi, a great scholar, but overall a great friend, who is always ready to engage in a conversation on Bernard Mandeville. I would like to express my deepest appreciation to the anonymous reviewers of my manuscript and to Han van Ruler, the series editor-in-chief, together with Brill’s staff, especially Arjan van Dijk and Ivo Romein, for their valuable advice and for their support and confidence in my project. My heartfelt thanks go to the librarians who helped me in the last years of research, in particular Elisabetta Morani and Livia Piotto at the Frohring Library and the staff at the Biblioteca di Storia Moderna e Contemporanea di Roma. I owe a great debt of gratitude to those who have helped me to revise my English: Portia Prebys, Elly Nagaoka Ricci, Nuha Elizabeth Ansari, Simon Martin, Kate Russell, Silvia Esposito and Robert Martin. I would also like to thank my parents for raising me in a house full of books and for supporting and encouraging me to pursue a proper intellectual education. I sometimes wonder if they ever regretted it, particularly when they were forced to read my Italian translation of Mandeville’s Enquiry into the Origin of Honour to check its quality and ended up calling their dogs Mandeville, Locke, Hobbes & Hume (Hobbes was the kindest and gentlest of them all). Finally, I wish to thank all the dear friends who having been exposed to my boundless interest over the years, asked the most intriguing and challenging questions even when out of boredom or despair: thank you to Claudio Carbonaro, Anna Falcone, Benjamin Martin, Mila Manasse, Massimo Sangermano, Simon Martin, Chiara Luti, Querciolo Mazzonis, Luca Rufino, Piyal Thiththalapitige and especially my sister, the late Anna Branchi, to whom this book is dedicated.

Introduction Sweetness of Temper, and Simplicity of Manners are the only lasting charm of Women Richard Steele, The Tatler 61

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The most pertinent way to introduce the topic of this book, Bernard Mandeville’s philosophical research on the qualities that make naturally self-interested individuals adhere to shared codes of honourable and virtuous behaviour and, at the same time, offer a first impression of the argumentative techniques of this elusive writer, is to plunge headlong into an early eighteenth-century public debate. Mandeville’s reflection on sociability begins unhesitatingly in this way. 1

Chastity and Courage

When the former army captain, playwright and political journalist Richard Steele began his periodical The Tatler, the editorial enterprise that was later, in association with Joseph Addison, to become an exemplary influential new form of publication, he made a deliberate effort to appeal to female readership. On Tuesday April 12, 1709, in the first issue, he declared indeed the intent to entertain “the fair sex, in honour of whom I have taken the title of this paper.”1 Rather than appealing to the masculine tastes for politics and economics served by previous papers, the journal addressed themes not only for women and issues meant to interest a female audience, but also on women, their roles, their rights, their virtues, their manners. In Tatler 172 Steele engaged in a comparison of the ability of men and women to control their passions in the “struggle between our reason and our temper,” in keeping their feelings in due subordination to reason, developing what appears to be an egalitarian perspective:

1 The Tatler 1, (April 12, 1709).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004428430_002

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I am sure, I do not mean it an injury to women, when I say there is a sort of sex in souls. (…) The ladies will please observe, I say, our minds have different, not superior qualities to theirs. The Virtues have respectively a Masculine and a Feminine cast. What we call in men Wisdom, is in women Prudence. It is a Partiality to call one greater than another. A Prudent Woman is in the same class of Honour as a Wise man, and the Scandals in the way of both are equally dangerous.2 Even if the qualities deemed as virtues differ in the two sexes “according to the employments for which they are designed,” Steele appears to grant an equal weight to male and female honour, here intended as synonymous with a public reputation of virtue, suggesting that women and men face equivalent dangers of public blame. A year later in the pages of The Spectator he returns to the topic, insinuating a tactful admission that women in matters of morality are less well-equipped than men: If we grant an Equality in the Faculties of both Sexes, the Minds of Women are less cultivated with Precepts, and consequently may, without Disrespect to them, be accounted more liable to Illusion in Cases wherein natural Inclination is out of the Interests of Virtue.3 The traditional view of women depicted them as more subject than men to the ‘storm of their passions,’ and therefore more easily disposed to jeopardise their honour in “Scandals.” Steele offers an explanation for this state of things in the difference of education, resulting for women in a lack of training in judgment and understanding, which seriously impedes their ability to control their impulses. Still, the ideal woman that Steele envisages in his periodicals does not require more education than that fit to make her a pleasant spouse. To the popular myth of the disorderly female, Steele opposes the equally debilitating one of the obedient wife, the companionable, domestic ‘help-mate’ whose virtue is confined to chastity and passive domesticity: “there is nothing in women so graceful and becoming as modesty, it add charms to their beauty, and gives a new softness to their sex.”4 From less cautious and diplomatic contemporary authors we get a clearer characterisation of chastity as the key virtue of women’s honour, and of its 2 The Tatler 172, (May 16, 1710). 3 The Spectator 79, (May 31, 1711). 4 The Tatler 84, October 20, 1709. Hilda L. Smith, Reason’s Disciples: Seventeenth-Century English feminists (Champaign, IL: 1982), pp. 40–45.

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practical implications for their lives. In a late seventeenth century book of advice to his daughter, reviewing the traditional justification for female chastity based on the necessity to keep the lineage and the ‘purity of blood,’ the First Marquis of Halifax remarked on the injustice, the unfairness, of men in making “in the utmost degree criminal in women” what for them is permissible. However, he continued, “whilst the point of honour continues to be so plac’d, it seems unavoidable to give your sex the greater share of the penalty.”5 The mass of didactic literature and conduct books for young ladies published in those years stressed that this double standard, the fact that men were permitted liberties of which no woman could ever avail herself and keep her honourable reputation, is in the nature of things.6 In The Spectator 99 Steele’s associate and collaborator Joseph Addison summarizes somewhat more bluntly the double standard of male and female Honour: “The great Point of Honour in Men is Courage, and in Women Chastity. If a Man loses his Honour in one Rencounter, it is not impossible for him to regain it in another; a Slip in a Woman’s Honour is irrecoverable.”7 By the early eighteenth century, duels were forbidden by almost all European legislation, and had been condemned as a deadly sin by the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century Council of Trent, and yet, to challenge someone to a duel for a misunderstanding or for an argument over precedence, and to behave politely with those who you were attempting to kill, remained a ritual of enormous social prestige. Apparently, courage, the traditional cornerstone virtue of male honour, was to be exhibited in masculine contexts, that is in prearranged combats, duels of honour.8 Chastity, the key virtue of female honour, appears to be essentially synonymous with passivity, the avoidance of sin, of dishonour; the reverse of the activity and consequence that constituted male honour. Women’s virtue not only is determined exclusively in the intercourse with the other sex, but it is presented as essential to female nature. Whereas men have the opportunity to act courageously and regain their tainted honour by performing in a duel, women are to be either chaste or not. Once lost, their

5 George Saville, Marquis of Halifax, The lady’s New-years gift, or, Advice to a daughter: under these following heads, viz. religion, husband, house and family, servants, behaviour and conversation, friendship, censure, vanity and affectation, pride, diversion, dancing, London, 1688, p. 34. 6 See Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility. Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford: 1998). 7 The Spectator 99, June 23, 1711. 8 Andrea Branchi “La virtù puntigliosa. I filosofi e il duello,” in Giornale di Storia Contemporanea, viii, 2, 2006, pp. 28–51.

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honour cannot be recovered.9 The context of Addison’s remark on the Point of Honour is a broader reflection on the “false kind of courage” and mistaken notions of honour that promotes the “absurd practice of duelling.” The campaign that Steele and Addison elaborated on the pages of The Tatler and later in The Spectator was meant to purge the ideal of gentlemanliness of “Gothick” and courtly vices such as gambling and duelling. In their journals Addison & Steele consciously attempted to redefine it, advancing the ideal of a polite, good natured, public spirited and benevolent ‘fine gentleman.’10 The Tatler and The Spectator offered rules for a wise and moderate life through a collection of social characters, and the popularization of philosophical, moral and scientific ideas.11 While maintaining a witty and light-hearted tone, Steele assumed the stance, not simply of a social commentator and critic, but of a committed promoter of moral reform, encouraging virtue, religion and a social order based on the public-spiritedness of its members.12 Although women play a decisive role in Steele’s scheme, both as readers and as topics for conversations, his effort to ‘moralize’ honour focuses almost entirely on gentlemen’s practices. True public virtue appears to belong exclusively to men. Steele pledged to improve women’s education, and he put forward the idea that the degree of civility of a nation could be evaluated by considering female conditions, but, in his scheme, women could not aspire to an independent social role.13 The “Table of Fame” that Steele announced and discussed in various Tatlers was created to celebrate the most virtuous individuals in the whole of human history. It testifies, in an exemplary fashion, to Steele’s misogynistic hierarchy of gendered virtues, hosting exclusively males, all from the ancient classical world, almost entirely statesmen and military commanders. The exclusion of women is justified by Steele by the absence of

9

10 11 12 13

Laura Gowing, “Women and the Popular Culture of Dishonour,” in Transaction of the Royal Historical Society, 1996, 6, pp. 225–234; Soile Ylivuori, “Rethinking Female Chastity and Gentlewoman’s honour in Eighteenth-Century England,” The Historical Journal, 59, 1, 2016, pp. 71–97. The Tatler 207, (August 5, 1710). Cf. Lawrence E. Klein, “Property and politeness in the early eighteenth-century Whig moralists. The case of the Spectator”, in Early Modern Conceptions of Property,” ed. by J. Brewer and S. Staves (New York: 1995), pp. 221–233. Arthur R. Humphrey, Steele, Addison and their Periodical Essays (London: 1959), p. 14. Maurice M. Goldsmith, “Introduction” to Bernard Mandeville, By a society of ladies. Essays in the Female Tatler, M.M. Goldsmith, ed. (Bristol: 1999), pp. 38–39. Maurice M. Goldsmith, “‘The Treacherous Arts of Mankind’: Bernard Mandeville and Female Virtue,” in History of Political Thought, vii, 1, 1986, pp. 100 and fwd. Cf. Richmond P. Bond, The Tatler: The making of a Literary Journal (Oxford: 1971), pp. 83–90.

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female examples in history books.14 A few days after its appearance, Steele’s ‘Table of Fame’ was challenged and ridiculed by a rival journal, The Female Tatler, authored ‘by a Society of Ladies,’ that along with other new periodicals exploited the new reading public and the potential female readership created by The Tatler. Two sister journalists, Lucinda and Artesia, presented a ‘Female Table of Honour’ in a direct polemical attack against Steele’s collection of heroes. Developing the issue in the following numbers and introducing over three dozen examples of women who demonstrated wisdom, courage and love of their country equal to that of any of the men listed by Steele, they openly criticized his misogynistic hierarchy of honour and of female virtues. The two sister journalists offer their Female Table of Fame as providing examples of real virtue, models of that “extraordinary Strength of the Soul” that few mortals possess, and certainly not the exclusive possession of men.15 It is not just an occasional tease. Richard Steele’s moralizing enterprise in The Tatler is closely followed and made a target of criticism and satire in several issues of The Female Tatler between July 1709 and March 1710. The sisters Lucinda and Artesia are the authors of thirty-two numbers that ridicule Steele’s reforming enterprise, his encomium of the dignity of human nature and peculiarly his attempt to moralize honour. Against Steele’s ideal of passive and obedient women, the two sister writers describe their own education and their active role in the business of writing. In The Female Tatler, men are accused of excluding women from education and history-writing, from reading and being read about in books, thus maintaining male domination over the other sex. Men are accused of handing down a culture in which a woman’s destiny is submission, her most valuable quality is meekness, and her public reputation of virtue is grounded exclusively in chastity. As for male honour, The Female Tatler insisted, against Steele, on the inner tensions and open contradictions inherent in the gentleman’s ideal, while developing at the same time a paradoxical defence of the practice of duelling and its social utility. Men of Honour are: “the oddest mixture of Good and Evil, and for their principles the most unaccountable Creatures in the World” and yet “the Vanity of the whole Profession” is a paramount component of any healthy and wealthy community. In contrast to Steele’s ideal of a naturally benevolent polite gentleman and his obedient and submissive wife, Lucinda and Artesia point out the profound inconsistency between the social ideal of 14 15

The Tatler 67 (September, 13, 1709); The Tatler 81 (October 22, 1709), Tatler 84 (Oct. 22, 1709). See Maurice M. Goldsmith. Private Vices, Public Benefits: Bernard Mandeville’s Social and Political Thought (Cambridge: 1985), p. 157. The Female Tatler 95 (February 29, 1710).

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polite gentlemanliness and the dictates of religion and virtue, denouncing the hypocrisy, or the bad faith, of those who moralize the discourse on civility through the ideal of manners and politeness. They also suggest that codes of morality and conduct commonly held as grounded in religion, tradition and nature are not absolute, objective standards but relative, self-serving ones. The very basis of society argues an ‘Oxford gentleman’ in one of the conversations reported by the sister journalists in The Female Tatler, is to be identified precisely in those passions that the public-spirited reformers label as vices. Those self-interested individuals condemned on the pages of The Tatler by would-be reformers, shouldn’t apologize for their conduct, and should rather be commended: “(Those) who by the Sollicitous Care they take of their Backs and Bellies, make Money Circulate, and are the real Encouragers of every useful Art and Science.”16 Only in 1935 was the author of the contributions to The Female Tatler and of the Lucinda-Artesia papers definitively identified as Bernard Mandeville, the Dutch born physician and philosopher, known almost exclusively as the author of The Fable of the Bees.17 MANDEVILLE, BERNARD, an English physician patronized by the first Earl of Macclesfield, and author of the Fable of the Bees, a book, which seeming to defend immorality, naturally excited considerable clamour. This concise definition opens the entry ‘Mandeville’ in a biographical dictionary of the late eighteenth-century well enough for a contemporary reader to locate the character in question in the social landscape of his age: a medical doctor, associated with the Whig party, and author of one of the most talkedof books of the century.18 Bernard Mandeville was indeed a physician. He practised in London as a specialist of nervous and digestive disorders and published in 1711 a work directly related to his professional activity: A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysteric Passions (reprinted, in an enlarged edition and with a different title in 1730). Mandeville was friend and protégé of Thomas Parker, First Earl of Macclesfield, a fabulously wealthy and powerful Whig politician, Lord Chief Justice (1710–1718) and Lord Chancellor (1718–1725) before being impeached by the House of Lords and unanimously convicted 16 17 18

The Female Tatler 64, December 2, 1709. P.B. Anderson, “Splendor out Scandal: The Lucinda-Artesia papers in The Female Tatler,” Philological Quarterly, 15 (1936), pp. 286–300; Gordon S. Vichert, “Some Recent Mandeville Attributions,” Philological Quarterly, 45 (1966), pp. 459–463; Goldsmith 1999, pp. 48–57. Jeremiah Whitaker Newman, The Lounger’s common-place Book; or Miscellaneous Collections, in History, Criticism, Biography, Poetry, & Romance, ed. 1805, Vol. i, p. 306.

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for corruption in 1725.19 Even without taking into account the openly political pamphlets attributed to him, it is evident that Mandeville, a Dutch émigré, rejected the main tenets of Toryism and embraced the fundamental principles of an early eighteenth-century Whig: contented with the outcome of the 1688– 89 revolution, he was in favour of the Protestant succession, and defended the Whig ideals of a limited monarchy and a mixed form of government. Although Mandeville’s ideas on luxury and commerce are commonly associated with the Whig party and those groups directly benefiting from the new financial institutions developed in the years following the Glorious Revolution, he was never directly involved in the party struggle. He opposed intolerant or extremist views and did not spare polemical criticism of his alleged party fellows.20 The author of ‘a book, seeming to defend immorality’? No doubt, The Fable of the Bees is Mandeville’s most notorious work. It has been likened to Machiavelli’s Prince and Hobbes’ Leviathan, ground-breaking works that owe their fame to the controversies they provoked and attracted.21 Nowadays, even people for whom the name ‘Mandeville’ means nothing nod when The Fable of the Bees is mentioned; it is certainly much better known than its author. The apology of the vicious beehive falling into a downward spiral of impoverishment and decadence, once implemented the cries to a moral reform, deeply outraged his contemporaries. Describing economic life in the language of morals and claiming that the prosperity of a large commercial society is grounded upon the free play of those self-interested passions traditionally denounced as vices, Mandeville introduced the disturbing idea that individual passions and habits commonly denounced by moralists as vices are, as a matter of fact, the very spring of the wealth of the whole social body, as the renowned subtitle of The Fable of the Bees suggests: “Private Vice, Publick Benefits.” The fondness for paradox, the brilliant and provocative style of Dr. Mandeville, his theory developed in the language of ascetic morality, linking wittily but forcefully national wealth and personal vices, and especially his explanation, reinterpreting the drives of most social practices in terms of selfish motivations, made him one of the most infamous men of his age. His work, amplified by its negative reputation and the succès de scandal, appeared in countless editions and reprints in the eighteenth century. Among those who had read him, or simply heard about him, there is no one who referred to Mandeville, committed in a “war 19 20 21

Lord Chief of Justice (the highest juridical authority in the country), regent of Great Britain after the death of Queen Anne and in the first months of the accession of the new German speaking king, George i. Harry T. Dickinson, “Bernard Mandeville: An Independent Whig,” in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 151–55, 1976, pp. 559–70; Goldsmith 1985. Philip Hart, “Introduction” to B. Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees (London: 1970), p. 7.

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against virtue,” without reproach and condemnation.22 Bernard Mandeville’s ‘selfish system’ represented a controversial point of reference for the Scottish Enlightenment. Francis Hutcheson judges Mandeville as so intentionally ambiguous as to be literally ‘unanswerable,’ and yet he devotes a significant portion of his work to the refutation of Mandeville’s philosophy. David Hume accused the author of The Fable of the Bees of incoherence, and still lists ‘Dr. Mandeville’ together with Locke, Shaftesbury, Butler and Hutcheson himself among those ‘who have begun to put the science of man on a new footing’.23 Adam Smith adopted and added to that very same list in the Edinburgh Review. According to Smith, Dr. Mandeville’s licentious system had tremendous success and “once made so much noise in the world” because, in spite of his errors, it “in some respect bordered upon the truth.”24 Samuel Johnson, according to one of his biographers, had always scruple to condemn loudly The Fable of the Bees, but always added, “that was the work of a man capable of thinking.”25 Still, the shadow cast by the controversy over The Fable of the Bees made its author a ‘sarcastic misanthrope with an extremely pessimistic view of human nature,” a figure to be careful not to be associated with.26 He has been remembered since as a cynical apologist of luxury and consumption, or forcibly enlisted among the early advocates of free-market economy and celebrated as a founding father of economic liberalism. In almost thirty years of intellectual activity, in the first decades of the eighteenth century, Bernard Mandeville composed poems and female dialogues, translated and wrote fables and medical treatises, and wrote periodical journals, philosophical essays and dialogues. Mandeville read Dutch, Greek, Latin, French and English and he developed his ideas from a wild variety of Continental as well as British sources: Erasmus, Montaigne, Abbadie, 22 23 24

25 26

Henry Fielding, The Champion, January 22, 1740; in The Complete Works of Henry Fielding, Esq., ed. W.H. Henley, London 1903, vol. xv p. 230. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. D.F. Norton and M.J. Norton, Oxford, 2000, Introduction, p. 5. Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, Oxford 1976 Vol. i, p. 313 (vii.ii.4.14), “A Letter to the Editors of the Edinburgh Review,” (July 1755) in Essays on Philosophical Subjects, Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1976. vol. iii pp. 242–246. M.M. Goldsmith, “‘Regulating anew the moral and political sentiments of mankind’ Bernard Mandeville and the Scottish Enlightenment,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 49, 1988, pp. 587–606. Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. by G. Birkbeck Hill, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1897, vol. i, p. 268. Rudolf Dekker, “Private vices, public virtues revisited: The Dutch background of Bernard Mandeville,” History of European Ideas, 14 (4), 1992, 481–498.

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Fontenelle, Esprit, Nicole, La Rochefoucauld, De la Barre, Bayle, the de La Court brothers, Descartes, Gassendi, Grotius, Hobbes, Locke and Temple.27 He had a broad university education both in medicine and in philosophy and kept himself well informed on the latest research in medicine and physics. He passionately engaged with his contemporaries, among them Richard Steele, Lord Shaftesbury, William Law, John Dennis, George Berkeley, Joseph Butler and Francis Hutcheson, in a wide range of public controversies, from the consistency of virtue and public spirit with commercial societies to female genital anatomy and women’s right to sexual pleasure. He was very often in polemical struggle with the most common way of thinking of his age. What was perceived by his contemporaries as an apology of vices and an empty paradoxical lampooning of the current values, is read today as a crucial step towards of the eighteenth century ideal of a ‘science of man’. Our contemporary understanding of Mandeville’s philosophical project is the result of the scholarly work of the last forty-five years, and these conclusions were reached by studying Mandeville in the framework of the British and European Enlightenment. To the extraordinary fame reserved for The Fable of the Bees in the eighteenth century, follows a semi-total silence in the nineteenth, with the exceptions of Karl Marx and Leslie Stephen.28 Dario Castiglione in his acute analysis of Mandeville’s fortune, suggests that the main reasons for this shifting interest is to be found in the progressive assimilation of Mandeville’s ideas into theories of other eighteenth-century authors, and the general change of interest of economic research in the functioning of modern societies, from consumer issues to production and organizational issues.29 The ‘partial indifference’ was broken in 1924, when the historian of 27

28

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See” F.B. Kaye, “Introduction” to B. Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees: or, Private vices, Publick Benefits, F.B. Kaye (ed.), Oxford 1924, Vol. 1, pp. lxxvii–cii; Malcom Jack, “Men Become Sociable by Living Together in Society: Re-assessing Mandeville’s Social Theory,” in Bernard de Mandeville’s Tropology of Paradoxes: Morals, Politics, Economics, and Therapy, Balsemão Pires, Edmundo, Braga, Joaquim (Eds.) (Cham, ch: 2015); pp. 1–13. In The Capital, Karl Marx defined Mandeville “an honest, clear-headed man” and noted how the treatment of the division of labour in Adam Smith’s Wealth of the Nations “is copied almost word for word from B. de Mandeville’s Remarks to his Fable of the Bees.” The Capital, Ch. 25 and Ch.14, Sect. 4 (Moscow: 1887) p. 252, p. 430. See D. Castiglione, “Mandeville moralized,” Annali della fondazione Luigi Einaudi xvii, 1983 pp. 239–90; “Considering things minutely. Reflections on Mandeville and the eighteenth-century science of man,” History of Political Thought vii, 1986, pp. 463–488; “La fortuna di Mandeville,” Il pensiero politico, xxi, 3, 1989, pp. 366–375; “Excess, Frugality and the Spirit of Capitalism. Readings of Mandeville on commercial Society,” in Culture in History. Production, Consumption and Values in historical perspective, a cura di J. Melling e J. Barry, Exeter 1992.

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literature F.B. Kaye published at the Clarendon Press in Oxford a critical edition of the Fable with all of Mandeville’s variations and revisions published between 1714 and 1732. It is still today a valid tool, a key reference to the work of the Dutch physician. Kaye presented The Fable of the Bees as a satire, where Mandeville adopted for satirical purposes ‘double standards of motivation and consequences’ – an ascetic standard of evaluations of the motives of human’s actions and a utilitarian criterion for the assessment of its consequences – in order to ignite his celebrated paradox of Private Vices as Public Benefits. Kaye’s extended commentary, as a matter of fact, has set the agenda for succeeding research, shaping the (mis-) representation of Bernard Mandeville for years to come. The idea that self-interested individuals, driven by their own desires, act independently to realize goods and institutions demanding cooperation, central to the economic concept of the market, made of The Fable of the Bees one of the chief literary sources of the laissez-faire doctrine.30 Friedrich Von Hayek in his 1966 enthusiastic reading of Mandeville as support for his own economic theory concerning the spontaneous order of the market, situates the Dutch doctor in a straight line that runs from Mandeville, through Hume, to Darwin. Mandeville is seen as the ‘grandfather’ of evolutionism and considered solely as an early theorist of the harmony of interests in a free market economy.31 An articulated understanding of Mandeville’s works began to take hold in the last decades of the twentieth century, when his thought was examined not only in relation to the literary landscape of the Augustan age, or by meas­ uring his purported allegiance to economic schools of thought, but also and more broadly within the context of seventeenth and eighteenth-century moral and political philosophy. Consideration was given to the range and diversity of Mandeville’s interests and to the ‘polemical contexts’ in which he participated, characterized by their own peculiar background, rhetoric, literary forms & conceptual vocabulary.32 Between 1974 and 1983, five monographs and a collection of essays on the author of The Fable of the Bees appeared. However, none of these  – with the exception of Natura umana e società competitiva: studio su Mandeville by Maria Emanuela Scribano  – provide a unitary reading of what was perceived as the irreducible fragmentation and ‘ambivalence’ of Mandeville’s production as doctor, psychologist, moralist, 30 31 32

M.M. Goldsmith, “Mandeville, Bernard”, in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. by E. Craig, 1996. Friedrich A. von Hayek, “Dr. Bernard Mandeville: Lecture on a Master Mind,” in Proceedings of the British Academy 52, 1966, pp. 125–41. John G.A. Pocock, “Virtues, Rights and Manners: A model for Historian of Political Thought,” in Virtue, Commerce and History. Essays on Political Thought and History (Cambridge: 1985), pp. 37–71.

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11

theologian and social reformer.33 The most articulated reconstruction of the ideological circumstances of Mandeville’s rise to fame, in the context of his polemical confrontation with Richard Steele’s version of public-spirit ideology, was advanced by M.M. Goldsmith, following the pathbreaking studies by J.G.A. Pocock on British political discourse. Edward Hundert, in his 1994’s The Enlightenment’s Fable: Bernard Mandeville and the discovery of society has explained Mandeville’s ambiguous and paradoxical fame in the wider context of the raging controversy in early eighteenth-century Europe on the nature of commercial societies and their moral and political implications. According to Hundert, uniting the physiological presupposition of his medical background with a continental discourse of analysis of the passions, Mandeville offered a reconceptualization of egoism and elaborated a theory of sociability in commercial societies. Setting Mandeville within the framework of the British debate about commerce and virtue has been crucial for understanding his work, in the total absence of the kind of biographical information needed to identify his intentions as an author, but had the unintended consequence of marginalizing Mandeville’s importance as a European thinker, committed to the project of a science of man, elaborating a hypothesis concerning the process of human civilization that traces it back to a finite set of explanatory principles empirically identified in human nature.34 Recent scholarship has acknowledged Mandeville’s stature as an accomplished philosopher whose influence on David Hume, Adam Smith and on the Scottish and European Enlightenment as a whole still remains to be reconstructed in depth. In his Mandeville and Hume Anatomist of Civil Society Mikko Tolonen has explored Mandeville’s intellectual development between the first and the second volume of The Fable of the Bees, arguing for a decisive influence of Mandeville on David Hume’s account of the artificial virtue of justice in book III of his Treatise on Human Nature.35 Recovering David Hume and Adam Smith’s underestimated contribution to the history of political thought, in their way of thinking about sovereignty, in which governmental power is grounded in “the opinion of mankind,” Paul Sagar assigned Mandeville a crucial intermediary role between Hobbes and the Scots, in the eighteenth-century British debate

33

34 35

Hector H. Monro, The Ambivalence of Bernard Mandeville (Oxford: 1975); Thomas A. Horne, The Social Thought of Bernard Mandeville: Virtue and Commerce in Early Eighteenth-Century England (New York-London: 1978); Maria Emanuela Scribano, Natura umana e societa competitiva: studio su Mandeville (Milano: 1980). Edward J. Hundert, The Enlightenment’s Fable. Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society (Cambridge: 1994). Mikko Tolonen, Mandeville and Hume, anatomists of civil society (Oxford: 2013).

12

Introduction

on sociability and in the long-standing political idiom revolving around the centrality of individual recognition.36 2

Bernard Mandeville’s Anatomy of Honour

The aim of this book is to reconstruct Mandeville’s science of man from the perspective of his analysis of honour, of his life-long interest for those shared systems of sentiments of approbation and disapprobation which he sees not only as the fundamental tie of society but also as the paradigmatic expression, in his naturalistic account of sociability, of that key ‘passional disposition’ which makes men fit for society. In Mandeville’s view, human beings are inevitably driven by their passions, to the point of deceiving themselves about their own motivations and deluding themselves to act out of rationality. At the roots of human capability to socialize Mandeville identifies the operations of the desire for recognition, what he calls in his mature writings the passion of ‘self-liking’, that sentiments of overvaluation of one’s self which is constantly reliant on other people to be confirmed, reassured, gratified and that gives rise to codes of honour. Simply by listing in sequence, devoid of context, some of Mandeville’s statements on honour throughout his works it is enough to sense its centrality in his philosophical anthropology and its structural connections with key themes and topics of his account of sociability: the desire of esteem as the basic human motivational drive, its expression in the passions of pride and shame, honour as a universal principle and the different codes of conduct in which it has been declined and, at last, the political exploitation of the idealized models of the self, characteristic of honour codes – and moral discourse – in the recent stages of the civilization process. In 1709, in his early collaboration to The Female Tatler Mandeville asserted that “The strict Observance of the point of Honour, is a necessary Evil, and a large Nation can no more be call’d Polite without it, than it can be Rich and Flourishing without Pride or Luxury” and that “Nothing is more necessary to the State than Men of Honour, and no Society could be long flourishing without.”37 In The Fable of the Bees (1714) he defined honour as “nothing else but the good Opinion

36 37

Paul Sagar, The Opinion of Mankind: Sociability and the Theory of the State from Hobbes to Smith (Princeton: 2018), p. 39 and 15. The Female Tatler 52 (November 4, 1709), The Female Tatler 84 (February 16, 1710).

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of others, which is counted more or less Substantial, the more or less Noise or Bustle there is made about the demonstration of it” and emphasised that “there would be no living without it in a large Nation; it is the tye of Society (…) there is no Virtue (…) that has been half so instrumental to the civilizing of Mankind.”38 In The Fable of the Bees Part II (1729) Mandeville makes of the adherence to codes of honour the expression of a constant and universal principle in human nature, “a Passion that is born with us is unalterable, and Part of our Frame, whether it exerts itself or not,” constantly at work in the whole of the human species: The same Passion, that makes the well-bred Man and prudent Officer value and secretly admire themselves for the Honour and Fidelity they display, may make the Rake and Scoundrel brag of their Vices and boast of their Impudence.39 The last piece of Mandeville’s philosophical production is a whole book on honour: An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour and the Usefulness of Christianity in War (1731). Here Mandeville defines honour as “a Technic Word in the Art of Civility, and signifies a Means which Men by Conversing together have found out to please and gratify one another on Account of a palpable Passion in our Nature” and, more bluntly, as “an Idol, by Human Contrivance, rais’d on the Basis of Human Pride.”40 Bringing honour to its essential elements component in the drive for esteem Mandeville writes that: “the highest Honour which Men can give to Mortals, whilst alive, is in Substance no more, than the most likely and most effectual Means that Human Wit can invent to gratify, stir up, and encrease in Him, to whom that Honour is paid, the Passion of Self-liking.”41 In the same text, addressing ‘the political use of passions’ Mandeville devotes a close attention of the role of honour in the recent stages of the civilization process, stressing its function – well above that of virtue – in political practice and the form that ‘Modern Honour’ took in the age of Politeness:

38 39 40 41

Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits ed. F.B. Kaye, 2 vols. (Oxford: 1924). Reissued in facsimile edition (Indianapolis: 1988), hereafter Fable, Vol. i, pp. 63–64, p. 215. Fable II, p. 91. Bernard Mandeville, An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, and the Usefulness of Christianity in War (London: 1732), hereafter Honour, p. 14, 64. Honour, p. 9.

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Introduction

The Invention of Honour has been far more beneficial to the Civil Society than that of Virtue, and much better answer’d the End for which they were invented (…) It was an Improvement in the Art of Flattery, by which the Excellency of our Species is raised to such a Height, that it becomes the Object of our own Adoration, and Man is taught in good Earnest to worship himself.42 Surprisingly enough, with a few exceptions, the ‘path of honour’, among Mandeville scholars is a hitherto generally underestimated perspective.43 Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes, Pierre Bayle, Bernard Mandeville, David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Cesare Beccaria and Adam Smith, to name just a few, they all lived in an age where the rapier – the slender sword with a sharply-pointed two-edged blade, well known in iconography and cinema – was a characteristic component of every upper-class man’s attire, fencing part of his education and duelling a widespread practice. Their contemporaries lived according to, or anyhow had clear in mind, an ideal of praiseworthy conduct that they acknowledge as ‘Modern Honour’. Yet, philosophers and social scientists have devoted surprisingly little attention to a systematic analysis of the concept of honour until very recent years. As a matter of fact, the term ‘honour’ escapes a comprehensive and uncontroversial definition. It is applied indifferently to a vast constellation of concepts. It is a universal term, filled with different contents in different times, places, societies and ranks. In honour’s name people have been, and are inspired to act civilly, hospitably, respectfully, even kindly, generously and bravely. On the other hand, in the name of honour ‘perhaps the bloodiest divinity in human history’ were and are committed and justified criminal abominable actions, in particular against women.44 In the twentieth century honour has been generally reckoned as an obsolete system of values, characteristic of pre-modern, highly hierarchical, patriarchal and violent societies, whose decline saw the rise of an historically unprecedented concern for the dignity and rights of the individual, divested of all socially imposed roles or 42 43

44

Honour, p. 54. Peter Olsthoorn, “Bernard Mandeville on Honor, Hypocrisy, and War”, in The Heytrop Journal, 60, (2), 2019, pp. 205–218; Markku Peltonen, The Duel in Early Modern England. Civility, Politeness and Honour (Cambridge: 2003); Andrea Branchi, “Mandeville e l’onore”, in Filosofia e cultura nel Settecento britannico, ed. by A. Santucci (Bologna: 2000), pp. 37–60 and “Vanity, Virtue & the Duel: the Scottish Response to Mandeville,” in The Journal of Scottish Philosophy 12.1 (2014): 71–93. José Carlos Del Ama, “Honor and Public Opinion”, Human Studies 32 (4):441–460, 2009.

Introduction

15

norms. Only in recent decades has there been a renewed scholarly interest in the concept of honour in political theory, in moral philosophy, in sociology, and in evolutionary psychology.45 Etymologically, ‘honour’ (honneur in French, honra in Spanish, onore in Italian) derives from the Latin noun honorem meaning ‘dignity, office, reputation,’ and from the Latin verb honorare referring to the action of honouring or paying respect; an act or gesture displaying reverence or esteem. ‘To honour’ entails forms of external recognition of superior worth giving visible expression to social order and ranking: titles of distinction, specific verbal modes of address, gestures and attitudes in daily social interaction, such as giving way, standing back, rising up, bowing, hat-doffing, the order at the table or in a procession.46 Men and women living in accordance with the honour code of their group demand the respect of their equals. This form of honour is referred to as ‘horizontal,’ to distinguish it from the ‘vertical’ honour between inferiors and superiors. To maintain honour and avoid dishonour, the individual is bound to follow the rules of the group. If those rules are respected through the individual’s own deliberate adherence to a demanding standard of behaviour and not out of external pressure or compliance with his peers’ expectations, the person concerned is said to be governed by his own sense of honour This is the crucial distinction between ‘external honour’, esteem, approval, or rewards bestowed by society on an individual; and ‘internal’, ‘personal’ or ‘subjective’ honour, the inner standard of behaviour that merits such approval or esteem. The influential definition by the anthropologist Julian Pitt-Rivers of honour as “a sentiment, the manifestation of this sentiment in conduct, and the evaluation of this conduct by others” expresses well the constitutive, internal tensions of the notion of honour and its lexical ambiguities.47 Honour is something more than a means of expressing approval and disapproval. It does not only imply a preference for a behaviour but also the right to a certain treatment in exchange, his or her ‘right to pride’.48 Honour and dishonour are thus the currency through which individuals compete for 45

46 47 48

Ludovico Limentani, Moralità e Normalità (Ferrara: 1920); Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen (New York: 2010); Sharon R. Krause, Liberalism with Honor (Cambridge, MA.: 2002); Michael Ignatieff, The Warrior’s Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (New York: 1997). K. Thomas, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England (Oxford: 2009), in part. Ch. 5. Julian Pitt-Rivers, “Honour and Social Status,” in Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society, ed. J.G. Peristiany (London: 1965), p. 23. Cf. Pieter Spierenburg, “Masculinity, violence and Honor: An Introduction,” in Men and Violence. Gender, Honor and Rituals in Modern Europe and America, Ed. by P. Spierenburg (Columbus, OH: 1998), pp. 1–29.

16

Introduction

the reputation and the means by which their self-esteem can be validated and integrated into the social system, or else refused, obliging the individual to correct it. Once the notion of reputation is admitted as a constituent of honour, a potential conflict emerges between the dictates of conscience and the facts of public recognition. Honour commits the individual to the performance of duties deemed characteristic of his or her gender, social role, rank and status; on the other hand, it induces conformity to others’ expectations and encourages hypocrisy rather than self-fulfilment.49 The notion of honour in its very origins is tainted by the tension between self-evaluation and the evaluation of others.50 From Aristotle’s definition of honour as “the reward of virtue,” and the opposition elaborated by the early Christian writers between true virtue based on one’s own conscience and pagan glory, grounded in the ‘testimony of men’; the whole reflection on the notion of honour in Western societies is marked by the ambiguity and tension between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ honour.51 Honour – in a more historically specific sense – is a key term in the realm of social distinction of modern Europe. When seventeenth or eighteenth-century authors mention the ‘Point of Honour’ or ‘Modern Honour’ they are referring to the post Renaissance reshaping of the ideal of gentlemanliness.52 The thoroughly influential Italian courtesy treatises brought into prominence how the gentleman should conduct himself – his manners and behaviour – to gain the approval and respect of others, both to win and to confer honour and reputation. The ability to conduct a ‘civil conversation’, or to conduct oneself in social life in the company of true gentlemen, required, according to these treatises, the mastery of a technique of self-representation and control and awareness of one’s performance in public – above all linguistic – which also included a heightened sensitivity to offenses. Knowing how to recognize a possible outrage, knowing how to respond in tone, with a challenge if needed, as a “polite response to an impolite act,” and the knowledge of the rules and formalities of the duelling code, are integral parts of the knowledge that defines

49 50 51

52

See Limentani 1920, in part. pp. 92–93. Julian Pitt-Rivers, “Honour” in The International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, Ed. by D.L. Sills (New York: 1968), vol. vi, pp. 503–51; and Pitt-Rivers 1965 pp. 21–80; Ludovico Limentani, L’onore e la vita morale (Roma: 1923). Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, iv.iii.15 (1123b 35) See also 1159a15; Whitley Kaufman, “Under­standing Honor: Beyond the Shame/Guilt Dichotomy” in Social Theory and Practice, 37, 4, 2011, pp. 557–573, Peter A. French, “Honor, Shame, and Identity,” in Public Affairs Quarterly, 16, 2002, pp. 1–15. Thomas 2018.

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a gentleman.53 At the same time, the rigid and stereotyped formulation of the rules had given to the ‘point of honour’ such an absurd elaboration that a gentleman was forced to challenge an opponent for the most banal verbal slip, for a brief moment of anger, for one word too many. The tension between inner moral integrity and the slavery to the social imperative of complaisance and accommodation is a traditional topic in the tradition of courtesy and civility. Very much like their Italian and French predecessors, early eighteenth-century British notions of politeness maintained the emphasis on the centrality of agreeableness and the idea that the chief role of civility and politeness in shaping human sociability was to provide rules for agreeable behaviour and thus for pleasing ones’ company.54 The recovery of genuine politeness as expression of the mind’s benevolent disposition, in contrast to affected formal behaviour is one of the key themes in Steele and Addison’s periodical literature. In his philosophical anthropology in the age of politeness Bernard Mandeville makes of his anatomy of honour the picklock to pray open the hidden working of human nature. He began to develop his theories in an unsystematic way, in opposition to Richard Steele’s encomiums of human nature, and the publicspirit ideology that characterized early eighteenth-century political discourse. In later works Mandeville contextualized his ideas in the philosophical arena by choosing Lord Shaftesbury’s ‘philosophy of politeness’ as a polemical target. ‘Manners’ are a paramount component of his philosophical project. A theory of sociability based on the desire for recognition requires a socio-historical account to identify attitudes and behaviours worthy of praise.55 Mandeville’s focus on chastity and courage – key characteristics of female and male honour – and their hidden psychological dynamics are thus substantial elements of his philosophy. Mandeville’s female voice is not just a literary mask occasionally worn. The topics that he had chosen to address as a female persona – women’s status, roles and perception in society, honour and the dynamics of passions on which society is built – are at the core of his life-long philosophical

53

54 55

Peltonen 2003, pp. 19–38; Ruth Kelso, The Doctrine of the English Gentleman in the Sixteenth Century (Champaing, IL: 1929); Marvin E. James, “English Politics and the Concept of Honour 1485–1642,” in Past and Present, Suppl. 3, 1978; Sergio Pérez Cortés, “La ofensa, el mentís y el duelo de honor,” in Revista Internacional de Filosofia Politica, 8, 1996 pp. 107–119; David Quint, “Duelling and Civility in Sixteenth Century Italy” in I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, 7, 1997, pp. 231–278. Peltonen 2003, pp. 148–150. Daniel Luban, “Bernard Mandeville as Moralist and Materialist,” History of European Ideas, 41 (7), 2015, pp. 831–857.

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Introduction

enterprise. He began his philosophical anatomy of the relativity of human values with women, opening his career as a prose writer with a book of female dialogues in which he (as a she) denounced from a woman’s point of view the relativity of the standards of honour and virtue and the social consequences of discrimination, and continued his analysis of prejudices in his contributions to The Female Tatler. In all of his writings Mandeville maintained a keen interest in the condition and abilities of women, on the double standard applied to women and men in many areas of life, and in 1724 pamphlet on prostitution, on the basis of his experimental anatomy of human nature and his medical background, Mandeville developed a consistent account of chastity as an artificial virtue. In addressing the issue of male honour Mandeville intervened in the debate on duelling in almost all his writings, with the eccentric and provocative attitude characteristic of his style, using traditional arguments from courtesy literature to advance a defence of duelling (in later writings dismissed as ironic) on the basis of its usefulness as a deterrent for those who might break social norms if not stopped by the fear of being called to account for their behaviour. But Mandeville makes of duelling, also and overall, a case study in applied ethics, a paradigmatic expression of the function of pride and shame in the process of sociability and civilization. Duelling, where standing on the field testify of the prevalence of the fear of shame over the fear of death, although relatable to a definite rank of people, represents for Mandeville the most extreme expression of a constant, fundamental feature of human nature which stands at the very roots of sociability: the tendency to strive for social recognition, acting on an idealised self-image to satisfy the impulses of pride and fear of shame, absorbed in a practice of self (and mutual) deception. By tracing the history of contemporary male and female codes of honourable behaviour from the perspective of his philosophical anthropology, Mandeville is able to show that the rituals of Modern Honour, the code of manners of his contemporaries, are an exemplary expression of a spontaneous and artificial order resulting from a natural disposition of human passions. For Mandeville, the forms of socialisation and behaviour typical of the culture of honour are the result of a civilising process which, in polemic contrast to both the abstract rationalism of contractarian theories and the theorists of natural sociability, he characterised in his mature writings as the result of an evolutionary, spontaneous process, achieved not by suppression but by the gradual domestication of originally competitive passions into forms of confrontation compatible with social cohesion and economic development. This book aims to account for what Irwin Primer, one of the leading scholars of the Dutch physician and philosopher, has called Mandeville’s “perennial

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attraction to the subject of honour.”56 It follows chronologically the development of Mandeville’s reflection on honour and on a series of themes and arguments structurally connected to it: the centrality in human nature of the desire for recognition, its expression in the passions of pride and shame, its role in the origin of sociability, the anatomy of manners as a functional part of Mandeville’s research in ethics, the political exploitation of honour in the recent stages of the process of civilization. The chronological structure is instrumental to the reconstruction of the background, the contexts and the development of Mandeville’s thinking on the concept of honour. It is not one of the aims of this book to provide a complete intellectual biography of Bernard Mandeville. It does not provide a substantive analysis of his political thought, his satire, or his thinking on economics and religion. The fact that most of Mandeville’s writings are discussed in the book is, in my view, proof of the fertility of my basic contention: honour is the thread that holds Mandeville’s philosophy of sociability together. The short Prologue: Rotterdam, Leyden & London presents Bernard Mandeville’s background, reviewing the latest additions to the still surprisingly scarce information available on his personal life: his education at Leiden, the family’s involvement in Rotterdam’s political life and Bernard Mandeville’s early activity in England as a physician, translator and verse writer. It introduces the celebrated apology, The Grumbling Hive, in the context of the general European debate on the consistency of virtue and commerce and its specific British manifestations. Chapter 1: Mandeville’s Female Voices presents the context of the debate on women in early eighteenth-century Europe, Bernard Mandeville’s first intervention on the subject in his first prose works and the sources of his arguments on women. In 1709 Mandeville published The Virgin Unmask’d, a book of female dialogues in which an expert woman advises her niece about the practical suffering that women endure in marriage, where they are totally dependent on their husbands for their material welfare and personal reputation. Mandeville’s contributions to the periodical The Female Tatler in July 1709–10 made a polemical target of Richard Steele’s ‘public spirit’ ideology and his enterprise of reformation of manners in discussing standards of female and male honour and their relativity and inequality. In his vindication of the rights and abilities of women, Mandeville relies upon the continental tradition of libertinage érudit, in particular, the works of François Poullain de la Barre and Pierre Bayle. Chapter 2: The Oxford Gentleman further examines Mandeville’s

56

Irwin Primer, Bernard Mandeville, in Dictionary of Literary Bibliography, 101 (Detroit: 1991), p. 226.

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Introduction

contribution to The Female Tatler on the subject of honour and duelling and introduces his Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions, (1711) his major medical work. The essays in The Female Tatler are for Mandeville the opportunity to offer, albeit in a satirical and polemical manner, a first set of themes later expanded in other works: the practice of duelling and the codes of gentlemanliness and a naturalistic account of the origin of society, evolving from a human’s natural susceptibility to flattery and tendency to self-deceit, a current of thought that his contemporaries associated with French moralists. The defence of the experimental method developed by Mandeville in his medical Treatise, together with the dialogical therapy that focuses on the anatomy of the motivations, clarifies his methodological options. Mandeville’s unprejudiced anatomy of social interactions and their primary passions is borrowed  – in its objectives and in its methods  – from the practice of the therapist of nervous disorders. For Mandeville there is no break in continuity between physiology, psychology and philosophy. Chapter 3: The Political Offspring of Pride follows Mandeville’s arguments on honour and the function of pride and shame in the origins and practice of sociability in the writings of the 1714 edition of The Fable of the Bees: the original poem, The Grumbling Hive (1705), twenty prose Remarks, running from a few paragraphs to many pages, and the essay An Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue, where Mandeville offers a genealogy of morality based on human sensitivity to praise and clarifies the basis of his philosophical anthropology: individuals are ineluctably governed by their passions and essentially driven by the desire for esteem to the point of developing a system of false beliefs about their motives. Addressing the question of honour as a general principle and its declination in the modern code of honour, on the basis of a physiology of the passions Mandeville reconstructs the progressive ‘domestication’ of natural courage into an artificial passion in civil society. While ridiculing the men of honour of his time and mocking martial virtues, Mandeville emphasises the function of honour as a fundamental social tie and taking up traditional arguments from the debate on civility offers a peculiar defence of the practice of duelling. Chapter 4: Politeness and Virtue focuses on the discussion of honour, manners and politeness in the 1723 edition of The Fable of the Bees, and on Mandeville’s assessment of chastity as an artificial virtue in his Modest Defence of Public Stews. The Fable 1723, containing two new essays and an expanded version of the Remarks, provoked a succès de scandale, an infuriated reaction, which marks the beginning of Mandeville’s fame. To the idea of charity and good manners as expressions of a natural, inner human disposition to share transcendental values, Mandeville opposes a sound explanation, directed at his new polemical target Lord Shaftesbury, based on the dynamics of pride and shame in promoting successful social

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intercourse and denounces the components of hypocrisy and self and mutual deception embedded in the ideal of politeness. Mandeville’s remarks on modesty, shame and infanticide in the 1723 edition of The Fable of the Bees and in his 1724 pamphlet on prostitution, expose Mandeville’s reflection on female honour. As courage is for men, so chastity for women is an entirely artificial virtue, as he explains, on the basis of a consistent experimental anatomy of human nature. Chapter 5: Cleomenes and Horatio follows Mandeville’s mature reflection on honour and sociability developed in the second part of The Fable of the Bees in the form of a series of dialogues between two gentlemen. In opposition to Shaftesbury’s theory of natural sociability and concurring with those continental writers who emphasized the component of flattery and hypocrisy implicit in the code of good manners, Mandeville exposes the profound inconsistency between the social model of the polite gentleman and the dictates of religion and virtue and argues that elegant and polite manners are not to be reckoned as an external expression of natural benevolence, but rather as the product of pride and fear of shame. In their dialogues, Cleomenes and Horatio identify ‘self-liking’ as a new term to account for the functioning of the desire of esteem and develop an evolutionary account on the origin of the rules of politeness and of human sociability itself. Chapter 6: Modern Honour and the Cult of the Self focuses on Mandeville’s last research book, entirely devoted to the concept of honour, where, again in the form of a series of conversations between Cleomenes and Horace, he further develops his analysis of selfliking, its role in the evolutionary narrative of human institutions, and the way in which political power exploits idealised social models of self-promotion. Reviewing the forms of honourable conduct that characterised the moral history of post-medieval Europe, Mandeville identifies the age of politeness as the last stage in the ‘history of pride’. Provocatively showing the incompatibility of honour with virtue and religion, Mandeville elevates the function of honour as a hierarchical principle and social bond, an example of purely naturalistic and secularised ethics. The chapter closes with a short remark on Adam Smith’s critique of Mandeville. The brief Conclusions indicate some implications of the reading of Mandeville proposed in the book.

Prologue

Rotterdam, Leyden and London Despite Mandeville’s notoriety in his time and the ‘clamour’ he raised, information about his personal life remains extremely scarce. No portrait of Mandeville is known to exist, nor is known who his friends and connections were. There is no existing private correspondence or public records of his activity after 1694, apart from his publications. This short Prologue is intended to present Mandeville’s background and education, his early years in London and the ideological context in which he produced the original verse apology of the beehive, later expanded into The Fable of the Bees, in the light of the information made available by recent scholarship, in particular on Dutch philosophy and history of political thought.1 1

Mandeville’s Continental Background

The only significant inaccuracy in Mandeville’s account in the biographical dictionary cited above concerns his origins. Bernard Mandeville is certainly part of the philosophy of the British Enlightenment, but he was not a native of the British Isles. The most important recent contributions to the understanding of his thought concern his Dutch background.2 Although the name suggests French ancestry, the Mandeville family had settled in the Netherlands in the sixteenth century, if not before.3 Bernard Mandeville was born in Rotterdam on November 15, 1670.4 Most of the male members of the family received university education and several held prestigious public offices within their professions. Bernard’s great-grandfather, Michael, was 1 Jonathan I. Israel, “Enlightenment, Radical Enlightenment and the ‘Medical Revolution’ of the Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Medicine and Religion in Enlightenment Europe, Andrew Cunningham (ed.) (Farnham: 2007), “The Intellectual Origins of Modern Democratic Republicanism (1660–1720),” European Journal of Political Theory, 3, 2004, pp. 7–36; Wiep van Bunge, From Bayle to the Batavian Revolution. Essays on Philosophy in the Eighteenth-Century Dutch Republic (Leiden: 2018). 2 Rudi Verburg, “The Dutch background of Bernard Mandeville’s thought: escaping the Procrustean bed of neo-Augustinianism,” Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics, 9, 1, 2016, pp. 32–61; Jack 2015, Dekker 1992. 3 Paulette Carrive, La Philosophie des passions chez Bernard Mandeville (Paris: 1983), i, p. 8, footnote 9. 4 Mauro Simonazzi, Mandeville (Roma: 2011), pp. 22–25.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004428430_003

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appointed city physician in Nijmegen and rector of the local Latin school in 1601. Bernard’s father, Michael, graduated in law and medicine at Leiden and successfully practiced in Nijmegen before moving to Rotterdam, where he married Judith Verhaar with whom he had four children. His wife’s father, Bernard Verhaar, also following a family tradition, was captain of Rotterdam’s admiralty after having served as commander in the First Anglo-Dutch War. In Rotterdam, Michael de Mandeville established a successful medical practice and was in addition administrator of the city hospital and lieutenant of the militia.5 The young Bernard studied at the Erasmus School in Rotterdam, the city’s Latin school, in the very same years in which Pierre Bayle taught at the Ecole Illustre. It has not been ascertained whether Mandeville ever met Bayle, or if he attended his lectures. It is incontestable that Bayle was a key source for Mandeville’s thought in his mature writings. At the age of fifteen Bernard Mandeville enrolled in the courses of medicine and philosophy at the University of Leiden, a cultural setting among the most advanced in the European world and a very receptive environment for the latest developments in natural and moral philosophy. During the last decades of the seventeenth century it had become, not without controversies, a center for Cartesianism and experimental philosophy. Leiden University led Europe in medical research, almost unique in that it taught anatomy with the aid of regular demonstrations and dissections. Burchard de Volder was one of the leading representatives of Cartesianism in Leiden and a key figure of the new Dutch academic scientific culture.6 In 1675 he was granted permits and funds to set up an auditorium for practical demonstrations and he taught experimental physics by using a wide variety of measuring instruments, particularly those illustrating the discoveries of Robert Boyle, whom de Volder had personally met in London.7 The Leiden University curriculum required, after three years, the submission for discussion of a dissertation in natural philosophy, and after two further years, a dissertation on a more specific medical topic. Mandeville studied philosophy and medicine under the direction of de Volder and graduated in Philosophy in 1689, after having discussed, on May 23, 1689, his dissertation Disputatio Philosophica de Brutorum Operationibus, on animal automatism. In this paper Mandeville explains the vital functions of animals according to a Cartesian perspective that sees them as automata, a thesis that 5 See Dekker, 1992, in part. pp. 482–483; Israel 2007, pp. 12–13. 6 Andrea Strazzoni, Burchard de Volder and the Age of the Scientific Revolution (Cham, ch: 2019). 7 Tad M. Schmaltz, Early Modern Cartesianism. Dutch and French Constructions (Oxford: 2017), pp. 277–278.

24

Prologue

he will abandon in his mature writings where he argues for the existence of sensibility and thought in animals.8 As Mauro Simonazzi has perceptively noted, the affinity of men and animals in Mandeville’s mature writings is not to be read as a re-evaluation of the superior function of non-human animals, but conversely, from the perspective of an increased awareness of the limits of human rationality according to which there is no qualitative distinction between men and beasts.9 In 1691 Mandeville completed the curriculum in medicine and graduated under the direction of Wolferd Senguerd, a fierce supporter of the experimental philosophy and of the iatro-mechanical school of thought, with the dissertation Disputatio Medica Inauguralis de Chylosi Vitiata, on digestive disorders and their influence on psychological attitudes, a theme he would further develop in the Treatise.10 The Rotterdam where Mandeville grew up was marked by a fierce political division. The Mandeville family had been introduced into the States Party’s circles; one of its leaders, Adriaan Paets, a lawyer, a member of Rotterdam’s city council, and later ambassador to Spain, was in direct contact with the Mandevilles.11 The young Bernard came into contact with political and economic thinking that emphasized personal interest and passions as the foundations of human conduct, in particular, the works of the brothers Johann and Pieter De la Court that linked the notion of self-interest to the defence of republicanism.12 The republican thought of the brothers De la Court advocated freedom of worship, of trade, of immigration, of working without the constraints of gilds and monopoly companies; their defence of the liberties of the hardworking population of the Netherlands against the abuses of aristocratic and monarchical governments was grounded upon the view that selfinterest took the place of reason and virtue as the basis of human conduct. 8 9 10 11 12

Mauro Simonazzi, La malattia inglese. La melanconia nella tradizione filosofica e medica dell’Inghilterra moderna (Bologna: 2004); pp. 312–316; Harold J. Cook “Body and Passions: Materialism and the Early Modern State,” Osiris, 2nd Series, 17, (2002), pp. 25–48. Simonazzi, 2011, p. 19. Ibid., p. 21. Harold J. Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Heaven: 2007), pp. 379–401. Arthur Weststeijn, “From the passion of self-love to the virtue of self-interest: the republican morals of the brothers De la Court,” European Review of History Revue européenne d’histoire, 17, 1, 2010, pp. 75–92; H. Cook, “Bernard Mandeville and the Therapy of “‘The Clever Politician’,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 60, 1999, pp. 101–124; J.W. Smit, “The Netherlands and Europe in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Britain and the Netherland in Europe and Asia, ed. J.S.Bromley and E.H. Kossmann (London: 1968), pp. 23–24; Hans Blom, Causality and morality in politics: the rise of naturalism in Dutch seventeenth-century political thought (Rotterdam: 1995), pp. 157–183.

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Biased by self-love, man cannot be relied upon to control his passions. In De la Court’s thought, it is only through a process of learning and socialization that man can channel and manage the passions. Some forms of government are better than others at creating the institutional structures that promote the ‘right’ passions and discourage the destructive ones: the passions and institutions are interdependent. The worth of a government is to be measured by the extent to which it is capable of bringing the passions of the citizens, their private interest, into harmony with the common good. Republican democratic life, allowing for the neutralization of contrary forces, results in social harmony and material betterment.13 The Mandeville family’s involvement in the so called ‘Costerman Riots’ in Rotterdam, in 1690, marked the story of the whole family and is behind Bernard’s emigration to Britain. It is also the occasion for his first known public piece of writing. Popular discontent against the arrogant and corrupt local governor, the bailiff Jacob van Zuijlen van Nievelt, exploded into an open rebellion when a member of the militia, Cornelius Costerman, was sentenced to death and executed for having stabbed with a sword and killed a taxman during a brawl about a cask of wine for which no excises had been paid. Presumably Bernard Mandeville himself authored one of the many satirical broadsides that circulated in Rotterdam in those days of late September 1690 and that fomented the crowd which on October 5, 1690, violently broke into Van Zuijlen’s house and ransacked it: Sanctimonious atheist, loving whore’s skin Money-grubbing tyrant, spawn of hell, Disturber of the peace, ruiner of the community Who spares neither widow nor orphan, but sucks from their bones The city government dismissed Van Zuijlen and sued him for crimes in office; but two years later, reinstated, van Zuijlen took revenge against his opponents and the people involved in the riot, among them, the printer of the pamphlet Johannes Bortius and the Mandeville family.14 Michael de Mandeville moved to Amsterdam. His son Bernard left for England, not to return. On September 17, 13 14

Verburg 2016; Cook 2002; Arthur Weststeijn, Commercial Republicanism in the Dutch Golden Age. The Political Thought of Jan & Pieter De La Court (Leiden: 2012). Cook 1992, p. 471, Dekker 1992, pp. 495–498. Schijnheyligh Atheist, Liefhebbent hoere vel, Geltsughtigh dwingelandt, uytbroedsel van de Hel, Verstoorder van de rust, bederver der gemeente Die Weeuw noch Wees ontsiet, maer suig uit haer gebeente.

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Prologue

1694, a passport was released at Whitehall to Bernard Mandeville, ‘Subject of the State Generals’. On February 1, 1699, in the church of St-Giles-in-the-Fields, Mandeville married Elizabeth Lawrence, who just a month later gave birth to a son, Michael (1699–1769) and seven years later to a daughter, Penelope (1706–1748). Between 1700 and 1709 Bernard Mandeville fathered an illegitimate child and with his wife Elizabeth had other three children. They all died very young.15 All dates after 1694 are connected almost exclusively with his publishing activity. 2

Early Years in London: Translator and Poet

For the first years of Mandeville’s life in England we have circumstantial evidence that allows us reasonably to imagine the context of his activity and his experience as a Dutch émigré in the London medical underworld of the 1690s. The first record of his presence in England is the warning he received from the Royal College of Physicians of London, in November 1693. The learned medical doctors of the Royal College sought to defend the pre-eminence of physicians educated at or affiliated with the traditions of Cambridge and Oxford in the rapidly developing medical marketplace, against the growing number of practitioners trained in other schools and the apothecaries who visited the sick and took money for the prescriptions they gave. Mandeville’s name appears on a list of eight practitioners summoned to the College, to respond concerning their activity. Ten years later, in 1703, we find Mandeville associated with the well-known physician and surgeon of Dutch origin Johannes Groenevelt and his group of physicians: ‘The Repository’. Groenevelt had developed a successful medical and surgical practice, at first among the Dutch community and then among the whole population. He had joined with four other licentiates of the College of Physician: John Crell, a German chemical physician, also educated at Leiden; Philip Guide, a French Huguenot refugee from Paris; Richard Browne, an English physician and translator of many works from Latin into English; and John Pechey, a prolific author and the first translator of Thomas Sydenham’s books from Latin into English. ‘The Repository’ practiced in King’s Street, in a sort of day-hospital where they took turns seeing patients and selling medications from a large stock they collected and compounded on site. To bring in patients, the group also published The Oracle for the Sick (1687), the first multiple-choice popular medical book in English, structured as a series of questions usually asked by a physician with multiple answers; by selecting 15

Simonazzi 2011, p. 24; Arne C. Jansen, “Bernard Mandeville: some recent genealogical discoveries,” Notes and queries, lvi (2009), 2, pp. 231–235.

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answers, a prospective patient could identify those who closely matched his or her affliction. Depending upon their replies, the patients were instructed to go on to one or another new set of questions. Patients with wounds or other external manifestations of disease could point to them on the human figures provided in the book.16 In 1693 Groenevelt was summoned by the censor of the Royal College of Physicians after a malpractice suit by one of his patients, for having prescribed cantharides (a well-known traditional medicament extracted from blistering beetles) for internal use. In 1697 Groenevelt was found guilty, fined and sentenced to Newgate prison, but he obtained release on habeas corpus and permanent freedom because of the general pardon granted by William iii at the death of Queen Mary. Supported by the London apothecaries and surgeons, Groenevelt sued the Censor of the Royal College of Physicians for false imprisonment and engaged in a publicity battle against the Censor via pamphlets and newspapers. The case developed into a cause célèbre with important consequences for the whole medical community.17 In 1698 Groenevelt published a volume in Latin defending his practice. In the second edition (1703) and in the English translation (1706) the book opened with a poem, praising the author and mocking those who lacked his skills, composed by ‘B. Mandeville, m.d.’18 Harold Cook suggests that the Repository group, very active in publishing and translating, may have been Bernard Mandeville’s point of contact with the London press. John Peachey and Richard Browne had both published English translations of important medical works. Mikko Tolonen has recently established Mandeville’s role in translating François de la Calmette’s Riverius reformatus from Latin into English in 1706.19 16

17 18

19

Mary E. Fissel, “Making Meaning from the Margins: The New Cultural History of Medicine,” in Locating Medical History: The Stories and Their Meanings; ed. by Frank Huisman and John Harley Warner (Cambridge: 2004), pp. 364–389, (in part. pp. 372–4); Margaret DeLacy The Germ of an Idea: Contagionism, Religion, and Society in Britain, 1660– 1730 (London: 2016); pp. 32–34. Cook 2007, pp. 399–402. Bernard Mandeville, In authorem de usu interno cantharidum scribentum’, in Joannem Groenvelt, m.d., Tutus Cantharidum in Medicina Usus Internus (2nd ed., London, 1703; 3rd edition, London, 1706). Translated by John Marten as Upon the Author, Treating of the Internal Use of Cantahrides, in John Greenfield, A Treatise of the Safe, Internal Use of Cantharides in the Practice of Physick, London, 1706. François de la Calmette, Riverius reformatus: or the Modern Riverius; containing the modern practice of physick, set down in a method very near the same with that of Riverius, but accommodated to the most received principles amongst the most modern philosophers, as well as physicians with practical. observations annex’d to each head or chapter, translated by Bernard Mandeville (London, printed for Richard Wellington, 1706. Cf. Tolonen 2013, pp. 107–109; and his Self-love and self-liking in the moral and political philosophy of Bernard

28

Prologue

In 1703 Mandeville’s first English work appeared in print: Some Fables After the Easie and Familiar Manner of Monsieur de la Fontaine. Mandeville’s translation of La Fontaine’s fables has no printer on the title page but carries three pages of advertising at the back for publications by Richard Wellington, one of Pechey’s publishers, who is also the publisher of the new, enlarged edition issued the following year: Aesop Dress’d: Or a Collection of Fables Writ in a Familiar Verse, with two new poems by Mandeville himself: The Carp and The Nightingale and the Owl. In the early eighteenth-century the literary form of the fable had developed, from a pedagogic tool to teach children Latin and impart useful moral maxims, into a means of political satire.20 John Ogibly’s Fables of Aesop (1688) and Roger L’Estrange’s Fables of Aesop and other Eminent Mythologists with Morals and Reflections (1692) are the first examples of the blending of moral pedagogy and political satire which twisted the tales of Aesop towards the political concerns of late seventeenth-century England. After 1698 a series of anonymous fables appeared in London setting Aesop on a journey through England and the whole of Europe: Aesop at Tunbridge (1698); Aesop at Bath (1698): Aesop Return’d from Tunbridge (1698); Old Aesop at Whitehall (1698); Aesop at Amsterdam (1698); Aesop at Islington (1699); Aesop in Spain (1701); Aesop at Court (1702). The popularity of Aesop may explain the change of the title in the second edition of Mandeville’s translation. Of the more than two hundred fables composed by La Fontaine, Mandeville chose thirty-seven, and in Aesop Dress’d added two more from his own hand. In Mandeville’s translation frequently the number of verses is greater than in the original, for it was the characteristic tendency of Mandeville’s style, both in verse and prose, to spell out references and allusions, and to adapt the fable to the stereotype of English life at the turn of the century.21 The selection of the poems and the themes stressed in the translation betrayed Mandeville’s interest in the social effects of the passions of pride and vanity, in hypocrisy and human motivations in general. The poems he authored, The Carp and The Nightingale and the Owl, focus on pride and vanity as root causes for action. The Carp is a satire of the Grand Tour and the provincialism of many British travellers: “Some Fops that visit France and Rome / Before they know what’s done at home (…) Strange Countries may improve a Man / That knew the World before he went / But he,

20

21

Mandeville and David Hume, Unpublished doctoral dissertation (University of Helsinki, 2010), pp. 48–52. Francis McKee, An Anatomy of Power: The Early Works of Bernard Mandeville, Ph. D. dissertation, University of Glasgow, 1991, pp. 63–76; Stephen H. Daniel, “Political and Philosophical uses of Fable in Eighteenth-Century England,” in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 23, 1982, pp. 151–71. See The Lyon and the Gnat (Le lion et le Moucheron ii, ix) The Dog and the Ass (L’Ane et le Chien viii, xvii).

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that sets out ignorant / Whom only Vanity intices / Bring Nothing from ‘em, but their Vices.” The other poem by Mandeville, The Nightingale and the Owl also concerns pride and its effects. The eagle, king of the birds, having searched in vain among the birds of his court for a night watchman able to sing in order to prove he has not fallen asleep, resolves to publish an edict to find a candidate to hold the position. The overconfident nightingale assumes he is the only one suitable for the job, but instead of offering his services he waits to be called, hoping for a greater reward. In the meantime, the humble owl gets the position and when the nightingale realises what has happened, he is literally suffocated by anger. Dr. Mandeville ironically depicts the physiological effects of mortifying pride, anticipating the symptomatology of passions he will develop in his medical treatises as well as in The Fable of the Bees: He star’d and cou’d not speak a Word, Grew pale, and swell’d, his Wind came short, And Anger overwhelm’d his Heart. He foams at Mouth, and raves and blusters, And utters all his Word in Clusters. A King! a Devil, stupid Fowl That can compare me to an Owl! In the following year Mandeville published another poem, in imitation of Paul Scarron: Typhon, or the Wars between the Gods and Giants: A Burlesque Poem in Imitation of the Comical Monsieur Scarron, in which he indulges in a coarse description of the drunken and lascivious Gods, disturbed during their banquet by the giant Typhon, and where the mortals, because of their vices and corruption, are punished by the Gods with discord, fear, impotence, lawyers and twenty-five different sorts of doctors and poets. The long poem is dedicated “To the Serenissime – The Numerous Society of F-----s in London and Westminster,” and the action takes place, as Mandeville declares at the opening of the poem, in: An Age, that spoil’d by Peace and Plenty / Had no Reformers, under Banners / Of holy thirst-encountering Manners / Those Champions of Sobriety / That watch to keep the world adry / Whose Drummers teach one day in seven / That the tap-too’s the March of Heaven / I say ‘twas in that wicked time / When quenching thirst was thought no Crime.22

22

B. Mandeville, Typhon: or The Wars Between the Gods and Giants; A Burlesque Poem in Imitation of the Comical Mons. Scarron, London, 1704, pp. 5–6.

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Prologue

The reference is transparent for a contemporary reader. By targeting the Societies for the Reformations of Manners, which had become a feature of the British social and ideological landscape, Mandeville enters the public arena of contemporary controversies. The first Society for the Reformation of Manners was founded in 1690 at Tower Hamlet, in the East End, when a group of residents gathered to shut down the illegal but widely tolerated local brothels and then agreed to meet regularly. When one of residents moved to the Strand, he founded a new Society in that area, which seems to have been the true progenitor of the societies that in the following years spread to different parts of England. The Tower Hamlet group was born to solve a local problem; the Strand group was made up of people who had a more general vision of reform, and who spread it by publishing proclamations, pamphlets, and letters. In 1699 there were eight other societies, about twenty in 1701. Since 1689 there were denunciations of the corruption of customs and the alarming spread of old and new vices, in what has been viewed as a ‘campaign’ against vice. For those who felt the need for reform, the majority of the nation seemed blind to the dangers – for their souls as well as for the nation as a whole – that the spreading of vice represented; fighting it meant not just saving souls but fighting for the economic and political salvation of England. Publications in support of the ‘Reformation of Manners’ did not merely refer to Christian duties, but also to worldly considerations on the need to enforce laws. From all over England came the plea for more zealous magistrates. Queen Mary gained a special place in the ranks of promoters of reform with her letter to the judges of Middlesex on July 6, 1691, reproduced and posted on the gates of all the Middlesex churches, calling on the magistrates to be particularly strict and rigorous in pursuing the crimes against morality, and to be themselves of exemplary conduct.23 3

Be Careful What You Wish For: The Grumbling Hive

But it is another poem by Bernard Mandeville published the following year that had an unpredictable success and eventually became the foundation for that set of writings known as The Fable of the Bees. The Gabinetto Nazionale delle Stampe in Rome holds an engraving by the almanac painter and illustrator Giuseppe Maria Mitelli, significantly entitled: Uno la fa all’altro, e il diavolo a tutti. (Everyone cheats everybody else, and the Devil cheats them all). In this 1691 engraving, various social character-types are standing in an open space 23

Faramerz Dabhoiwala, “Sex and Societies for Moral Reform, 1688–1800,” Journal of British Studies, 46, 2, (2007), pp. 290–319.

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in a semi-circle: the Rich, the Buffoon, the Thug, the Villain, the Merchant, the Lawyer, the Prostitute and the Physician. In the boxes next to the figures, each proudly celebrates his own ability to cheat the others, but none is aware of the ‘invisible hand’ of the Devil that literally draws them all towards him, holding them with his laces. In the lower section of the print some verses make explicit the Morals: This World is a business Where everyone in order to gain Tries to cheat his fellows. Everything is driven by Interest Like a Chain it ties All the Vices like its rings These to those and those to these24

figure 1

24

The Italian social fabric symbolised by a chain of social types, with all relations of dependence ultimately relating back to the devil (Uno la fa all’altro e il diavolo a tutti) 1691. Etching by Giuseppe Maria Mitelli, 1634–1718 Courtesy Wellcome Collection. Attribution CC-BY-4.0

Questo mondo è una bottega, / dov’ogn’un per far guadagno / d’ingannar cerca il compagno, / L’interesse à ciò ne piega, / Qual catena questo lega/ Tutti i vizii come anelli; / Quelli a questi, e questi a quelli (the translation is mine).

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Prologue

The reciprocal exploitation of other people’s vices out of self-interest is depicted as a devilish action. The Italian engraver graphically expresses a diffused worry across civilized Europe at the close of the seventeenth century: the idea that the level of civilization and progress reached by the most advanced nations could entail a corresponding moral decline. The notion that the proper operation of the social organism depends upon the wide dispersion of virtue throughout society, of a direct relationship between the virtues of the citizens and the well-being of society, is as old as Plato’s Republic; it gained new urgency with the previously unknown standards of material wealth reached by the most advanced and developed nations at the turn of the century, which appeared to many as a threat to the social fabric. Early modern Europe witnessed also the rise of a new vision which claimed that morality, sociability itself, is grounded in man’s passions and interests rather than in reason or external authorities. Several thinkers advanced the distressing idea that men are driven primarily by their passions rather than by ideals of reason and virtue, and that self-interest is the main thrust among them. Eventually, self-interest came to be thought of as the safeguard against other disorderly drives, as the antidote to arbitrary, capricious actions based on more unruly passions. In France, sceptics, epicureans and neo-Augustinians, arguing from different perspectives, peculiarly shared a characterization of human nature as subordinate to passions. La Rochefoucalud, Pascal, Saint-Évremond, Nicole, and Bayle all assigned a central role among the passions to the love of praise, and explained virtue as the result of the chameleon-like effects of pride.25 In the Netherlands the Dutch republican thought of Johan and Pieter De la Court in reappraising the role of man’s passions emphasized the connection between self-interested personal behaviour and the needs and concerns of statecraft, and the positive contribution of well-guided self-interest and ambition for honour in securing the health and wealth of a republic of merchants.26 But in the British Isles the issue assumed a particular resonance. It was a common opinion among English polite society that humankind was naturally generous and sociable, and that if unchecked the passions would lead to corruption, crime and social disorder. In the early eighteenth-century the rhetoric of private virtue and moral reform was associated with the political language of classical republican virtues. Between 1689 and 1713 Britain was in an almost constant state of war against France on the European continent and on the colonial possessions in North America. Protracted warfare posed critical 25 26

See Arthur O. Lovejoy, Reflection on human nature (Baltimore: 1961); Laurence Dickey, “Pride, Hypocrisy, and Civility in Mandeville’s Social and Historical Theory,” in Critical Review 4, 1990, pp. 387–431; Hundert 1994, pp. 29–35. Verburg 2016, Weststeijn, 2010.

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logistical problems, and the resolutions adopted by the Whig governments of those years promoted those transformations later known as the ‘financial revolution’ and the growth of the ‘fiscal-military state’. The problem of raising money to recruit and supply regularly, over long distances, a large-scale permanent army required the employment and the promotion of numerous civilian officers and the growth of a sizeable public administration devoted to the military effort and drove the government to develop new financial institutions: the Stock Market, the Bank of England and a system of National Debt. By this latter, governments could borrow almost indefinitely as long as they could find enough money from taxes to pay the interest, and the ordinary individual or company could borrow to start or support a business. The means to fund the war through public credit created a new body of investors who drew profits from the military efforts. London lawyers, government officials and tradesman profited of the expansion of trade and public expenditure. The growth of the ‘fiscal-military state’ altered the balance of social forces in Britain, penalizing the landed classes, creating a new class of financers, and laying a heavy burden of taxes on the ordinary consumer.27 The cost of the war and its deep political and ideological implications was a dominant theme in English society in the reign of Queen Anne. These new financial institutions, not relying on land, the traditional source of wealth and power, appeared as new and threatening forms of wealth and were often addressed in the political discourse with the rhetoric of classical republican virtue. The language of classical Italian citizenship was applied to the English landed aristocracy in a moment of constitutional chaos in the second half of the seventeenth century and remained an ever-present possibility for conceptualizing the relations of the English gentlemen with their political world.28 The partisans of the classical republican tradition, advocating a fundamental connection between political liberty and landed property, assimilated the English monarchy to the mixed constitution of the ancient classical republics, in which the one, the few and the many – in Britain King, Lords and Commons – balanced each other, and the archetypical landed gentleman, bulwark of both private and public virtue, remained the 27

28

John Brewer, The Sinews of Power, War Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge, MA: 1990); Andrew Lincoln, “The Culture of War and Civil Society in the Reigns of William III and Queen Anne,” in Eighteenth-Century Studies, 44, 4, 2001, pp. 455–474; Stephen H. Gregg, “‘A Truly Christian Hero’: Religion, Effeminacy, and Nation in the Writings of the Societies for Reformation of Manners,” in Eighteenth-Century Life 25, 1, 2001, pp. 17–28. John G.A. Pocock, “The reconstruction of discourse: towards the historiography of Political Thought,” in Modern Language Notes, xcvi, 1981, pp. 959–980; Francesco Fagiani, “La storia del discorso politico inglese dei secoli XVII e XVIII, tra virtù e diritti,” in Rivista di storia della filosofia, 3, 1987.

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Prologue

ideal of the virtuous citizen. According to the rhetoric of the opposition to the Whig governments and their ‘moneyed interests’, the expansion of foreign trade and the new mechanism of public credit and government spending had not only corrupted manners, weakened traditional virtues, and sapped martial spirit by encouraging luxurious consumption, but endangered the very basis of the British constitution.29 The Grumbling Hive: Or, Knaves Turn’d Honest appeared anonymously on April 2, 1705, and was soon after “Pirated, cry’d about the Streets in a Half-Penny Sheet.”30 The 433 verses in a low, conversational style made famous by Samuel Butler’s Hudibras, describes a large community of bees, the mechanisms of its wealth, and the disastrous decline that is triggered in the life of the opulent hive by a moralizing intervention. The drudging bees, a transparent metaphor for contemporary Britain, live in wealth, luxury and ease. The hive is crowded by a great multitude of individuals, a large society made wealthy by the mutual exploitation of the needs, passions and interests of individuals. In all professions and social functions each individual works for his own advantage, but the well-being of the whole society – here is the novel perspective advanced in the poem – is not endangered: those passions that many condemn as vices, if skilfully managed, are at the very source of the prosperity of the hive: Vast Numbers throng’d the fruitful Hive; Yet those vast Numbers made ‘em thrive; Millions endeavouring to supply Each other’s Lust and Vanity;31 (…) Thus every Part was full of Vice, Yet the whole Mass a Paradise; “Their Crimes conspir’d to make them Great:” the wealth of the hive stems from the self-interested passions of the individuals, and the author of the poem is adamant  – although he has later become a kind of standard-bearer in economic thought of the opposite argument, even in his early satire Mandeville does not support in any form a theory of the harmony of the interests – he is adamant that the general outcome of the self-interested behaviour of the inhabitants of a large commercial society may become the collective good, when channelled and harmonized by a skilful political management: 29 30 31

Hundert 1994, pp. 10–11; Thomas 2018, pp. 188–191. Fable I, p. 4. Fable I, p. 18.

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THIS was the States Craft, that maintain’d The Whole of which each Part complain’d: This, as in Musick Harmony, Made Jarrings in the main agree; But the grumblings, protests and appeals to reform are continuous and insistent. While enjoying their well-being in a large society, the bees – out of ignorance or hypocrisy – complain about the spread of vice. The almighty Zeus, angered by the arrogance of the insects, punishes them simply by fulfilling their wishes. Suddenly all vices, hypocrisy and dishonesty, great or small, disappear. The effects are immediate and devastating: prices fall, professional activities and commerce halts, unemployment grows. With the collapse of the prices of luxury goods, those who base their labour on the exploitation of the self-aggrandizing passions of others suddenly find themselves out of work. The frugality and temperance now prevailing irreversibly hamper the development of arts and industry. In short, the hive is emptied and impoverished, and the population decreases to the point of not being able to further defend itself. The bees, reduced to misery and threatened by their enemies, are forced to flee the hive. The moral of the poem is unequivocal: any attempt to moralize, to reform, a large and wealthy society is utopian and doomed to fail. Moral virtue and commercial prosperity are incompatible. The closing verses enclose an invitation to silence the grumbling, to accept the reality that frugality, honesty and virtue are incompatible with commerce, wealth, military power, and civilized and polite progress: THEN leave Complaints: Fools only strive To make a Great an Honest Hive T’enjoy the World’s Conveniencies, Be fam’d in War, yet live in Ease, Without great Vices, is a vain Eutopia seated in the Brain. (…) Bare Virtue can’t make Nations live In Splendor; they, that would revive A Golden Age, must be as free, For Acorns, as for Honesty.32

32

Fable I, pp. 37–38.

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Prologue

To attack discontent in verses had a political meaning. Fables were being used as vehicles for Tory and Whig propaganda.33 In a small poem that Mandeville had published in 1703 he had already referred to England as ‘a grumbling Nation’.34 Those who ‘grumbled’ in spring 1705 were the Tories, and the prolongation of the war against France fueled new tensions. Mandeville’s poem appeared during the campaign for one of the most bitterly fought elections of the century, and was indeed taken by some as a Whig tract, although it does not appear to be closely connected to any specific partisan political position.35 The Grumbling Hive addresses in a satirical and paradoxical form the broader issue of the compatibility of ‘virtue’ and ‘commerce’ that in the first decades of the eighteenth century sparked passionate debates, both in political discourse and philosophical thought. In the Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes, referring to the traditional Aristotelian image of the bees and ants as naturally political animals, remarked that for these creatures the good of the community is coincident with the private good, that their agreement is ‘Natural’, while for humans it is ‘Artificial’ and requires a ‘Common Power, to keep them in awe, and to direct their action to the Common Benefit’.36 Fénelon had used the image of the virtuous and frugal beehive, orchestrated by a monarch concerned to promote the well-being of her subjects.37 In his early fables Mandeville endorsed the conventional view that vice harms individuals and virtue benefit them. In the Grumbling Hive he reverses the practice of the moralizing use of nature, emphasizing – not without irony – that the growth and the well-being of a large society is grounded precisely in those passions labelled by many as vices, and that hypocrisy is the moral price to be paid in exchange for economic prosperity. The grumbling bees are not an example of industry, temperance and devotion to the common good, but rather a standard of mutual exploitation. By showing how the implementation of a moral reform would inescapably lead to collective impoverishment, 33 34 35

36 37

Daniel 1982, pp. 168–69. The Pamphleteers: A Satyr , London, 1703. Parliament was prorogued on March 14, 1705, and a dissolution followed shortly under the provision of the Triennal Act. The election which followed was one of the most bitterly fought of the eighteenth century, with over 100 contests, in England alone. Cf. C. Cook, J. Stevenson, British Historical Facts 1688–1760 (London: 1988), p. 113; Goldsmith 1999, pp. 25–27; Tolonen 2003, pp. 112 and 166. T. Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C.B. Macpherson (London: 1968), pp. 225–227. Cf. István Hont, “The Early Enlightenment Debate on Commerce and Luxury,” in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, ed. M. Goldie and R. Wokler (Cambridge: 2005), pp. 379–418; Ryan Hanley, The Political Philosophy of Fénelon (Oxford: 2020), pp. 145–148; David Runciman, Political Hypocrisy: The Mask of Power, from Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond (Princeton: 2010), p. 45.

Rotterdam, Leyden and London

37

Mandeville ridicules the ideology of private virtue and civic engagement, and provocatively hints at the idea of the ‘virtue of self-interest’. The Grumbling Hive foreshadows The Fable of the Bees but does not contain a fully developed social theory; it is not an argued attack on the prevalent ideology of public and private virtue.38 Evidently Mandeville enjoyed writing poetry, and in 1712 he published a collection of his own poems, but it is only in his prose production that he presented and elaborated his anatomy of motivations, passions, human values and institutions.39 He began with women and assumed a female persona. 38 39

Goldsmith 1999, pp. 22–25, and his Private Vices, Public Benefits. Bernard Mandeville’s Social and Political Thought, Revised edition, Cybereditions, 2001, p. 24. Wishes to a Godson, with Other Miscellany Poems. By B.M., London: Printed for J. Baker, 1712.

Chapter 1

Mandeville’s Female Voices Tous les peuples du monde (…) tiennent les femmes dans une espèce de captivité.

p. Bayle, Nouvelle lettres critiques sur l’histoire du Calvinisme, od, ii, p. 284b

∵

Bernard Mandeville’s first two prose publications, a book of women’s dialogues and a series of periodical essays, are both about women and both written assuming a female identity. He begins his reflection on society by looking at the values and virtues on which honourable codes of conduct are based from a female perspective, denouncing their relativity and the flagrant inequality to which women are subjected in all spheres of life. Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the debate on women in which Mandeville develops his arguments as a female character, the strategy with which he develops his arguments in polemical opposition to Richard Steele’s moralising campaign in The Tatler, and some indications of the possible sources of Mandeville’s ‘feminism.’ 1

The Century of Sex

The circumstances of Mandeville’s debut on the literary scene are not known, but certainly the ‘querelle des femmes’ was a hot topic for the reading public and for the editorial market.1 The 1718 edition of the annual reference book Magna Britannia Notitia, or The Present State of Great Britain provides an enlightening summary of the way in which a female condition of subjection was sanctioned by the English law: Women in England, with all their Moveable Goods so soon as they are married, are wholly in potestate Viri, at the Will and Disposition of the 1 See Karen O’Brien Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-century Britain (Cambridge: 2009). Cf. J. Martin Stafford Bernard Mandeville, in Sex from Plato to Paglia. A Philosophical Encyclopedia, Ed. by Alain Soble (Westport, CT-London: 2006), Vol. 2, pp. 632–36.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004428430_004

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Husband (…) She can’t Let, Set, Sell, Give away or Alienate any thing without her Husband’s Consent. (…) The Woman upon Marriage loseth not only the Power over her Person, and her Will, and the Property of her Goods, but her very Name. But, adds the author, notwithstanding all this, Englishwomen are, generally speaking, the “most happy Women in the World,” because of the good nature of the Englishmen with their tenderness and respect in “giving them the uppermost place at Table.”2 The eponymous character of Defoe’s 1724 novel Lady Roxana personifies the strains of this condition and the very (im)possibility for women to possess their own fortune in a patriarchal society when she bluntly exposes the reasons for declining an advantageous and honourable marriage proposal from a man she deeply loves and respects.3 Being a wealthy woman, marriage for her is a business transaction – a way to launder the capital saved in her twenty-years career as a courtesan – as well as a redemption, a means to acquire the respectability she needs to enjoy the outcome of her activities. Yet, she doesn’t want to give up her independence.4 She owes the merchant his love and honesty, but they are not an adequate reassurance: “the very nature of the Marriage-Contract was, in short, nothing but giving up Liberty, Estate, Authority, and every-thing, to the Man, and the Woman was indeed, a meer Woman ever after, that is to say, a Slave.” Facing such patriarchal reality Lady Roxana chooses to maintain her independence at the expense of her gender identity: “it was my Misfortune to be a Woman, but I was resolv’d it shou’d not be made worse by the Sex; and seeing Liberty seem’d to be the Men’s Property, I wou’d be a Man-Woman.”5 Her choice thus exemplifies the idea that only men can attain social identity and be active members of society and her remark is not an isolated one. The debate over the role and status of women in society was particularly lively in Britain. The late seventeenth and the eighteenth century, known also as ‘the century of sex’, is regarded as a period which witnessed not only a shift in the way human bodies were understood, but also the rise of an increasingly polarized notion of gender differences; the idea of two

2 Edward Chamberlayne, Magna Britannia Notitia, or The Present State of Great Britain, London 1718; Bk.iii, Ch. v, pp. 176–177. 3 Daniel Defoe, The Fortunate Mistress: Or, A History of the Life and Vast Variety of Fortunes of Mademoiselle de Beleau, Afterwards Called the Countess de Wintselsheim, in Germany, Being the Person known by the Name of the Lady Roxana, in the Time of King Charles II, London 1724. 4 Lady Roxana (Penguin ed. London 1975), p. 147. 5 Lady Roxana pp. 142 and 148.

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incommensurable sexes, where the woman is not simply counted as a defective occurrence of the male.6 A variety of social, political, economic and philosophical developments in the last decades of the seventeenth century fuelled the debates over women’s identity and their social standing. The seeds of the revolution in the theoretical and practical understanding of the human body were sown by Descartes: the radical doubt, the scepticism toward the common prejudices of mankind and overall mind-body dualism provided a new perspective on human biology and anatomy, and consequently produced a whole new range of arguments on the characteristic of the female mind. A series of researches in physiology and midwifery, resulting from the new developments of medicine in the postCartesian era, provided evidence against the attempt to ground social differences between the sexes on presumed anatomical differences and challenged the traditional view of women as inferior and incomplete versions of men, as men manqué.7 After 1660 a significant number of voices argued against the traditional ideas concerning female sexual anatomy, menstruation, orgasm, conception and developed influential accounts of generation that stressed women’s active and essential – if not principal – role in reproduction at a time when patriarchal theorists derived male superiority, at least in part, from men’s presumed generative powers.8 Political philosophy too had its share of responsibility in arousing widespread further concerns about traditional values regarding women. Significant developments in political theory and in British political history had a substantial impact on the ideas about marriage. John Locke’s fundamental assumption on human beings as free and equal in the state of nature gradually extended from the political arena into the domestic order. The Glorious Revolution, the Hanoverian settlement and the demise of patriarchal political theory undermined traditional family-state analogies as explanations for social order and tools of female subordination. In a 1701 poem, The Ladies Defence, the female protagonist Melissa, complains about the hypocrisy of men who are fair in public and tyrannical in private, that is, Whigs in the coffee house, but Tories in the bedroom:

6 Karen Harvey, “The Century of Sex? Gender, Bodies, and Sexuality in the Long Eighteenth Century,” The Historical Journal, 45, 4 , 2002, pp. 899–916. 7 Cf. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: 1990), in part. pp. 64–68; Estelle Cohen, “‘What the Women of All Times Would Laugh At’: Redefining Equality and Difference, Circa 1660–1760,” Osiris, 2nd Series, 12, 1997, pp. 121–142. 8 Cf. Daniel Tauvry, A New Rational Anatomy, containing an explication of the Uses of the Structure of the Body of Man and some other Animals according to the Rules of Mechanicks, London 1701; in part. pp. 126–130.

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Passive Obedience you’ve to us [women] transferr’d, And we must drudge in Paths where you have err’d: That antiquated Doctrine you disown; ‘Tis now your Scorn, and fit for us alone.9 The author, Lady Mary Chudleigh, was evidently inspired by her acquaintance and correspondent Mary Astell, the author of Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1696–1697) and Some Reflections Upon Marriage (1706), a proponent of a particular brand of Tory Feminism that wittily intersects the language of political and domestic realms to expose the contradictions of a paternalistic and masculinist Whig ideology, criticizing women’s subjection and lack of education. These publications were among the many titles available to readers at the time. The number of published works on the status of women in marriage and society is particularly significant at the turn of the century. Arguments for the dignity of a woman’s nature or even “the pre-eminence of the female sex” were not new, but from the 1690s onward, the intensity of the debates in works written especially by women, were “quite out of the ordinary.”10 As in many other moments in history, women’s bodies and rights were grounds for broader ideological struggles. Another particular set of books focusing on women in this context, potentially subversive to the accepted views on sexuality, were those belonging to the pornographic tradition. Sexual objectification is an inherent feature of these works, but early modern erotica often challenged and revised the traditional and conventionally accepted patriarchal definitions of women’s sexuality. They often emphasized female sexual activities, supporting the notion of women as subjects of their own desires, and exposing an open concern for their pleasures.11 A specific genre within this category, dating back to Pietro Aretino’s Ragionamenti (1534–36), is the dialogues between women; usually a mature, experienced ‘elder’ and a young, ‘naïve’ apprentice. These books also exploited the conventional association of women’s voices with prostitution where that of the experienced woman was immediately connected to sexual transgression.12 9 10 11 12

The Ladies Defence, Or, a Dialogue Between Sir John Brute, Sir William Loveall, Melissa, and a Parson (1701) in The Poems and Prose of Mary, Lady Chudleigh, ed. Margaret J.M. Ezell (Oxford, 1993), lines 95–8. Cf. Sarah Apetrei, Women, Feminism and Religion in Early Enlightenment England (Cambridge: 2010). Manuela Mourão, “The Representation of Female Desire in Early Modern Pornographic Texts, 1660–1745,” in Signs, 24, 3, 1999, pp. 573–602. Cf. P. Aretino, Ragionamento della Nanna e della Antonia fatto a Roma sotto una ficaia, Venezia 1534, and Dialogo nel quale la Nanna insegna alla Pippa l’arte puttanesca, Venezia, 1536.

42 2

Chapter 1

The Virgin Unmask’d Here, Niece, take my Handkerchief, prithee now, if you can find nothing else to cover your Nakedness (…) I cann’t abide your Naked Breasts heaving up and down; it makes me Sick to see it.13

This is the opening of Bernard Mandeville’s first prose work in English: The Virgin Unmask’d, or Female Dialogues Betwixt an Elderly Maiden Lady, and her Niece, on several Diverting Discourses on Love, Marriage, Memoirs, and Morals, & c. of the Times, published in summer 1709. The front page bears no indication of the author but the preface, is signed B.M.14 It is constructed as ten dialogues between two women; Lucinda, the elderly, ‘wise’ maiden and Antonia, the young, virgin niece.15 The choice of the title itself and the opening of the first dialogue, where Lucinda is reproaching her niece for indecently displaying her breasts, are forms of deception to a would-be purchaser of pornography. The most notorious author among the French erotica circulating in Britain from the last decades of the seventeenth century was probably Nicolas Chorier, whose book L’Academie des dames, ou les Sept entretiens galants d’Aloisia (1660) was first translated into English in 1688 as A Dialogue between a Married Lady and a Maid, and again in 1707, two years before Mandeville’s book, with the title The School of Love. This later edition had public resonance because of the prosecution of the editor, John Marshall.16 Once again Mandeville challenged his readers. Notwithstanding the characters and the highly connotated setting of the dialogues, in The Virgin Unmask’d women are not represented as an object of pleasure. Rather, the book describes the unevenness of marriage conditions 13

14 15 16

The Virgin Unmask’d, or Female Dialogues Betwixt an Elderly Maiden Lady, and her Niece, on several Diverting Discourses on Love, Marriage, Memoirs, and Morals, & c. of the Times, p. 1. (Hereafter The Virgin Unmask’d). Mandeville’s identity is revealed by his initials at the end of the preface. Mandeville felt the need to clarify in the Preface “tho’ Lucinda speaks altogether against matrimony, don’t think I do so too” (p. ix). Jansen 2009, pp. 231–235 suggested that Mandeville’s sister Petronella and her single aunt Elizabeth could have inspired the characters of The Virgin Unmask’d. The first edition appeared in 1660 with the title Aloisiae Sigeae Toletanae Satyra sotadica de arcanis Amoris et Veneris; Aloisia Hispanice scripsit; Latinitate donavit Ioannes Meursius as a fictitious attribution to an original Spanish manuscript later translated into Latin The School of Women, or The Seven Flirtatious Encounters of Aloisia (French: L’Academie des dames, ou les Sept entretiens galants d’Aloisia). Cf. Goldsmith 1986, p. 103; Gordon S. Vichert, “Bernard Mandeville’s The Virgin Unmask’d,” in Mandeville Studies, ed. I. Primer (Den Haag: 1975), pp. 1–2. Dario Castiglione had stressed the affinities with the Dutch moral literature, in particular in a poem by Jacob Cats. Cf. Castiglione, 1983, p. 250.

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in an articulated analysis of women’s general condition of subjection through men’s monopoly of education and culture and the consequences of unequal standards of public reputation imposed on women. The theme of female virtues is indeed the first step in Mandeville’s analysis of the relativity of human values. Starting with the ‘double standard’, Mandeville began developing his anatomy of the roots of human action, anticipating topics and methods of his mature writings: that is to say, an unprejudiced analysis of the dynamics of passions and their role in human nature, in polemical contrast with narrative fictions or eulogistic treatments of human rationality. He also exploited the idea of a dual standard of evaluation of an action sketched in The Grumbling Hive: where, on the one hand, are the agent’s motivations and on the other, their effects on the general welfare: “All is not Gold that glisters; many things are done daily, for which People are extoll’d to the Skies, that at the same time, tho the Actions are good, would be blamed as highly, if the Principle from which they acted, and the Motive that first induc’d them where thoroughly known.”17 The prurient opening of the book and the entire first dialogue, where Lucinda harshly reproaches her niece’s attire and dress, and her general attitude of immodesty described in these words, “You talk of Dressing, yourself, this is Undressing; you are halfnaked (…) every Thing about you smells so strong of the Harlot,” and Antonia’s reaction, to justify herself with the latest fashion before being reduced to tears, are part of a rhetorical strategy internal to the structure of the conversation.18 As Mandeville explained in the Preface, Lucinda’s argument is a “Sophistical Way of Arguing,” a pedagogical tool she employs to win the trust of her niece Antonia.19 It is a pattern that Mandeville maintained in all of his work in a dialogic form: his medical treatise of 1711, The Fable of the Bees, Part II (1729) and the Enquiry into the Origin of Honour (1732). All of Mandeville’s dialogues proceed along this same structure, with two main interlocutors: the instructor/ doctor and the student/patient, where the former, the author’s spokesman, is summoned to cure psychological or moral disorders of the latter through therapeutic conversations. At the beginning the student-patient expresses hostility towards the doctor-instructor, who by employing a therapeutic shock to moderate the pride and vanity of the interlocutor, makes him or her more receptive to a didactic tone of conversation and open to self-analysis.20 After the

17 18 19 20

The Virgin Unmask’d, p. 66. The Virgin Unmask’d, p. 3. The Virgin Unmask’d, Preface. Stephen H. Good, “Introduction” to B. Mandeville, The Virgin Unmask’d (facsimile edition) (New York: 1975), pp. iv–v.

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first dialogue, the conversation in The Virgin Unmask’d proceeds along more peaceful tones. Lucinda wins the confidence of Antonia by revealing the real function of her blame: to mortify her vanity and criticise her demeanour in order to stimulate her awareness to the real intentions of men, in the hope of encouraging Antonia to regain that fear of the other sex, which would help women to resist men’s devious assaults. Lucinda, no doubt, is a strongminded feminist and her dislike of men is so exaggerated it verges on being comical. She argues that the effects of the “Sting of Males” are “more Dreadful, Lasting and Pernicious” than “that of the Tarantula.”21 Lucinda had constantly tried to convince her niece with the “Ill Opinion of Men which they deserve,” but while growing up Antonia’s interests changed. She began to follow fashion, to spend money in “Plays and Romances” and to grow sensitive to men’s presence.22 To uncover men’s true motives, Lucinda suggests it is necessary to act “as a Skilful Physician, and not always judge alike of the same Symptoms, tho’ in the same Distemper.”23 Thus, Antonia’s apparent lack of interest for men, which as a child could be explained with innocence and ignorance, can now be ascribed to her improved skills at dissimulation.24 Lucinda had the time and comfort to observe and study her niece’s behaviour, and Antonia acknowledges her insight: “Indeed you have Unmask’d my Soul, and trac’d my Thoughts through every Chink, and Cranny of my Heart: I own, all what you have said is true.”25 This is the ‘unmasking’ pledged by Mandeville in the title. It is the process through which Lucinda drives Antonia to self-understanding and to the recognition of the true motivating passions in her and other’s behaviour. The whole book is an exercise in anatomy of human passions in courtship rituals and in conjugal life, with a particular focus on the burden imposed on women by men’s shaped common norms of honour, reputation and their effect on women’s lives. To expand her arguments and to offer an articulated anatomy of passions, Lucinda reports two exemplary stories, two lengthy case studies, which take up five out of the ten dialogues of the book. In her analysis of passions Lucinda significantly distinguishes between ‘novel’ and ‘romance’ and carefully contrasts her fictional, but truthful description of dynamics of human passions

21 22 23 24 25

The Virgin Unmask’d, pp. 121, 123. The Virgin Unmask’d, pp. 18–20. The Virgin Unmask’d, p. 25. The Virgin Unmask’d, p. 26 and p. 23. The Virgin Unmask’d, p. 24.

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from contemporary ‘entertainment’ fiction and traditional literary genres.26 Both plots belong to well established narrative traditions of the Augustan age, that Mandeville exploits and stretches to fit his own agenda. The first story is introduced as a confutation of Antonia’s comments, referring to Aurelia, a common acquaintance, as an example of a happily married woman. The intrigue of love, in which the betrothed lovers need to overcome a series of impediments before getting married was a typical popular plot of the late seventeenth century romance. However, at the point where most stories end Mandeville continues, and expands it well beyond the supposed ‘happy ending’ in order to illustrate the actual conditions of subordination imposed on women by matrimony and the psychological distress they face; namely domestic violence, the pains of pregnancy and child-birth, and the complete loss of their independence.27 Aurelia’s story contains the arguments Lucinda uses to warn her niece: men as clever and interested ‘fortune-hunters’ and the condition of marriage as a painful slavery. When Aurelia father’s dies leaving her disinherited, the love story turns into a terrible nightmare. Dorante, her husband, is revealed to be a rake and a gambler, interested only in Aurelia’s dowry and in money altogether. The incitement pronounced by Dorante to convince Aurelia to prostitute herself is an example of the perverted use of argumentative skills that men often exhibited. In his violent, rude and extreme language, almost caricatural, ‘virtue’ is reduced to a sexual connotation, measured exclusively in its pecuniary value; thus emphasizing the relativeness of the concept of ‘virtue’ and ridiculing the moralist’s attitude. Dorante says: “Let him lie with you, and you’ll oblige me (…) if you are possessed of any Virtue, that will get us Money, shew it; but as to bare Virtue, the very Moralists, that in extolling it, have wrong’d their Judgement to shew their Wit, must own that it’s worth nothing.”28 The plot of the second case study deployed by Lucinda illustrates how even a very intelligent women, determined to defend her virtue, may succumb to men’s cunning stratagems. This type of story dates back to medieval romance, but by the Restoration period had become anti-romantic and cynical

26 27 28

The Virgin Unmask’d, p. 87. Cf. Andrea Branchi, “Filosofia o letteratura? Mandeville, Fielding ed il contesto settecentesco,” Iride. Filosofia e discussione pubblica 18-vi, 1996, pp. 479–489. Vichert 1975, pp. 1–10. Cf. John G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: 1975), p. 405. The Virgin Unmask’d, pp. 64–65. Cf. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley-Los Angeles 1957), pp. 155–159.

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in tone.29 Lucinda’s main concern for her niece focuses on the vulnerability of women in the face of men’s deceitfulness. Antonia’s self-confidence may expose her to the dangers of men’s skills of seduction and this very condition is extremely dangerous for women, because they delude themselves of being able to resist men, and consequently let their guards down.30 Both of Lucinda’s exemplary stories are a powerful demonstration of the inefficacy of reason and of the power of passions as motivating forces. Lucinda had studied medicine, a subject helpful to understanding one’s self and comprehending nature, and she consciously assumes the attitude of an empiricist grounding her claims in unprejudiced, careful observations. But despite Lucinda’s praise for study and reason, she is aware of the limited power of them over the passions, particularly for women. Lucinda is indignant about their condition of subjection: when young, to their fathers and when married, to their husbands. This oppression implies a further damage to their character. According to Lucinda, they are often ‘silly’ because they are brought up to be ‘silly’. Instead, men are offered a sound education, apt to stimulate the development of their skills and abilities. They have the opportunity to attend schools and universities to have their minds sharpened by the best scholars and teachers. Meanwhile, Lucinda protests, women are “pricking a clout.”31 Education is simply denied to them. Women may be taught to sing, dance and dress and trained in good manners “but these Things chiefly concern the Body, the Mind remains uninstructed.”32 This disparity in access to education is the root of the inequality between the sexes, which has no natural grounds. Although Lucinda sustains that women are endowed with the same “wit and understanding,” they are not equipped to compete with men in reason: “she that listen to them, is ruined, and her Liberty is lost (…) our Wit may be equal with theirs, but in Every Thing else they exceed us.”33 Poor education for women, the norm at the time, not only condemns them to a subordinate social role but also exposes them to further misfortunes. Men’s skills in social relations and in seduction are sharpened by education, and women are dangerously exposed to them. They can be ‘easily’ conquered and brought to a socially disadvantageous situation; either irredeemably losing their honour, and according to the rhetoric of reputation, inexorably

29 30 31 32 33

P.A.W. Collins, “Restoration Comedy,” in From Dryden to Johnson, ed. by B. Ford (London: 1982), pp. 118–134. The Virgin Unmask’d, p. 27. Cf. p. 70: “I knew you had pride enough to secure your honour.” The Virgin Unmask’d, p. 28. The Virgin Unmask’d, pp. 27–28, 48. The Virgin Unmask’d, pp. 27–28.

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fall into a downward spiral of moral depravity; or being trapped into a hairraising marriage.34 3

Female Education: “What Girls Should Do with Latin?”

The contemporary debate on female education had an important ‘Dutch chapter’ of which Mandeville could easily have been acquainted. The physician Johan van Beverwijck published in 1639 Van de wtnementheyt desvrouwelicken Geslachts (On the excellence of the female sex), an apology for the superiority of women over men, developed by blending medical arguments and historical examples.35 The German-born Dutch painter, engraver and exceptionally learned scholar Anna Maria van Schurman published in Latin an essay translated into English in 1659 with the title The Learned Maid; or Whether a Maid May Also Be a Scholar, mentioned by Pierre Bayle  – another key source for Mandeville’s remarks on women, as we will see  – in the Dictionnaire.36 The most recent reflection on the subject available to Mandeville in Britain, particularly concerning the accusation of men’s enslaving women in marriage and their inadequate education, their being actively discouraged from learning, are articulated in the writings of Mary Astell, in particular in Some Reflections upon Marriage.37 Mandeville certainly knew the text, and he could also have borrowed from it, as M.M. Goldsmith suggests. But to Astell’s Tory political perspective which uses women’s subordination to satirize the Whig doctrine  – the idea that reasonable creatures have the right to resist their rulers and that the learned woman’s career is an austere life of retirement, Mandeville’s view contrasts significantly, granting women an active

34 35

36 37

Cf. Faramerz Dabhoiwala “The Construction of Honour, Reputation and Status in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England” in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Vol. 6 (1996), pp. 201–213. Cf. Cornelia Niekus Moore, “‘Not by Nature but by Custom’: Johan van Beverwijck’s Van de wtnementheyt desvrouwelicken Geslachts,” in The Sixteenth Century Journal, 25, 3, 1994, pp. 633–651; Lia van Gemert, “The power of the weaker vessels: Simon Schama and Johan van Beverwijck on women,” in E. Kloek, N. Teeuwen, & M. Huisman (Eds.), Women of the Golden Age: an international debate on women in seventeenth-century Holland, England and Italy (Hilversum: 1994), pp. 39–50. Cf. Michael A. Seidel, “Poulain De La Barre’s The Woman as Good as the Man,” in Journal of the History of Ideas, 35, 3, 1974, pp. 499–508. In a Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest (1696 and 1697) Astell urged the establishment of convent-like college for women wanting to choose a world of retirement in religious and intellectual studies.

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participation in public affairs.38 In most of his contemporary sources egalitarianism between the sexes is limited to the mental sphere. Mandeville goes further, contributing to the contemporary debate with an articulated insight into the practical sufferings of women, and their hindered social condition, stemming from their disadvantages in education. In The Virgin Unmask’d, Aunt Lucinda’s emancipatory strategies focused on access to education, intellectual training and self-knowledge. Women should not only be granted access to books and masters and have the opportunity to train their minds; but, in order to apply their skills in the public sphere, they should also develop a knowledge of their own bodies, their own anatomy. Lucinda states in The Virgin Unmasked, to study books “of Physics and Anatomy, the inward Government of our bodies doesn’t take more time and effort, than to embroider a piece of Fillegrew Work.”39 Mandeville’s expression echoes a passage in the writings of François Poulain de la Barre, the French author who in the 1670s wrote a series of path-breaking and influential feminist works, in which he tuned up Cartesianism into a social philosophy and developed a radical and philosophically sophisticated egalitarian argument, dissecting the cumulative layers of customs and traditions that lead society to believe in women’s ‘natural’ inferiority, and made the case for their physical, cognitive and intellectual equality with men.40 In contrast with its marginal reception in France, Poulain de la Barre’s major work had a significant influence in England following its translation in 1677 as The Woman as Good as the Man.41 Mandeville’s references to Poulain de la Barre are not accidental.42 In the sixth dialogue Lucinda develops a “political analogy” of her animosity towards the other sex: “my hatred to men is built on the same foundation, with the Enmity and ill will, which all wise Princes, and states of Christendom bear to the King of France.”43 As women with men, many rulers fall into the dangerous error of underestimating the threat represented by Louis XIV’s cunning 38 39 40 41

42 43

Cf. John Toland, Letters to Serena, Preface; Justin Champion, Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture, 1696–1722; (Manchester and London: 2003), pp. 52–3). The Virgin Unmask’d, p. 123. Siep Stuurman, François Poulain de la Barre and the Invention of Modern Equality (Cambridge, MA: 2004); Israel 2006, p. 572. Cohen 1997, pp. 124–1127; Cf. Siep Stuurman, “Social Cartesianism: François Poulain de la Barre and the Origins of the Enlightenment,” in Journal of the History of Ideas, 58, 4, 1997), pp. 617–640; Alvin Snider, “Cartesian Bodies,” in Modern Philology, 98, 2, 2000, pp. 299–319. François Poulain de la Barre, On the Equality of the Two Sexes, in Three Cartesian Feminist Treatises, Ed. by Marcelle Maistre Welch, trans. by Vivien Bosley, Chicago 2002, pp. 67 and 83; 54–56; 59–61 Cf. The Virgin Unmask’d, p. 125. The Virgin Unmask’d, pp. 126–127.

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behaviour and his great ambition to bring Protestant Europe “under his Yoak.” According to Lucinda, the English had dramatically miscalculated the wealth and strength of France, deceived by the wretched conditions of the poor in that country. In the conversation that follows, Lucinda develops an articulated analysis of European and British politics through an account of the relationship between the forms of government and manners, demonstrating a complete mastering of a topic traditionally reserved for men and thus embodying the ideal of the socially active woman. In the praise of King William and in the support for the war and the union with Scotland, her argument expresses a distinctive Whig bias. Lucinda develops a comparison between France, Holland and Britain, on the effects of political rule on the distribution of wealth, the social hierarchy, mentality and attitudes for “the several degrees of people, from the Sovereign to the beggar.”44 In France, according to Lucinda, there is a great distance between the nobility and the gentry. The people of the lowest rank live in miserable conditions, where they “set but small value upon themselves,” and like “fawning slaves,” they are disposed to work for a small remuneration, contented to live a meaner life. In Holland, by contrast, the distance between the nobility and the gentry is “none at all.” The poor are “Intolerably sawcy” and act as “Unmannerly brutes.” The Dutch have less resources from the land, but they are “very industrious and saving” and “the notion they have of liberty makes ‘em so proud, that the ordinary man think himself as good as the best in land; and knowing that all are subject to the same laws naturally scorns to pay any homage to men that by their birth have no prerogative over them.”45 In England – “with us,” writes the Dutch physician and philosopher already naturalised as a British subject – a greater and richer nation, where there is “a mixture of Monarchy and Commonwealth together,” the “top of the Gentry converse with the Nobility,” and the mob is less rude than in Holland. In The Virgin Unmask’d, as well as in most of his writings, Mandeville warmly praises and defends the Dutch society and its economic success, together with the greater involvement of women in economic life typical of Holland, as opposed to the contrived respectfulness  – dismissed by Lucinda as mere “outward shew” – attributed to Englishwomen. This pattern of political analysis comparing republic to monarchy and both to mixed constitutions echoes James Harrington’s civic humanist maxim that power follows property, but Mandeville remarks that the same amount of wealth would be differently distributed under different forms of governments, where republics are characterized by more egalitarian manners and by a greater equality of reward. “When

44 45

The Virgin Unmask’d, p. 163. The Virgin Unmask’d, p. 164.

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Nations are equal in Rich and Plenty, the lowest rank of People will not be so poor in a Commonwealth as in a Kingdom.”46 When Antonia asks her aunt to clarify the simile between her hatred of men and her arguments on Louis xiv, the answer is clear and univocal “But what has mankind done to you? They have enslaved our sex: In Paradise men and women were upon an even foot. See what they have made of us since: Is not every Woman that is Married a Slave to her Husband?”47 Lucinda compares the present state of women’s subjugation to the idea of an original ‘state of equality. Poulain De la Barre in his works developed a conjectural history of inequality, explaining how the original state of peaceful collaboration in which men and women performed the same tasks in harmony was broken by men, on the ground of their superior physical strength and women’s temporary vulnerability during pregnancy and childbirth. They progressively imposed a gendered separation by gradually restricting women’s range of activities and preventing them from holding political power.48 As an example of men’s unfounded misogynistic rhetoric, Antonia reads aloud a short poem, ‘A Satyre upon Eve’, in which the earliest female creature after having experienced the pleasure of sex  – the first recorded intercourse – demonstrates inconstancy and unreliability since then traditionally attributed to women: Yet of the nuptial Bow she weary grew, And as she lov’d, still long’s for something new (…) And once get out of sight, she prov’d so frail That she would listen to a Serpent’s Tale, And rather enter with the Dev’l in Chat, Than be a woman and not be a Coquet49 The unnamed author that Antonia, as she declares, wishes to hang for ‘striving to expose our sex’ is Jean-François de Sarazin (or Sarasin). His sonnet A Monsieur De Charleval, was remembered as an instance of how poets have enhanced traditional misogyny and denounced women as “false and insipid” by Poulain de la Barre and partly quoted by Bayle in the entry ‘Eve’ of the Dictionnaire. Mandeville as in the translations of La Fontaine, expands the 46 47 48 49

The Virgin Unmask’d, p. 165. Goldsmith 1985, pp. 82–83. For a different reading cf. Israel 2001, pp. 623–625, Israel 2007, p. 19. The Virgin Unmask’d, p. 127. Stuurman 2004, pp. 204–205. The Virgin Unmask’d, p. 130.

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poem almost doubling the number of verses. Together with Poulain de la Barre, Pierre Bayle took an exceptionally open-minded and intense interest in sexual morality proposing, both in the Dictionnaire and in the Miscellaneous Reflection an innovative discussion of female sexuality, in the framework of an emphasis on society as an autonomous, dynamic construct built on the passions, where ‘virtue’ is merely the outcome of natural circumstances and hypocrisies tailored to the pressure of popular prejudices.50 In the second half of the year 1709, after the publication of The Virgin Unmask’d, Bernard Mandeville was busy collaborating with The Female Tatler, one among the thick mass of imitators exploiting the new audience that Richard Steele had discovered and contributed to create. Under the pen name of Isaac Bickerstaff, borrowed from his friend and collaborator Jonathan Swift, Steele begun the publication of The Tatle,r a triweekly periodical, in April 1709. The Female Tatler borrowed The Tatler’s successful formula of shortening political news in favour of comments on manners, brief stories, exemplary anecdotes, character sketches, letters etc. Between November 1709 and March 1710, this journal, formerly directed by ‘Mrs. Crackenthorpe, a Lady that knows everything’, was taken over by a ‘Society of Ladies’. Two of the Ladies, the sisters Lucinda and Artesia, were Mandeville’s pen names.51 In the 32 issues he wrote, Mandeville led a continuous dispute against the ideology of private and civic virtue promoted by Steele/Bickerstaff, exposing his early views on a number of subjects of great relevance in his later writings: women, honour, and the role of passions in the origins and functioning of society. The versatile form of the periodical journal, made of short essays, accounts of conversations, letters, character sketches and ‘proto-novels’ similar to those in The Virgin Unmask’d, allowed Mandeville to present his arguments in an articulated manner, through fictitious debates, with counterarguments and explanations. Alongside the main speakers Lucinda and Artesia, other characters appear in the journal exemplifying different points of view in the discussions. The most ‘Mandevillean’ of them is an Oxford gentleman “who makes a Jest of all the World, and calls every thing Vanity that others count most valuable,” whose main function seems to be to set out and defend apparently paradoxical opinions too outrageous to be advocated by the two sisters.52 The articulated

50 51 52

D. Wootton, “Pierre Bayle, libertine?” in Studies in Seventeenth-Century European Philoso­ phy, M.A. Stewart (ed.) (Oxford: 1997), pp. 197–226; Israel 2006, pp. 578 and 576; O’Brien 2009, pp. 19–20. Goldsmith 1985, pp. 35–36. Rae Blanchard, “Richard Steele and the Status of Women,” Studies in Philology, 26, 3, 1929, pp. 325–355; Lanis R. Wilson Richard Steele and the Fair Sex: Women’s Issues in the Tatler and Spectator, Chapel Hill, 1989. The Female Tatler 78; Goldsmith 1999, pp. 48–49; Bond 1971, pp. 83–90.

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denouncement of the unjustified misogyny of social and cultural standards norms elaborated in The Virgin Unmask’d, was revisited by Mandeville in The Female Tatler as a further argument against the public-spirit ideology boosted by The Tatler. As already mentioned in the introduction to this volume, in The Tatler 67, Richard Steele announced a “Table of Fame,” a project to gather the most virtuous individuals in history. The proposal, mentioned in various issues of The Tatler, was however extensively discussed only in The Tatler 81. To sit around his “Table of Fame,” Bickerstaff summoned Alexander the Great, Pompeus, Caesar, Hannibal, Homer, Virgil, Archimedes, Socrates, Aristotle, Augustus, Cato, and Cicero. Steele’s cast, dominated by statesmen and generals from ancient history including no women, expresses a characteristic conception of virtue embodied in the idea of the landed, patriotic gentleman-citizen.53 In The Tatler 84, responding to letters from female correspondents questioning the omission of Lucretia, Bickerstaff offered to set up a “small Tea-table” for her and for those of her character, if there were enough women to fill it.54 The Female Tatler promptly replied announcing a “Female Table of Honour.” In The Female Tatler 68, contending that there was a “greater number of Female Worthies than a little Tea-Table will hold,” Lucinda introduced a number of notable women, raising the question of precedency and hierarchy of virtues among her interlocutors. When the company approves, in agreement with established conventions, that chastity is to be ranked as the highest of the female virtues, Lucretia is placed at the head of the table. Here, the Oxford Gentleman intervenes, suggesting that had she valued this virtue so highly, she would have died in resisting her abuser, rather than committing suicide afterwards, comparing her with Marchionness Susanna Obizzi, who was more virtuous than Lucretia because she died resisting rape.55 The Fam’d Lucretia dar’d undone, Die for her Honour when t’was gone; But Chaster Susan did much more, Who dar’d to save it, Die before. The female figure presented by the Oxford Gentleman appears to be, as a matter of fact, a conflation of two different individuals: the Paduan gentlewoman 53 54 55

The Tatler 67 (September 13, 1709), The Tatler 81 (October 22, 1709). Cf. Goldsmith 1985, p. 157. The Tatler 84 (Oct. 22, 1709), Goldsmith 1999, p. 56. Pierre Bayle, Miscellaneous Reflections, § 180 (p. 372 Vol. ii ed. London 1708).

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Lucrezia Dondi Horlogi Obizzi, and Susanna from the apocryphal chapter xiii (Susanna and the Elders) of the ‘Book of Daniel’. M.M. Goldsmith had indicated as an ‘almost certain’ source for Mandeville the book by François Maximilien Misson A New Voyage to Italy (London 1695).56 In Lucinda and Artesia’s company, not only the most celebrated historical example of chastity is ridiculed as unfit, but the arguments developed into a rebuke of the tradition that makes of chastity the main female virtue, where women’s reputation depends exclusively on their relationship with the other sex. Chastity is simply the precondition for women’s role of inescapable subjugation. Happy are the Men, that either with or without Wives, may arrive to the top of Glory, whilst we poor creatures can deserve but little unless we are first enslaved by them.57 A “Female Table of Honour” was announced in The Female Tatler 53, and the subject discussed in eight other issues.58 In The Female Tatler 78 and 80 Lucinda and Artesia presented a series of women in history famous for their courage, wisdom and political prudence. A month later another six papers on the subject were added, reporting dozens of notable women from ancient history to the present times: Penelope, Iphigenia, Deborah, Jahel, Judith, Portia, Clelia, Boadicea, Jeanne of Arc, Isabelle of Castille, Queen Elizabeth of England and many others, celebrated for their wisdom, courage, generosity, clemency, temperance, justice, prudence, fortitude, magnanimity and wit.59 The source for the first group of women is to be found in Plutarch, (On the Bravery of Women). For the second, M.M. Goldsmith suggests that Mandeville must have had access to The Gallery of Heroick Women, (1652), a compendium of forty extraordinary skilled women, by the Jesuit priest Pierre Le Moyne, originally published in French as La Gallerie des Femmes Fortes in 1647, five from each of four religions: Jewish, Barbarians, Romans and Christians and their contemporary counterparts. The two sister journalists argued that if women are not remembered in history books it is solely because history is written by men:

56 57 58 59

Goldsmith 1999, pp. 57–58. The Female Tatler 68, Goldsmith 1999, p. 119. The Female Talter 53 (December 7, 1709); 68 (December 12, 1709), n° 70 (December 16, 1709), n° 86 (January 23, 1710), n° 88 (January 27, 1710), n° 88* (February 1, 1710), n° 90 (February 1, 1710), n° 92 (February 10, 1710), n° [95] (February 20, 1710). The Female Tatler 53, 68, 70.

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we must mind that the Writing of History has been all along engros’d by the Men, of which the most Cunning have always been so careful to pick out the most remarkable Subjects, never endeavouring to render any Name Immortal whose Greatness was not able to perpetuate their Own. The Virgin Unmask’d’s Lucinda complained about the lack of adequate education for women. The Female Tatler’s Lucinda accused men, not only of keeping exclusive possession of education, but also of maintaining their domination over the other sex by handing down a culture in which woman’s most valuable virtue is submission and meekness her most valuable virtue: Why should we be treated almost as if we were Irrational Creatures? We are industriously kept from the Knowledge of Arts and Sciences, if we talk Politicks we are laugh’d at; to understand Latin is petty Treason in us; silence is recommended to us a necessary Duty, and the greatest Encomium a Man can give his Wife is to tell the World that she is Obedient (…) Husbands are deemed prudent if they don’t trust their wives, and very often they made women believe that to be co-partner in the management of the estate would be an “insufferable Trouble ’for them,” with the result that, because of the “Neglect, Folly or Extravagancy” of the husband, a wife “is often made a Beggar at the same time when she thinks herself a Wealthy Woman.”60 In Female Tatler 96, an old gentleman reproaches the two sisters for their literary activity, disapproving of their degree of education and remonstrating that the eminent women they recalled are dangerous examples for Englishwomen: What Girls should do with Latin? (…) Young Women shou’d only Study how to get Husbands (…) If you had given the Town a parcel of such edifying Examples of Women that had Honour’d and Obey’d their Husbands, and been Discreet to all the World besides, you might have done some good, but of the Women you have named, there is scarce one that an Honest Man would be troubled with. The response of the two sisters to the old gentleman is firm and resolute, in their Female Table of Fame, which together with examples of true virtue, offers models of the “extraordinary Strength of the Soul” that few mortals possess, and which certainly is not men’s exclusive prerogative: 60

The Female Tatler n° 88, (January 27, 1710).

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Women were as capable as Men of that Sublimity of the Soul, and had at least equall’d if not excell’d the greatest and most Heroick of the Cruel and Injurious Sex, that had used so many Artifices to enslave them.61 61

The Female Tatler 96, February 20, 1710. Cf. Andrea Branchi, “‘Cosa dovrebbero farci le ragazze con il latino?’ Mandeville e Defoe: alcune osservazioni sui rapporti tra donne ed uomini nell’Inghilterra del Settecento,” in Almanacchi Nuovi, 3, 1995, pp. 231–245.

Chapter 2

The Oxford Gentleman and Philopirio The Facts is clear, tho’ the Distinction nice, Pride now for Virtue acts, and now for Vice.1

∵

In the conversations reported by the sister journalist Lucinda and Artesia on The Female Tatler the character of the Oxford Gentleman “who makes a Jest of all the World, and calls every thing Vanity that others count most valuable” stands out as Mandeville’s mouthpiece.2 Two issues in particular are addressed, beginning with an occasional satire that becomes a coherent anatomy of the motivating passions involved in human practices and institutions. Defending in polemical contrast with Steele, the social and economic usefulness of selfinterested behaviour Mandeville opens his reflection on the nature of society and on those who have contributed most to its improvement. In an analogous manner, a satire of the fashionable men of ‘modern honour’ and their keenness for duelling are the cue for Mandeville to sketch a crucial distinction between two sides of human self-centredness that plays a pivotal role in his mature theory of sociability. Chapter 2 extends the analysis of Mandeville’s contribution to The Female Tatler, and on the continental sources of his thought. The final part of the chapter addresses another of Mandeville’s voices. Philopirio ‘Lover of Experience’, is the name of the autobiographical leading character of the medical treaties in a dialogic form that Mandeville published in 1711, where he details the ‘toolbox’ of his experimental and naturalistic approach both to medicine and philosophy.

1 James Forrester, The Polite Philosopher, or an Essay on that Art which makes a Man Happy in Himself and Agreeable to Others, Edinburgh, 1734, p. 1. 2 Female Tatler 78, Goldsmith, 1999, p. 49.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004428430_005

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Living Dead and Public Benefactors

In his early 1705 poem Mandeville had challenged the public-spirit ideology for its blindness on the real mechanisms of society by pointing at the disastrous effects of their call for moral reform. In The Female Tatler Mandeville finds in Richard Steele the ideal target to advance his ideas in polemical opposition and addresses in prose the themes outlined in verse in the poem. The pen name of Isaac Bickerstaff, Esquire, that Richard Steele adopted in the Tatler was created by Jonathan Swift in a satirical attack on almanac-makers as part of a hoax predicting the death of the well-known almanac maker John Partridge. The hoax, gaining immense popularity, plagued Partridge until the real end of his life. When Partridge published a letter asserting that he was still alive, Swift declared the letter false, as “sure no man alive ever to writ such damned stuff as this.”3 In his self-proclaimed capability as a censor, Steele/Bickerstaff universalized the maxim of the Partridge affair, and in Tatler 96 stated that all those individuals not committed to pursuing the good of society, or at least to self-improvement, had to be considered as ‘walking dead’, even if still able to roam the streets, smoke a pipe, and drink coffee: “The Living are only those that are in some way or other laudably employed in the Improvement of their own Minds, or for the Advantage of others”. A week later, in Tatler 99, aware that all the “gentle Methods imaginable” by which he had attempted to “inspire Notions of Honour and Virtue” among his fellow citizens had proven ineffectual, Steele/Bickerstaff went to the extreme of calling for a team of undertakers to bury all the ‘walking dead.’ The decision taken was “to give my good Friends, the Company of Upholders, full power to bury all such Dead as they meet with, who are within my former Descriptions of deceased person.”4 The Tatler’s campaign against the walking dead is an expression of the ideology of public and private virtue. In Steele’s reforming scheme, that blends the Christian concern for private virtue with the classical republican concern for civic commitment, society originated, grew and developed through the efforts of those who promoted the public good and sought to improve living conditions both materially and morally. Those who were not knowingly dedicated to these purposes were useless beings, parasites, wasting resources that could be better readdressed.5

3 J. Swift, A Vindication of Isaac Bickerstaff, in The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, London 1801, p. 51. 4 The Tatler 96 (November 19, 1709). 5 Goldsmith 1985, pp. 36–43; Jack 1989, pp. 30–31.

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The Female Tatler immediately responded. In number 62, Artesia reported a conversation that took place some days before – the very day in which Tatler 99 referring to the ‘walking dead’ appeared  – on the nature of society and those who have contributed most to its improvement. A lady in the company, celebrating the easiness and the “Happiness of Civil Conversation” and man’s natural sociability, was interrupted by Arsinoe, who, on the evidence of the frauds, enmity and robberies that men suffer from one another, declared men to be an unsocial animal: “There is no animal so little inclined to sociability as men, without the government and the rigor of the law would be impossible that a dozen of them spent a whole day in peace.” To this Hobbesian outlook Lucinda replied, embracing the ‘public-spirit’ ideology: “I am of the Ingenious Mr. Bickerstaff’s Opinion, that none are to be counted Alive, but such as, setting aside all private Interests and Personal Pleasure, are Generous enough to labour and exert themselves for the benefit of others.” According to Lucinda, any improvement in human life, and civilization itself, are to be ascribed to the actions of those moved by public spirit. Only those “that ever invented any thing for the Publick Good” are to be counted amongst the worthy and honourable ancestors of humankind. One of the conversers, the Oxford gentleman politely dissented: the greatest and most immediate benefactors of human society are “the idle Favourites of blind Fortune” who take no other care than to please themselves, devote their time and money to satisfy their appetites, “and value neither Health nor Estate in the purchase of Delight.” The promoters of human progress are not the ‘civic spirited’ individuals who have dedicated themselves to the public good but rather self-interested hedonists who have simply pursued the satisfaction of their passions and desires, thus promoting consumption and commerce. The Oxford gentleman does not limit himself to a schematic declaration of Epicureanism – in the conventional view of the sensual gratification of desires – but completes his argument by sketching, in a dense paragraph, the dynamics of the civilization process. Humans are not sociable in the sense of possessing “some good Quality or innate Virtue” prompting them to love the company of others; it is rather their physical and psychological characteristics that in the long term enable them to live in large groups: by the multiplicity of their Wants as well as Appetites, (…) the vast Love every one of them has for himself, the fickleness of their Minds, and the discontentedness of their Nature, joyn’d to their use of Speech, the excellent Fabrick of their Bodies, (…) they are of all Animals the only Species

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of which even the greatest Numbers may be made Subservient to one another, and by Skilful Management compose a lasting Society.6 What the moralists call vice, according to the Oxford gentleman, is inseparable from the efficient running of society. No nations could enjoy the most ordinary comforts of life if these are not “Counter-ballanc’d by the opposite Vices.” The more a wealthy man consumes “the better Subject he is.” The pursuit of the satisfaction of personal desires stands at the root not only of prosperity but of civilization as well. Individual wants and desires are the core engine of human progress and the achievements of the arts and sciences: “they are all come to the Perfection they are in by very slow Degrees, and the first Rudiments of most of them have been so small that the Authors are hardly worth naming.”7 Humans have improved their condition through a slow, gradual process in which their desires and needs evolved as well. Those vices, therefore, that the ‘Reformers’ denigrated, not only are productive of wealth and prosperity, but are also the fundamental drive of human progress.8 In the following paper Lucinda reported another conversation held by the same company in which the Oxford gentleman had the opportunity to return to the subject and answer the objections raised. He did so by directly addressing Bickerstaff: “The Comical Remonstrance of the Upholders Company is very Witty and Diverting (…) but if we may be Serious, and reflect upon all the different Parts of which a Potent and Flourishing Society must unavoidably consist, I doubt the Banter will lose its Force.” All the people “that take no other Worldly Care than How to Dress, Eat, Drink and Sleep well,” rather than being so useless to human society to be considered as deceased are instead beneficial to society; their consuming habits are “the very Springs that turn all the Wheels of Trade.” Those condemned in the pages of The Tatler by would-be reformers shouldn’t apologize for their conduct, and should rather be commended: “[those] who by the Sollicitous Care they take of their Backs and Bellies, make Money Circulate, and are the real Encouragers of every useful Art and Science.”9 Each individual follows his own inclinations: “Trahit sua quemque voluptas” (each is drawn by his own pleasure) explains the Oxford gentleman, quoting a maxim by Virgil recalled by Augustine, Gassendi, Pascal and Bayle and later mentioned in The Fable of 6 7 8 9

The Female Tatler 62, (November 25, 1709), Goldsmith 1999, pp. 49–50. The Female Talter 62. Do we not owe the growth of Wine / To the dry, crooked, shabby Vine? Fable I, p. 26. The Female Tatler 64, (December 2, 1709).

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the Bees in a discussion of the Epicurean belief that all human conduct is driven by the pursuit for pleasure.10 But if society is built as a network of interests, the harmony of the whole is not spontaneous. The web of interests needs to be woven by a skilful management, specifies the Oxford gentleman, anticipating the commentaries of The Fable of the Bees by expounding in prose a line of the original poem The Grumbling Hive.11 Political management is a pre-condition for the successful channelling of the competing interests of individuals in society. “The jarring Discord of Contraries makes the Harmony of the Whole, it is the Business of the Skilful Politician, to make every thing serve in its proper Place, and extract good from the very worst, as well as the best.”12 The prosperity of a society is grounded on the individual pursuit of desires solely when those are regulated by a political system of law and management.13 “Happy is the Land, whose Constitution is so well fenc’d with wholesome Laws, that Fear and Prudence may supply the place of Honesty.”14 The Grumbling Hive was not yet a sustained attack on the current ideology of public and private virtue, countering the ideology put forward by Squire Bickerstaff. However, Mandeville in The Female Tatler anticipated the line of reasoning expressed in the very subtitle of The Fable of the Bees – “Private Vices, Publick Benefits” – stressing the role played by pride and luxurious consumption in human sociability.15 Where crimes are appropriately punished, ‘vices’ do not need to be repressed, quite the opposite: “some of them are so necessary to the State, that no Nation can be Great without them; I could prove that to wish for a flourishing Trade, and the decrease of Pride and Luxury is as great an Absurdity, as to pray for Rain and Dry Weather at the same time.”16

10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Virgil, Eclogues, 2, line 65. Bayle, Miscellaneous Thougts  §144; Fable I, p. 148. Cf. Pierre Force, Self-Interest before Adam Smith: A Genealogy of Economic Science (Cambridge: 2003), pp. 50–55. This was the States Craft, that maintain’d The Whole of which each Part complain’d: This, as in Musick Harmony, Made Jarrings in the main agree; The Grumbling Hive, in Fable I, p. 24. The Female Tatler 64, (December 2, 1709). Goldsmith ed. p. 105. Jack 1989, p. 31. The Female Tatler 64, (December 2, 1709). Goldsmith ed. p. 107. Goldsmith 2001, p. 39; Force 2003, p. 55. The Female Tatler 64, (December 2, 1709). Goldsmith p. 107.

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The Duel of Honour

In another set of issues of the Female Tatler, in a further polemical contest with Bickerstaff/Steele, Mandeville played the opening move of his life-long interest in the practice of duelling. Before proceeding it may be helpful to clarify more precisely what were the issues at stake in the debate on the practice on the duel of honour in Britain. In the last quarter of the sixteenth century, the ability to fence became an essential part of the education of young English gentlemen. Between 1580 and 1610 there was an impressive increase in the number of challenges and publications on the practice.17 The tensions, disputes, and offenses which a gentleman could incur in the course of his social interactions are the topics addressed in a series of Italian courtesy tracts published in the second half of the sixteenth century. The English translations of these works parallel the spread of the duel in England and the duel of honour and its theory remained – although highly problematic and contested – a fundamental, defining feature of gentlemanliness.18 When in the Elements of Law (1640) Thomas Hobbes lists the marks of respectability, the signs that warrant the public recognition of the power of an individual, among the first that he mentions is the French “à avoir tué son homme.”19 Strongly opposed under the Commonwealth, with the Restoration duelling returned to be part of public life. In the manners of King Charles II’s court, among the gentlemen returned from exile in France, a certain behaviour took on of a new significance. It was part of a royalist reaction to the puritan morality imposed during the Interregnum, when the frequency of duelling sharply decreased, opposed by legislative efforts of the Roundheads who perceived it as an aristocratic vice. Jonathan Swift 17

18

19

Iain Gilmour, Riots, Rising And Revolution: Governance and Violence in Eighteenth Century England (New York: 1993), in part. Chap. 13; Robert A. Nye, ‘How the Duel of Honour promoted Civility and attenuated Violence in Western Europe’, in Honour, Violence and Emotions in History, ed. by Carolyn Strange, Robert Cribb, Christopher E. Forth (London: 2014), pp. 183–202; Peltonen 2003. Giovanni Della Casa’s Galateo appeared in English translation in 1576. Stefano Guazzo’s The Civile Conversation a few years later (1581 and 1586). The Courtier Academie (1598) is a translation of Annibale Romei’s Discorsi. In 1595, in London, was published Vincenzo Saviolo, His Practice. In two bookes. The first intreating of the use of the rapier and dagger. The second of honor and honorable quarrels. This text, published by John Wolfe, is strongly inspired – basically a translation – of the book by Girolamo Muzio Il duello, published in Venice in 1550 and reprinted in numerous editions (twelve only between 1550 and 1585) and French and Spanish translations. R. Peterson, Galateo of Maister John Della Casa, or rather a treatise of the manners and behaviours (…), London 1576, G. Pettie, The civile conversation of M. Steven Guazzo (…) London, 1581, 1576; Discorsi del conte Annibale Romei genilhuomo ferrarese (…) Venezia 1585, translated by John Keepers, London 1598. T. Hobbes, The Elements of Law, P. i; Ch. vii, § 5 (Oxford: 1994, p. 49).

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observed that Cromwell’s attitude in encouraging a kind of rough familiarity among his men “was a piece of policy found out to ridicule a point of honour in the other extreme, when the smallest word misplaced among gentlemen ended in a duel.”20 In his Theory of Moral Sentiments Adam Smith explained the political connotations of this behaviour: “In the reign of Charles ii a degree of licentiousness was deemed the characteristic of a liberal education. It was connected, according to the notions of those times, with generosity, sincerity, magnanimity, loyalty, and proved that the person that acted in this manner, was a gentleman, and not a puritan.”21 “During the usurpation of Cromwell it was forbidden to the civilian to bear arms”, remembers the author of an essay on duelling published in 1720; “but after the Restoration of Charles ii, swords being put on by all as a Badge of the Recovery of Liberty, ‘twas not long before this licentious use of them became common.”22 The practice of duelling had assumed an eccentric but fundamental place in the very definition of the British and the European gentleman, in particular in the way in which it was discussed in the 1710s in Britain; to the point that it is tempting, as Markku Peltonen pointedly suggests, to consider the debate about duelling as a contest between manners and morals.23 Certainly Mandeville exploited it in this sense. Richard Steele was one of the most tenacious opponents of the practice of duelling perhaps because of a youthful encounter in which he nearly killed his opponent, but also because in his view duelling represented the characteristic expression of the wrong kind of civility. Already in The Christian Hero: An Argument proving that no Principles but those of Religion are sufficient to make a Great Man (1701) Steele had stated the importance for a gentleman of an education centred on religious principles. What in his first works was little more than a generic appeal to Christian virtues and to a natural benevolence, in The Tatler took the form of a forceful campaign to promote a new social model, constructing the ideal of a good natured, public spirited and benevolent ‘fine gentleman’.24 Addison and Steele were particularly incensed 20

21 22 23 24

J. Swift, “Hints toward an Essay on Conversation,” in A Tale of a Tub, The Battle of the Books and other Satires, London 1911, p. 232. Cf. Ordinance against Challenges, Duels and all Provocations therunto , June 29, 1654 and Military Orders And Articles, Established by his Maiestie, Oxford 1643. Charles H. Firth, Cromwell’s Army (London: 1962); pp. 276–310; Barbara Donagan, “Codes and Conduct in the English Civil War,” in Past and Present, 118, 1988, pp. 65–95. A. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (V. 2.3) Glasgow edition, ed. by D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie, Oxford 1976, p. 201. John Cockburn, The History and Examination of Duels, London 1720, p. 351. Peltonen 2003, p. 224. Bond 1971, pp. 75–77.

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with duelling because they saw it as the epitome of the kind of ‘small civilities’ typical of court societies, where it was demanded that individuals put their peers’ opinion of their public performance above everything else.25 In Tatler 25 Steele opened the campaign to disabuse his readers of all those mistaken and distorted notions of honour, credit and reputation that drove men to the “fatal folly of duelling.” Even if an “endless crowd of men of honour will be offended by such a discourse,” Steele expressed his determination to carry on his task. “I am pretty well acquainted by great opportunities with the nature of man, and know of a truth that all men fight against their will (…) I shall talk very freely on a custom which all men wish exploded, though no man has courage enough to resist it.”26 The readiness to engage in duelling, lamented Steele, had become the only mark of honour: “as the matter at present stands, it is not to do handsome actions denominates a man of honour; it is enough if he dares to defend ill ones.” Steele complains that “often you see a common sharper in competition with a gentleman of the first rank” with the frequent result that brave gentleman is killed in duel by a “common hangman” and yet the latter avoids the punishment he deserves because he pretends to be a man of honour. In a series of Tatlers, Steele articulated an historical overview of the practice of duelling, arguing that to base one’s personal reputation on duelling is nothing else than a blend of fraud, cowardice, falseness, and lack of understanding. In Spain, men of honour kill, moved by a sentiment of revenge, while in England they are ruled by well-breeding, Steele observes with bitter sarcasm. Duelling is an illegitimate child of errant knighthood, an expedient to gain the other sex’s admiration, a monster, a chimera, an effect of the strength of custom. Nor the Chinese, nor others celebrated for their martial virtue, such as Greeks and Romans, knew that practice.27 In Tatler 162 Steele congratulates himself on the good results of his effort to promote a new ideal of gentlemanliness: “I have separated Duellists from Men of Honour.” The Female Tatler, invented to exploit the success and the public of Steele’s journal, repeatedly referred and commented on it.28 In a series of papers Mandeville derides the inner contradictions of ‘Modern Honour’ while stressing at the same time the fundamental social function of the duelling code as a means of encouraging civility of manners, since the risk of being challenged acts as a strong incentive to treat other people respectfully; it is a check on

25 26 27 28

Peltonen 2003, pp. 250–252. Tatler 25 (Tuesday, June 7, 1709). Tatlers 28, 29, 31. Goldsmith 1999, pp. 63–65.

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those who, if not restrained, will offend men and women, and in brief destroy not only good company but civil society itself.29 In The Female Tatler 52, a Colonel Worthy, “A Man of undaunted Courage, that had Considerable Share in most of the Actions that have happen’d in this and the last War,” replied to Steele’s statements concerning the Greeks and the Romans, celebrated for their martial and civic virtues and yet free of the practice of duelling. Colonel Worthy admitted that in ancient times duels were unknown but retorted that “in those Ages Conversation was not so much refin’d as it is in ours (…) Kings call one another Names, and swallow Words and Injuries, which the vilest of our Mob would not pass without Blows.” The practice of duelling, although Colonel Worthy is against it and favours capital punishment for those who send or accept a challenge, is nonetheless held to be indispensable to maintain public order: The strict Observance of the point of Honour, is a necessary Evil, and a large Nation can no more be call’d Polite without it, than it can be Rich and Flourishing without Pride or Luxury.30 In Female Tatler 84, the Oxford gentleman expresses his concern for the “Frentick Notions of Honour” characterising the gentlemen of his age: “a Man of Honour is in his way a punctual observer of Justice, he pays a profound Veneration to all Religious Matters, and a blind Obedience to the Government he serves,” he is ready to pay his debts, he considers inviolable the laws of friendship, he is willing to defend the honour of wives, sister, daughters and mistresses, and ready to lie down with anybody else. He fights for the laws of his country, but at the same time he considers himself “and the whole Fraternity of Honour above’em, and in his Opinion all Controversies are to be decided by the Sword.” His reputation is so tender that he cannot refuse a challenge even if he is sick or mistakenly challenged. He “looks upon himself as a petty king, or Prince of some Sovereign State by itself, that has no Dependance upon any other and killing a Man in a Duel is Conquering his enemy in a lawful War (…) He is so much Master of his Passions, as never to be angry with any body, whose Throat he endeavours to Cut, but shakes him by the Hand.”31 Still, concludes Mandeville’s mouthpiece: “the Vanity of the whole Profession” is a paramount component of a healthy and wealthy community: “Nothing is

29 30 31

Thomas 2018, p. 34; Nye 2014. The Female Tatler 52 (November 4, 1709). The Female Tatler 84 (January 18, 1710).

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more necessary to the State than Men of Honour, and no Society could be long flourishing without.”32 The topics of martial virtues and honour were addressed a few weeks later in another series of Female Tatler.33 The discussion of a family conflict offered the occasion for the Oxford gentleman to sketch the core features of Mandeville’s philosophical anthropology, later articulated into a coherent theory in his mature writings. In Female Tatler 77, Lucinda reported on a letter from her uncle complaining about his younger son, Pompey. He worries that his son may choose a “pitiful, unactive Merchants Life” rather than follow “the same Path of Honour as his Brothers have done before him.” The uncle pleads with Lucinda to do everything possible to convince her cousin Pompey to go to war.34 But the uncle’s request is contrasted with the aunt’s. Already stricken by the loss of two children, this eighteenth-century proto-Mrs. Ryan does not want to cry for the third because of the insensitivity and obstinacy of her husband. She had written to Artesia asking her to carry on a work on persuasion, but in the opposite direction, to convince Pompey not to go to war.35 The two sisters are thus divided on the subject: Lucinda sides with her uncle and his conception of honour, granting absolute priority to the martial virtues. Artesia, very critical, reads a short poem she composed that ridicules honour, entitled: ‘Grinning Honour’.36 The choice of title is not accidental: ‘grinning honour’ is from a line in Falstaff’s speech in mockery of honour in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part I.37 In Artesia’s poem, Honour is embodied by a charming lady who is at the same time a bloody idol who enchants and captivates men who kill and suffer on her behalf: In Bloody Fields she Sits as Gay As other Ladies at a Play; Whilst the Wild Sparks on which she Doats, Are cutting one another’s Throats 32 33 34 35 36 37

The Female Tatler 84 (Monday, Feb. 16, 1710) Cf. Daniele Francesconi, “Bernard Mandeville e il linguaggio della Politeness,” in La Cultura 2, 1998, pp. 263–300; Horne 1993, pp. 229–244. The Female Tatler 77 (January 2, 1710), 78 (January 4, 1710), 80 (January 9, 1710), 84 (January 11, 1710). Female Tatler 77, January 2, 1710. Lincoln 2011, pp. 455–474; Gregg 2001, pp. 17–28; Hannah Smith, “Politics, Patriotism and Gender: The Standing Army Debate on the English Stage, circa 1689–1720,” in Journal of British Studies, 50, 2011, pp. 48–75. The Female Tatler n° 78, January 4, 1710. Grinning Honour appeared two years later (with minor changes) in a collection of poems by Mandeville: Wishes to a Godson with other Miscellany Poems, by B.M., London 1712. W. Shakespeare, Henry IV (Act v, Scene iii) I owe this indication to Irwin Primer.

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In Female Tatler 78, Lucinda and Artesia introduce the champions they have selected to support their arguments. In defence of martial honour Lucinda calls Colonel Worthy while Artesia relies upon the Oxford gentleman. In the following issues of the Female Tatler the discussion unfolds. Colonel Worthy sums up his argument in three main points: first, among all eminent men those who stand out because of warlike virtues are at the top and receive extraordinary tributes of honour by posterity. Second, there is no better occasion for a gentleman to gain honour than in a military campaign. Finally, there is no nobler mission than to fight against the tyranny of France, which threatens Great Britain and Europe as a whole. In his response, the Oxford gentleman analyses the dynamics of the passions behind those patterns of behaviour celebrated as expressions of martial virtue, exposing the radically self-interested nature of human beings, which combines a deep concern for the approval of others with a systematic propensity to misjudge one’s own motives and those of others.38 Mankind is a strange Compound made up of Qualities, that contradict each other, we are all Lovers of Self-Preservation, and would naturally avoid whatever we think troublesome or hurtful, and yet we are great Admirers of Praise and desire to be thought well by others; but as this is innate to all, so it follows that no body can be much pleased with the Action of others, as long as he can perceive nothing in them but a Tendency toward their own Preservation, and consequently he that would be praised must at least seemingly recede from that first Principle, so as to make others believe that his own Benefits is not the only thing he aims at. This is the great Point where we all cheat and are cheated by one another.39 Human beings are fundamentally “Lovers of Self-Preservation” but at the same time “great Admirers of Praise.” This basic distinction between an animal instinct for self-preservation and the desire for public approval foreshadows Mandeville’s later distinction between self-love and self-liking, elaborated in the Fable of the Bees Part II and in the Enquiry into the Origin of Honour. The awareness that to express exclusively their inborn self-concern is unpleasant drives individuals to pretend not to be dominated by self-regard. The courage exhibited in the military virtues, according to the Oxford Gentleman, is 38 39

Harold J. Cook, “Treating of bodies medical and political: Dr. Mandeville’s materialism,” Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics, 9, 1, 2016, pp. 1–31, in part. pp. 20–21. The Female Tatler 80, (January 9, 1710).

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praised because it is seen as an expression of self-sacrifice for the community: one of those actions where, seeming to neglect ourselves, we labour visibly for the benefits of others. The duel of honour, allegedly connected with martial bravery, is a practice which makes detectable a constant, universal feature of human nature: the search for approval and praise. Mandeville’s spokesman points out the paradoxical nature of the actions of those – as in duelling – who destroy themselves to please themselves: such are the Charms of Praise to some, tho’ the desire of it proceeds Originally from a Principle of pleasing themselves, that the eagerness of pursuing their Pleasures, makes them so far forget themselves as to destroy the very Being they strove to please at first.40 The inborn desire of praise, points out the Oxford gentleman, has nothing to do with morality: it “is only a pleasing of ourselves, and proceeds not from any Principle of Virtue” but is grounded in the “Difference and Absurdity as well as the unworthiness of the Things for which some People would be Praised.” This is the core mechanism of human’s capability to socialize, a constitutive feature of human nature, which assumes different shapes in different ages, societies and ranks: “Children Claim the Praise of their Companion for being Disobedient, and Thieves and Burglars without doubt value themselves among their Associates for their Dexterity of doing Mischief.” Courage, the archetypal virtue of the republican canon is thus reduced to the love of praise and the search for others’ approval. “I don’t question but the Men of Honour richly deserve our Praise and Admiration, but I don’t think that Praise and Admiration of ours worth their venturing to be shot for it.”41 Bernard Mandeville shared with Richard Steele and other contemporary moralists and would-be reformers the perception of the widespread diffusion of vice and fraud at all levels of society, but his attitude is antithetical.42 For contemporary readers it was not difficult to recognize a powerful continental tradition in the insistence on the subordinate role of reason in relation to the passions, and in the predominance of self-love among these passions. In the mind of his contemporaries, Mandeville was associated with that heterogeneous set of thinkers who shared a conception of the search for others’ approval as the most powerful and persistent motivation in human behaviour, in particular, those authors who gave to pride, vanity and self-love a role in 40 41 42

The Female Tatler 80, (January 9, 1710). The Female Tatler 80, Chiessi pp. 42–44. Horne, 1978, p. 7. Cf. Fable I, The Grumbling Hive, pp. 18 and 24.

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replacing virtue itself.43 Steele, in what looks like a response to The Female Tatler, associated Mandeville with the French moral philosophers as authors who denigrate human nature: I could never read any of our modish French authors, or those of our own country who are the imitators and admirers of that trifling nation, without being for some time out of humor with myself, and at everything about me. Their business is to depreciate human nature and consider it under its worst appearances. They give mean interpretation and base motives to the worthiest actions: they resolve virtue and vice into constitution.44 In the French culture of the late seventeenth century, philosophers of conflicting schools and theologians of different sects, free thinkers and fervent believers found a common ground in emphasizing the limited influence of reason and the power of passions as motives for action. Already in 1922, the historian of ideas Arthur Oncken Lovejoy, in a personal letter to F.B. Kaye, the editor in 1924 of the modern commented edition of the Fable, rebuked him for having overestimated Mandeville’s contribution to the history of utilitarianism and economic thought. According to Lovejoy, Kaye lost sight of Mandeville’s specific contribution to the Enlightenment: the analysis of institutions, practices, and human behaviour in terms of motivating passions. With his analysis of self-esteem and the desire for social recognition, Mandeville had investigated the roots of human agency, anticipating, according to Lovejoy, the latest fashion of psychology: psychoanalysis. (Lovejoy writes in the 1920s) The most significant aspect of Mandeville’s work therefore is the role attributed to ‘approbativeness’, the desire for approval or admiration of oneself, one’s acts, and one’s achievements on the part of one’s fellows, and for the expression by them of this feeling: i.e., the love of praise. In this framework Mandeville finds his place – both theoretically and chronologically – in the “history of the psychology of moral behaviour of men,” following authors such as La Placette, Esprit, Abbadie, Vauvenargues, Milton, Blackmore, Pope, and before Butler, Hume and Voltaire.45 In Mandeville’s pages resonate themes developed by his countryman Erasmus, by Montaigne, La Bruyère, Pascal, Abbadie, Gassendi – and more particularly by François de La Rochefoucauld, Pierre Nicole, and Pierre Bayle. With great intellectual honesty Kaye included Lovejoy’s letter in his 1924 critical edition of The Fable of the Bees, and in the commentary 43 44 45

Fable I, p. xcii. Lovejoy 1961, pp. 170 and 131. Tatler 108, December 1709. Cf. Goldsmith 1999, pp. 66 and fwd. A.O. Lovejoy, “Letter to FB Kaye,” March 3, 1922, in Fable II, p. 452.

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noted that the real predecessors of Mandeville’s “vivisection of human nature” were those authors who argued that pride may take the form of the various virtues and that apparently altruistic qualities can be accounted for as indirect and disguised forms of selfishness.46 The idea of the approbation of others as a stabilizing force in society emerges in Jansenist thought, in particular in the discussion of what makes possible the appearance of morally upright, or apparently morally upright, persons, among those deprived of efficacious grace. In order to defend their pessimistic view of man  – his depravity after the fall, and his impotence to effect his own salvation – and to account for the apparent orderliness and civility of the world in terms other than grace or the residual goodness of men, the Jansenists engaged in a subtle psychological analysis of human behaviour in term of self-love.47 For the Duke of La Rochefoucauld, not only is human society an inextricable mixture of vices and virtues; mutual deception also has an essential function as a social bond. “Nos vertus ne sont, le plus souvent que des vices désguisés.”48 With this epigraph, previously part of the text, François La Rochefoucauld opened his Maximes (1664), starting from the fourth edition (1675). In Kaye’s words “much of Mandeville’s philosophy might be summarized as an elucidation’ of this maxim.”49 The Jansenist theologian Pierre Nicole, emphasizing the corruption of human nature because of original sin, reserved an anthropological primacy to self-love. In his Essais de Morales he had offered an explanation of the social order in terms of the chameleon-like capacity of this passion to impersonate the most diverse virtues. This explanation appears in particular in Of Charity and Self-Love, a translation of De la charité et de l’amour propre in Essais de Morale, published in Paris between 1671 and 1678. The essays were partly translated into English by John Locke for personal use before appearing in a full printed edition in London in 1691, but it is very likely that Mandeville read 46 47

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Kaye 1924, p. xcii. Jennifer A. Herdt, Putting On Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices (Chicago: 2008), p. 250; Dale K. Van Kley, “Pierre Nicole, Jansenism, and the Morality of Enlightened Self-Interest,” in Anticipations of the Enlightenment in England, France, and Germany, ed. by Alan C. Kors and Paul J. Korshin (Philadelphia: 1987), pp. 69–85; Horne, 1978, pp. 20–21. La Rochefoucauld, Maximes (Paris: 1997), p. 45. Cf. Edward J. Hundert, “Bernard Mandeville and the Enlightenment’s Maxims of Modernity,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 56, 1995 pp. 577–93; Horne 1978, pp. 23 and fwd.; Anna Maria Magini, “La Rochefoucauld e Mandeville alle origini della società civile,” in Nuova rivista storica, lvii, 1973, pp. 171– 174; H.C. Clark, “La Rochefoucauld and the Social Bases of Aristocratic Ethics,” History of European Ideas, I, 1987, pp. 61–76. Kaye 1924, p. cv.

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them in the original edition.50 Nicole presents self-love as the most general, the strongest, and also the most subtle and flexible of social passions, able to mimic and counterfeit a wide range of virtuous behaviours. Men refrain from crime out of fear, help others in view of their own interest, and engage in charitable actions to enjoy the esteem and love of others. There is a gulf between the sources of charity and self-love: the first is motivated by the love of God that extends to others, the other is an expression of the corrupt nature of man. As for the effects, however, self-love takes on the appearance of charity to the point of becoming indistinguishable not only to outside observers but also to oneself. In the last decades of the seventeenth century the critique of virtues had become so commonplace that the French Calvinist divine Jacques Abbadie could affirm that “La fausseté des vertus humaines n’est plus une chose contestée” (the falsity of human virtues is no longer in dispute).51 The relationship of Mandeville with the work of Pierre Bayle is much more direct and complex. In the Baylean analysis of the relationship between passions and positive religions, Mandeville could find a model for the analysis of society starting from the idea of the self-sufficiency of its mechanisms. The passions determine human nature and its customs. “Man (…) almost never acts in accordance with his principles (…) [rather] according to his wild desires.” Bayle’s reflections on the ‘temporal utility of the point of honour’ and especially his arguments for the possibility of a society of atheists provided Mandeville with a model for explaining social organization by observing the game of passions as they are channelled into the streams of gratification, honour, esteem and the laws of society.52 In his works Mandeville quotes, paraphrases, and pillages Bayle always with great respect and esteem, and without distancing himself from the French philosopher even when he seemed inclined to abandon the fundamental axiom of Bayle’s philosophical anthropology regarding the incapacity of human beings to act according to general principles. Certainly, Mandeville demonstrates much more honesty than his contemporaries in explicitly recognizing his debt to an author who in the early eighteenth century was widely read and used as a source of learning, not only 50 51 52

Cf. B. Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees and Other Writings, ed. by E. Hundert, Indianapolis, 1997; p. 222. Jacques Abbadie Traite de la verité de la religion chrétienne, Paris 1677, p. 294. Cf. Force 2003, p. 59. P. Bayle, Reponse aux question d’un provincial, in Oeuvres Diverses, Paris 1964, vol. 3 pp. 979–81(iii, c.xxviii); Maria Emanuela Scribano, “La Presenza di Bayle nell’opera di Bernard de Mandeville,” in Giornale Critico della Filosofia Italiana 60, 1981, pp. 186–220, in part. pp. 189 e 192 Cf. Gianluca Mori, Introduzione a Bayle (Roma-Bari: 1996); Elisabeth Labrousse, Pierre Bayle, (1964) (Paris: 1996).

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in deist circles. Mandeville has no direct interest in the closed world of the court, whose rituals were the subject of the reflections of La Rochefoucauld and his contemporaries. Rather, he appropriates the Continental ‘natural psychology of the élites of the ancien régime’ and makes use of it in the context of the blossoming commercial society as it was being structured in England in the first decades of the eighteenth century. But a further, decisive component characterises Mandeville’s philosophy. The way in which throughout his works Mandeville proceeds from observing the practices of social interaction, without prejudices, to identifying the underlying passions, and articulating a truthful description of human nature, is borrowed – in its aims and methods – from his medical training and his practice as a therapist of nervous disorders. 3

Medicine and Philosophy: The Hypp’d Nation

Mandeville’s critical attitude toward those who extol the natural sociability and rationality of human nature and fail to see the centrality of pride among the springs of human behaviour is not confined to his social commentary, but it is also strongly engrained in his medical theory and practice. While outlining his philosophical anthropology in The Female Tatler, Mandeville lived out his medical practice as a specialist in nervous disorders, in fact as a psychotherapist, meeting his patients for long sessions of therapeutic conversation in his private quarters, for some time (we happen to know), in Manchester Court, Channel Row, Westminster. Mandeville was evidently also working on a book, which in fact appeared in print in 1711: A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions, Vulgarly Call’d the Hypo in Men and Vapours in Women, by B. de Mandeville, m.d.53 It is from the introduction to the 1711 second edition of this work that we have this information. There Mandeville explained how he wanted to “stage himself” under the name of Philopirio, or “a Lover of Experience, as I shall always profess to be.” He came to London to learn English and having found the country to his liking had chosen to stay.54 In a series of 53

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A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions, Vulgarly Call’d the Hypo in Men and Vapours in Women, in which the Symptoms, Causes, and Cure of those Diseases are set forth after a Method intirely new. The whole interspers’d, with Instructive Discourses on the Real Art of Physick it self; and entertaining Remarks on the Modern Practice of Physicians and Apothecaries: Very useful to all, that have the Misfortune to stand in need of either. In three dialogues by B. de Mandeville, m.d. (London: Printed for the author D. Leach, W. Taylor, John Woodward, 1711), reprinted in 1715 and re-edited in an enlarged form in 1730. Treatise, ed. 1711, pp. xi e xiii.

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dialogues between a doctor and his patient, Mandeville presents his theories on the causes of hypochondria, hysteria and nervous disorders in general and proposes a therapy. At the same time, he presents an informed survey of medical issues in the early eighteenth century and offers an unprejudiced and pungent account of the social role of the physician and the influence of fashions on the development and dissemination of scientific theories. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, hypochondria was generally regarded as Britain’s national disease. Not without pride, Dr Cheyne entitled his book on nervous disorders ‘The English Malady’.55 The spread of a disorder characterised by a broad but well-defined set of symptoms – prostration, digestive problems, irregular heartbeat, misanthropy, insomnia, unreasonable fears, headaches and facial pallor, and variously called hypochondria, melancholia, spleen, hysteria, vapours, disease of the learned  – was explained as a side-effect of the high degree of civilisation achieved by the inhabitants of the British Isles. Nervous disorders were seen as the result of the stress and responsibilities of civilized life, a condition peculiar to educated members of the upper classes; more engaged in study or intellectual pursuits, more prone to illness. The English Malady was therefore also a privilege, a sign of the status of the sufferer, as well as a widespread and much discussed disorder. Among the number of publications on the English disease in those years, Mandeville’s Treatise stands out not only for the wide range of topics more or less directly related to nervous diseases, and for the discussion of the theory and practice of medicine, but especially for the choice of the dialogical form and the central place given to the relationship between doctor and patient. These last two factors are not disjointed: the unusual choice of the dialogical form for a treatise on medicine is conscious and highly significant. The dialogue itself is a substantial part of the therapy. Paying attention to the patient, listening with indulgence and willingness to the detailed exposition of his disorders and confusions is the most appropriate way to gain trust and establish a fruitful therapeutic relationship, not tainted by the vanity that usually characterises the attitudes of both.56 Mandeville respected the conventions of the genre: the book is structured in three long dialogues, proceeding roughly from symptoms, to causes, to treatment; but everything is developed in the form of conversations between doctor and patient, and generalisations about the disease are always linked to specific illustrations of the case in question. The text itself is addressed to patients rather than specialists. Mandeville constructs three imaginary case 55 56

George Cheyne, The English Malady, London, G. Strahan, 1733. Cf. P.J. Schoenberg, “A Dialogue with Mandeville,” in British Journal of Psychiatry, 1976, pp. 120–124; Luigi Turco, Lo scetticismo morale di David Hume (Bologna: 1984).

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history that brings together most of the symptoms of the disease in a single family.57 Philopirio is summoned by Misomedon (‘he who does not like doctors’), who presents his case together with that of his wife Polytheca and their daughter, both suffering from hysteria. Misomedon is a man of letters, initially open-minded and friendly, but made irritable and suspicious by his illness; he is now in an unstable mood, impatient with treatment because of the failures of the treatments he has experimented. He despairs of the very possibility of recovery and has developed a deep scepticism towards medical science, which he has meanwhile studied himself in the hope of solving his problems. Philopirio, unlike the other doctors consulted previously, is accommodating and offers his full willingness to listen. In his long and detailed account of Misomedon’s illness and the unsuccessful treatments he attempted, Philopirio reviews the physiological and aetiological theories that were widespread at the beginning of the eighteenth century and the therapies practised by his colleagues and advances his own. In his articulate response, Philopirio seems to be interested above all in the social dimension of illness and the public role of physicians, analysed in terms of motivating passions. The current relationship between doctors and patients, Mandeville/Philopirio repeatedly insists, is corrupted by pride ‘the first Sire’ of human nature, and by the vanity of both: ‘Tis Pride that makes the Physician abandon the solid Observation of never erring Nature to take up with the loose conjectures of his own wandering Invention, that the World may admire the Fertility of his Brain; and it is pride in the Patient, that makes him in love with the reasoning Physician, to have an opportunity of shewing the depth of his penetration.58 The argument against the arrogance of the speculative doctor, more interested in finding confirmation of the theories acquired in academic study than in adequate patient care, is not simply a rhetorical device or an exclusively sociological critique. Rather, it is a way for Philopirio to introduce his own perspective and clarify his methodological options in the context of the medical-scientific debate of the time. During the seventeenth century, Galen’s authority – on which the Western medical tradition had relied for over fifteen centuries – was challenged by the advances of the Scientific Revolution. 57 58

Sylvie Kleiman-Lafon, “Introduction” in Bernard Mandeville, A Treatise of the Hypo­ chondriack and Hysterick Diseases (1730), Ed. by Sylvie Kleiman-Lafon (Cham, ch: 2017), pp. 4–5. Treatise…. ed. 1730, Preface, p. iv.

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In many university centres, Aristotle’s reputation as a naturalist gave way – not without tension, as Philopirio /Mandeville recalls – to mechanistic physiology and the corpuscular theory of matter: “I have observ’d as much Hatred and Animosity between the Aristotelians and Cartesians, when I was at Leiden, as there is now in London between High-Church and Low-Church.”59 The Cartesian distinction between thinking and extended matter opened the way to the mechanist approach to the human body, the ‘iatromechanical’ and the ‘iatrochemical’ medical approaches.60 Alongside rationalist medicine, there remained a therapeutic approach that favoured the practical side of medical training and the careful observation of the patient as the primary, if not exclusive, field of medical research. According to this strictly empirical tendency, only careful and scrupulous observation of symptoms and comparison of therapeutic effects with particular treatments or drugs were considered suitable for advancing medical science, while any method of indirect knowledge was considered ineffectual. Dr Mandeville was firmly opposed to ‘hypothetical medicine’ and in favour of a therapeutic approach centred on the diligent observation of patients. The defence of the experimental method developed in the Treatise represents a theoretical basis and a clarification of Mandeville’s methodological options that is very significant for the subsequent development of his philosophy, particularly its application to society. Mandeville saw himself working within the tradition of empirical science, following in the footsteps of two of the most famous physicians of his time for basing their theories on experience: Thomas Sydenham and Giorgio Baglivi, both of whom are extensively cited in Mandeville’s book.61 59 60 61

Treatise, ed. 1711, p. 115. Cf. Thomas S. Hall, Ideas of life and matter. Studies in the history of general physiology, 600 BC–1900 AD; Vol. 1 (London: 1963); John Henry, The Scientific Revolution and the Origin of Modern Science (Basingbroke: 2002). Sydenham is known for his studies of fevers and epidemics but even more for his opposition, in disagreement with his colleagues, to the abstract dogmatism of ‘rational’ medicine, and for the stout commitment to clinical experience, which earned him the nickname of English Hippocrates. One of his most talented students was John Locke, whose preparation and experience as a doctor in collaboration with Sydenham played an indirect but key role in his conception of the objectives and limits of human knowledge. Cf. John R.Milton, “Locke, Medicine and the Mechanical Philosophy,” in British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 9 (2), 2001, pp. 221–243; Kenneth Dewhurst, John Locke: Physician and Philosopher (London: 1963).While accepting the principles of iatromechanicism in medical research, the Italian doctor Giorgio Baglivi proclaimed the need for a return to Hippocratism, that is to say to an observation of diseases not tainted by doctrinal prejudices. In front of the patient, the doctor must set aside all theories and let the observation speak. Cf. Cook 2016, pp. 1–31; Mauro Simonazzi, Le favole della filosofia. Saggio su Bernard Mandeville (Milano: 2008), pp. 97–152.

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Arousing Misomedon’s disappointment, Philopirio does not disdain being counted among the “Empiricks” and consciously contrasts his approach with the “speculative fashion” that dominates current medical culture. Against the witty speculations of the “Hypothetical Doctors,” the indiscriminate use of unverified hypotheses and conjectures on which both diagnoses and therapies are a priori based, Philopirio insists on the value of the practical approach, characterised by “judicious and diligent” observation.62 In Renaissance medical literature, melancholy, literally ‘black bile’, was considered from the perspective of the humoral theory and regarded as a psychological disorder with a physical foundation, precisely the imbalance deriving from the excess of melancholy. Generally, when it was not identified as a symptom of demonic possession, it was regarded as a less severe depressive disorder than madness, linked in some way to the condition of the upper abdomen. Hysteria, a name that derives from the Greek term for womb, was considered a typically feminine disorder and according to an explanation by Hippocrates derived from Plato, was caused precisely by the movements of the womb, which as a disobedient animal wanders through the body causing all varieties of disease.63 With the spread of mechanistic and corpuscular theory, Thomas Willis’s pioneering studies of the anatomy of the nervous system and Thomas Sydenham’s clinical observations, not without controversy, hysteria and hypochondria began to be classified as two forms, in women and men, of the same disease, produced by the malfunctioning of the nervous system.64 In the course of the conversations, reviewing the history of opinions concerning the causes of hypochondria and hysteria, Philoprius is prompted by Misomedon to introduce his own explanation. Hypothetically and conjecturally, true to his avowed methodological scepticism, Philoprius argues that the causes of hypochondria and hysteria are to be found in a disorder of the digestive process, an imbalance between the large and fine particles that make up the ‘animal spirits’. Philopirio claims to rely on knowledge derived from observation, and to have limited as much as possible the use of hypotheses. The definition of animal spirits “on whose existence the agreement is almost unanimous” is minimal. Philopirio considers them simply “instruments of movement and perception,” without entering into the distinctions of their conformation, their finesse, or the characteristics of the pores through which they pass.65 By accepting on a provisional basis – and soon it is clear that this is a rhetorical device to reject this hypothesis – a Cartesian 62 63 64 65

Treatise, ed. 1730, pp. iv–v. Plato, Timeus, iii, 91c. Simonazzi 2004, in part. Chaps. 3 and 4. Treatise, ed. 1730, pp. 135–138 (Tr.1711, p. 25).

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dualism, Philopirio argues that we can assume that we are constituted of soul and body, or thought and matter. We cannot know if the soul has a seat, and what it may be, but we know from experience that the activity of thinking is accomplished in the head more than in any other part of the body. There must be “Internuncii,” elements or particles that act as intermediaries between the soul and the less subtle parts of the body and these are precisely the animal spirits.66 Without pretending to explain the actual functioning of the brain in the activity of thinking  – that is, in the arrangement of previously received images (the reference to Locke is transparent) – and starting from the limited knowledge of the digestive processes, on the basis of which one can reasonably infer the existence of a digestive ferment of some sort, Philopirio postulates a sympathetic relationship between the stomach and the brain. Considering the large number of nerve endings present in the stomach, the considerable influence that appetite or aversion have on digestion, and the fact that our mood significantly influences our digestive system, Philopirio concludes that the fine particles involved in the process of thinking are also engaged by the stomach. The Dutch doctor therefore postulates a “communication, agreement and extraordinary contest between stomach and brain, without entering into definitive hypotheses on how this can happen,” thereby offering an explanation of the concomitance of the digestive disorders and their psychological counterparts.67 Dr. Mandeville therefore suggests that people affected by hypochondria suffer from a “waste of animal spirits” because they lack that knowledge and awareness of themselves that alone allows a proper and balanced administration of one’s energies and commitments. The role of the doctor in the treatment of melancholy is then to operate on the passions provoked by the disease with a logotherapy aimed at inclining his patients toward a more wholesome life despite their fragilities, and to lead them to the discovery of their own inner nature and true motivating passions in order to overcome their incapacity to be satisfied with their own condition.68 Philopirio’s explanation of the physiology of the human body and of the activity of the mind does not imply a separation between soul and body, or between thought and matter. He advanced his theories on this relationship with great cautiousness and in the form of conjectures, but on the whole, it is clear that he is perfectly aware of the materialistic implications of his thought. The idea that matter can think, or that thought can have its seat in the mortal body, in the brain, without 66 67 68

Treatise, ed. 1730, p. 125; (Tr. 1711 p. 130). Treatise, 1711 pp. 131–132 Cf. Mark S. Micale, Hysterical Man (Boston: 2008), pp. 38–40. Cook 2016, pp. 1–31; Francis McKee, “Honeyed Words: Bernard Mandeville and Medical Discourse,” in Medicine in the Enlightenment, ed. R. Porter (Amsterdam: 1995), pp. 223–54.

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the need to postulate the existence of a soul, according to Philopirio has been bitterly opposed because of false assumptions and because of our inability to explain the functioning of the brain. The very idea that humans are endowed with an immortal soul is the product of pride.69 Ten years after the publication of his Treatise, Mandeville offered his personal diagnosis on the whole British nation, manifestly affected by a chronic discontent. The fact that is spite favourable soil and climate and healthy inhabitants, the English people continue to protest, complain and grumble about their social and political condition, is to be read as a symptom, Mandeville observes, of “State Hypochondria”: Should any State Physician (…) examine into the real Cause of all our Grievances, he must infallibly pronounce the Nation hypp’d. No Woman in the height of Vapours is more whimsical in her Complaints than some of us, and melancholly Madmen have not more dismal Apprehension of Things in the blackest Fits of the Spleen, than our State Hypochondriacks are daily buzzling in our Ears.70 Bernard Mandeville, the Dutch-born doctor trained in nervous disorders as well as philosophy, had established his practice in England, enjoying writing poetry and social satire. He began to write, inspired by the unjustified discontent of his fellow citizens, about what they saw as the spread of vice in society. Agreeing with the tradition of libertinage érudit, Mandeville opened his enquiry into human nature by addressing the state of current notions of male and female virtue and honour in the light of Dutch republican thought and continental egalitarianism, taking Richard Steele’s version of the ideology of civic spirit as his first polemical target. Drawing on the Continental tradition of self-love analysis, refined and enhanced by his background in medical empiricism and his practice on nervous disorders, Mandeville expounded his arguments in The Fable of the Bees, the work that brought him fame. 69 70

Treatise, ed. 1711 pp. 173–175. B. Mandeville, Free Thoughts on Religion, the Church, and National Happiness, (1720), pp. 331, 334.

Chapter 3

The Political Offspring of Pride By Jove, I am not covetous for gold, but if it be a sin to covet honour I am the most offending soul alive w. Shakespeare, Henry v (iv, iii)

∵

In 1714 the book trader John Roberts published in London, anonymously, The Fable of the Bees or, Private Vices Publick Benefits.1 This is the book that – after the 1723 enlarged edition – made Mandeville one of the most in-famous man of his days. The 1714 volume included the original poem The Grumbling Hive reprinted with a preface and a short essay entitled An Enquiry into the Origins of Moral Virtue, also with a short introduction; and twenty prose remarks listed alphabetically from A to Y, glossing twenty verses of the original poem and ranging in length from a few pages to long and detailed essays. The Dutch physician had acquired an extraordinary mastery of the English language and wrote in a brilliant and provocative style. Mandeville’s challenging arguments on the social utility of those human passions labelled as vices, initially formulated in verse and in the periodical press, find an articulated and coherent, though not yet systematic, exposition in this volume. Chapter 3 gives an account of Mandeville’s notions of the function and evolution of codes of behaviour based on pride and reconstructs how his thesis on the centrality of the desire for recognition develops into a peculiar theory of sociability. In The Fable of the Bees Mandeville introduces a theory on the origin of moral distinctions based on human susceptibility to praise, and sets out the basis of his philosophical anthropology: humans are ineluctably governed by their passions and share false beliefs about their motivations, believing themselves to be rationally motivated beings and setting unattainable standards of virtue. In the Remarks, drawing on a physiology of the passions, Mandeville explains the distinction between honour as a general principle and the rituals 1 On the publishing history of The Fable of the Bees see Tolonen 2013, pp. 110 and fwd.; Goldsmith 1999, pp. 46–7.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004428430_006

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of modern honour, emphasising the differences between original passionate impulses and their ‘sociable’ counterparts, the process of domestication of ‘natural’ courage into an ‘artificial’ passion in civil society and its function in contemporary manners. Exploiting traditional arguments in the debate on civility and manners, while ridiculing men’s honour and martial virtues, Mandeville emphasises its function as a fundamental social bond and develops a disconcerting defence of the practice of duelling. 1

Powerful Persuasions

The Fable of the Bees appears as a collection of considerations, sketches of characters and institutions, social portraits, scenes of urban life, “a Rhapsody void of Order or Method” as Mandeville himself called it in a later work, in which individuals, institutions and mechanisms of social interaction are analysed in terms of motivating passions.2 At a time when the reforming power of satire was extolled as a critical tool for exposing vices and hypocrisy, Mandeville consciously reversed the canon and made efforts at moral reform the object of his parody, openly turning the “Batteries of Ridicule” against the very crusaders of civic virtue, and making the very idea of supposed human benevolence and rationality a side-effect of pride.3 Mandeville opens the book with a defence of his perspective as a scientist of human nature, committed to studying the ‘low’ ingredients that make up society. Just as anatomists dissect the human machine to observe its internal constitution, without regard to criteria of beauty or harmony of external forms, so those who are willing to examine the nature of man: “may observe, that what renders him a Sociable Animal, consists not in his desire of Company, Good-nature, Pity, Affability, and other Graces of a fair Outside; but that his vilest and most hateful Qualities are the most necessary Accomplishments to fit him for the largest, and, according to the World, the happiest and most flourishing Societies.”4 The author of the Fable of the Bees presents himself a scientist, an anatomist who applies the experimental method  – observing the symptoms of the passions developed in the field of medicine  – to the study of society. In Mandeville’s experimental naturalism there is no break between medicine and philosophy: he presents himself as a truthful enquirer into human nature, ready to engage (echoing Machiavelli and Hobbes) in a profound and 2 Fable I, p. 405 (Vindication). 3 Cf. Joseph Addison, The Spectator 445, July 31, 1712. 4 Fable I, p. 3.

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unprejudiced analysis of the real mechanisms of human social organization, in contrast to the preconceptions and hypocrisies of those who “are always teaching Men what they should be, and hardly ever trouble their Heads with telling them what they really are.”5 Man, for Mandeville, is a “compound of various Passions, that all of them, as they are provoked and come uppermost, govern him by turns, whether he will or no.”6 The “Desire to be thought well of,” “the immoderate Love we bear to our selves,” is the key to many of the actions we perform and the very values we share: “Men are never, or at least very seldom, reclaimed from their darling Passions, either by Reason or Precept.” Awareness of this state of affairs is stifled by pride, which is the basis of a “strong Habit of Hypocrisy we have learned from our Cradle to hide even from our selves the vast Extent of Self-Love, and all its different Branches.”7 From the point of view of the Dutch doctor and philosopher, not only are men dominated by the passions, but the very belief that one can conduct oneself rationally by controlling one’s appetites is itself an illusion produced by pride. Mandeville reiterates in prose the moral of the poem: for the citizens of modern commercial societies, combining virtue and worldly greatness is an impossible dream. The design of the Fable is thus “to shew the Vileness of the Ingredients that all together compose the wholesome Mixture of a well order’d Society” and the impossibility of enjoying the comforts of an industrious, powerful, wealthy and polite nation without the “inseparable Vices and Inconveniences,” and thus expose the “Unreasonableness and Folly” of moralists and would-be reformers, those who “grumble” and yet are “wonderfully greedy after all the Benefits” distinctive of wealthy and prosperous societies.8 After the verse apology of the bees there is a short essay, An Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue, where Mandeville offers a puzzling account of the genesis of morality, introducing the idea of moral distinctions as the inventions of ‘clever politicians’ and setting up the strict standard for virtuous actions that was to remain a feature of his moral theory. It is one of the most controversial pieces in all of Mandeville’s writings, having attracted criticism from his contemporaries and baffled twentieth and twenty-first century’s scholars. In these pages Mandeville advances an explanation of the origin of moral distinctions based solely on men’s sensitivity to praise, flattery and fear of shame: individuals fundamentally characterised by self-concern and pride are united in society through a dynamic of desires 5 Fable I, p. 39; Mauro Simonazzi, Temi machiavelliani nell’opera di Mandeville, in Anglo american faces of Machiavelli. Machiavelli e machiavellismi nella cultura anglo-americana (Monza: 2009), pp. 313–341; Runciman 2010, pp. 45–49. 6 Fable I, p. 39. 7 Fable I, 63, 82, 182, 185 (see also 75). 8 Fable I, 6–7.

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and needs in which the search for the approval of others plays a predominant role. The title page of the 1714 second edition of The Fable of the Bees presents the book as: “Containing Several Discourses, to demonstrate That Human Frailties, during the Degeneracy of Mankind, may be turn’d to the Advantage of the Civil Society, and made to supply the Place of Moral Virtues.” In the “wild state of nature,” Mandeville explains, the first thing necessary to establish society among animals as selfish, stubborn and cunning as human beings was to make them believe that it is “more beneficial to every Body to conquer than to indulge his appetites.” In order to make sociable an animal that has a natural inclination to prefer its own welfare to that of others and that cannot be civilized by force alone, the legislators working for “the Establishment of society” acted through flattery and adulation to impose a scale of values that praised self-control and glorified the domination of one’s own appetites in favour of public interest.9 Knowing that human beings are governed solely by their passions and having observed men’s innate susceptibility to flattery, that “none were either so savage as not be charm’d with Praise, or so despicable as patiently to bear Contempt,” the cunning politicians devised a way to make people subdue rather than indulge their appetites and to pursue public good rather than their own interests, by offering them a “general equivalent for the trouble of self-denial” and for the “violence they must commit on themselves” in curbing “pressing impulses, troublesome to resist.”10 The imaginary reward that the legislators devised was praise for those who subordinated their inclination to public welfare and an equally imaginary punishment of blame directed at those who indulged their appetites.11 By extolling the excellency of the human species over other animals, praising the wonders of human understanding, and offering a “thousand Encomiums on the Rationality of our Souls,” the imaginary lawgivers were teaching men not only to conceive of themselves as rational animals, but to behave in the way that such a conception seemed to require. They emphasised how inappropriate it is for the dignity of creatures as sublime as humans to indulge in gratifying appetites shared with brutes, and how glorious it is to resist the pressing impulses of nature; and that within mankind those who are public-spirited are morally far above those who are only concerned with themselves.12 In pursuit of the ambitious goal of inculcating the desire to resist all desires, the ‘skilful 9 10 11 12

Fable I, p. 42. Fable I, pp. 42–43. Herdt 2008; pp. 272–273. Fable I, p. 43 Peter Olsthoorn, “Bernard Mandeville on Honor, Hypocrisy, and War,” The Heytrop Journal, 60, (2), 2019, pp. 205–218.

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politician’ made the human desire to think himself superior to non-rational animals the defining characteristic of human beings.13 By exploiting their susceptibility to the pleasure of feeling themselves a species superior to other animals, the ‘cunning politicians’ thus made men believe that they had a motive other than the passions.14 To enforce the scheme, the ‘skilful politicians’ elaborated a sophisticated political myth in which the entire human species is divided into two groups: on the one hand the “abject, low-minded People, that are always hunting after immediate Enjoyment (…) incapable of Self-denial and without regard for the good of others,” aiming exclusively at their own advantage and the satisfaction of their sensual pleasures; on the other, the “lofty high-spirited Creatures,” free from “sordid selfishness,” that “despising what they have in common with irrational creatures,” are committed in “a continual War with themselves to promote the Peace of others.”15 The idea that man can act according to rational principles plays on the profound self-esteem that characterises human nature and pushes man to accept the definition of virtue as self-control and control of those self-seeking passions by which he is, in fact, ineluctably dominated. Since pride is inseparable from the very essence of man  – according to Mandeville, one of its ‘main ingredients’ – the fine notions of the “Dignity of Rational Creatures” introduced by the clever lawgivers are effective on both sides. Even those who strove only to gratify their appetites, Mandeville explains, realising that controlling their inclinations or trying to satisfy them “with more Circumspection” they would avoid the problems and misfortunes associated with a “too eager Pursuit after Pleasure,” were driven to hide “their own Imperfections” and to “cry up self-denial and public-spiritedness as much as any.”16 Therefore, they agreed with the rest, to call every thing, which, without Regard to the Publick, Man should commit to gratify any of his Appetites, VICE; (…) And to give the Name of VIRTUE to every Performance, by which Man, contrary to the impulse of Nature, should endeavour the Benefit of others, or the Conquest of his own [49] Passions out of a Rational Ambition of being good.17 13 14 15 16 17

John J. Callanan, “Mandeville on Pride and Animal Nature,” in: Balsemão Pires E., Braga J. (eds) Bernard de Mandeville’s Tropology of Paradoxes (Cham: 2015), pp. 125–136. Lovejoy 1961, in part. pp. 171–180; Scribano 1980; pp. 150–152; Jack 2015; pp. 1–13. Fable I, pp. 43–44. Fable I, p. 46. Fable, p. 48.

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To forestall the objection that the notions of good and evil and the distinction between virtue and vice were not created by the “Contrivance of Politicians” but are the effects of religion, Mandeville emphasises, avoiding any reference to divine origins, that he is arguing about “neither Jews or Christians, but Man in the State of Nature and in the ignorance of the true Deity” – and that “the Idolatrous Superstition of all other Nations, and the pitiful Notions they had of the Supreme Being were incapable of exciting men to virtue (…) Religion, far from teaching Men the Conquest of their passion and the way to virtue, seem’d rather contriv’d to justify their Appetites and Encourage their Vices.” It was not then, “any Heathen Religion or other Idolatrous Superstition that first put Man upon crossing his Appetites and subduing his dearest inclinations” but it is by the “skilful Management of vary Politicians” that savage men were persuaded to adopt rules of morality.18 In short, as one of the most quoted passages in all of Mandeville’s writings states: the nearer we search into human Nature, the more we shall be convinced, that the Moral Virtues are the Political Offspring which Flattery begot upon Pride.19 The idea that the very institution of human society is to be attributed to the powerful persuasion of eloquent orators and of heroic leaders whose rhetorical power drove men away from their savage way of life belongs to a tradition rooted in Cicero’s praise of rhetoric in De Inventione and in De Oratore: humans, “who once roamed in the fields like wild animals (…) were first brought together and forged into a civil society through the eloquent persuasion of a single wise man.”20 The tradition of civic republicanism, whose arguments were still strongly influential in early eighteenth-century Britain, emphasized the role played in the origin of society by great legislators and founding fathers. Political legislators as civilizing agents leading a scattered humanity out of its brutish existence in the wilderness appeared also in the writings of Sir William Temple, English ambassador in the Netherlands in the 1670s, an author whom Mandeville quotes extensively.21 The theory of priestly imposture and of religion as “a politick Trick invented by Statesmen to aw the credolous Vulgar” – an invention of politicians and cunning manipulators  – also belongs to an 18 19 20 21

Fable I, pp. 50–51. Fable I, p. 51. Cf. Fable II, p. 402. Dickey, “Pride 1990, pp. 392–98; Scribano 1980; pp. 150–154. Cicero, De Inventione I.i.1; I. ii. 3 Cfr also Isocrates, Nicocles 5–10; Antidosis 253–6. Sir William Temple, Miscellanea, The Second Part, In Four Essays, Printed by I.R. for Ri. and Ra. Simpson, at the Sign of the Harp in St. Paul’s Church-yard, London 1690; iii. Upon Heroick Vertue, pp. 147–148.

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established tradition in the writings of deists and free-thinkers.22 According to Maurice M. Goldsmith’s reading, Mandeville’s invention of morality by politicians is not to be read in a literal sense, but rather as a convenient shorthand  – a fictitious literary device, a functional formulation  – to refer to a more elaborate genetic or developmental explanation. However understood, Mandeville’s account also serves as a further satirical attack on the ideology of the reformers.23 Goldsmith observed that Mandeville’s account of the origin of society in the Enquiry into the Origins of Moral Virtue is constructed as a combination of the three competing views presented in issue 62 of The Female Tatler. The first is the fiction of the social contract put forward by Arsinoe, which attributes a decisive role in the foundation of society to the “rigor of the laws.” The second, proposed by Lucinda and embracing Steele’s views, supported the ‘great public benefactors’ and legislators of the Machiavellian tradition. The third is expressed by the Oxford Gentleman, elaborating on the assertion that what allows men to be trained to live in society are precisely those physical and psychological characteristics that at first sight appear to be the strongest obstacles to peaceful coexistence.24 In Mandeville’s synthesis, the superhuman task of leading savages to civilization is carried out by individual heroes, who, instead of acting as great public benefactors, founders of states or religions as emphasized in the civic humanist tradition, are expert manipulators of psychological characteristics, able to push individuals who are essentially driven by their own self-regarding passions to curb and control their egotistic impulses, through a ulterior passion that they do not recognize as such.25 In the final pages of the Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue Mandeville sarcastically recalls his main polemical target in the preceding years, the “incomparable Sir Richard Steele” (the only author mentioned in the essay), and ridicules his rhetorical praise of the excellence and dignity of human nature, likening it to the “artful Encomiums” and the blandishments employed by baby-sitters in teaching children how to be mannerly. Anyone with abilities superior to those of a child, Mandeville concludes, would consider Steele’s arguments “fulsome Flatteries, and, if you will, abominable Lies.”26 Mandeville thus mocks 22

23 24 25 26

John Toland, Christianity not Misterious, London1696, p. 58. Cf. Justin Champion, “Legislators, impostors, and the politic origins of religion: English theories of ‘imposture’ from Stubbe to Toland,” in Heterodoxy, Spinozism, and Free Thought in Early-EighteenthCentury Europe, Berti S., Charles-Daubert F., Popkin R.H. (eds.) (Dordrecht: 1996), pp. 333–356. Goldsmith 1985, p. 62. Goldsmith 1985, pp. 49–53. Goldsmith, 1985, p. 51. Fable I, pp. 52–53.

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at competing narratives that praised the public-spiritdness of those who invented society, while demonstrating the explanatory force of his theory: the work of politicians can also be explained by the politician’s selfish motive, his interest for domination; its success is explained in turn by pride and sensitivity to praise, by the fact that men are self-deceptive to the point of accepting false beliefs about their own nature and motives. Mandeville’s genealogy of moral distinctions thus not only accounts for the origin of human sociability but offers also a provocative explanation of the fashionable public-spirit ideology he opposes. Even the most ‘brutish’ humans find it in their interest “to preach up Publick-Spiritdness” in order to enjoy the “Fruits of the Labour and Self-denial of others”, and “at the same time indulge their own Appetites with less disturbance.” Approbativeness and the desire for self-esteem and the aversion for their opposites are the initial and the principal subjective sources from which the behaviours usually considered moral arise. Thus, Mandeville explains how, on the basis of the self-centred passions by which they are inevitably dominated, human beings can develop a shared system of sentiments of approval and disapproval. A ‘rigoristic’ definition of virtue, based on the intentions of the agent, as a control over one’s passions out of a “rational ambition to be good,” in contrast with any action tainted by a passional impulse to be labelled as vice advanced by Mandeville in the Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue was maintained in all his subsequent works.27 Several readers have recognised this criterion of moral merit as proof of Mandeville’s adherence to the Augustinian tradition, which was taken up in various forms by the French moralists of the second half of the seventeenth century and had a strong influence in the Dutch Calvinist environment in which Mandeville grew up. All Scottish critics of Mandeville’s moral theory agreed in condemning the excessive strictness of the definition. “He has probably been struck with some old Fanatick Sermon upon Self-Denial in his Youth; and can never get it out of his head since,” suggested Francis Hutcheson.28 David Hume referred in this regard to “the frenzies of enthusiasm,” while Adam Smith remembered, as a foundation of Mandeville’s ‘licentious system,’ “some popular ascetic doctrines (…) which placed virtue in the

27 28

Cf. Robin Douglass, “Mandeville on the origins of virtue”, in British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Vol. 28, 2020, Issue 2, pp. 276–295. F. Hutcheson, Three letters to the Dublin Weekly Journal, (1726), in J. Martin Stafford, Private Vices, Publick Benefits? The Contemporary Reception of Bernard Mandeville (Solihull: 1997), p. 392 and fwd. Cf. M. Jack, “Hutcheson and Mandeville,” Notes & Queries, 24, 1997, pp. 221–222.

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entire extirpation and annihilation of all our passions.”29 The strict standard of moral merit introduced by Mandeville is the instrument of his denunciation of social hypocrisies and the basis of his sceptical arguments about human virtues and the true motives for action. Many behaviours that appear virtuous in the eyes of society are not really so if they are motivated by passion. Pride and shame, however, can stimulate and simulate ‘virtuous’ conduct through the desire to earn praise by conforming to others’ expectations of what constitutes socially acceptable behaviour. By consciously adopting the attitude of the humanist sceptics, following the anti-rationalist current running through the continental culture he was familiar with – from his fellow-citizen Erasmus to Montaigne, Nicole and Bayle – Mandeville builds his paradoxical technique of unmasking the contrast between men’s social practice and the theories they professed, to which he owes his fame and literary success. Faced with the contradiction between the theory and practice of men, between their stated principles and their actual behaviour, Mandeville explicitly recalls Pierre Bayle’s Miscellaneous Reflexions on the Comet: Man is so unaccountable a Creature as to act most commonly against his Principle; and this is so far from being injurious, that it is a Compliment to Human Nature, for we must say either this or worse. This Contradiction in the Frame of Man is the Reason that the Theory of Virtue is so well understood, and the Practice of it so rarely to be met with.30 It is more charitable, that is, to maintain that human beings are hopelessly dominated by their passions and that the aspiration to behave according to reason is an empty – albeit useful – illusion, than to admit that human nature is fundamentally selfish, self-interested and hypocritical, as human behaviour seems to demonstrate to disenchanted observation. Mandeville’s rigorism, his rigid definition of virtue, however, is not only the effective rhetorical device of a severe critic of man’s customs and duplicity, but an element perfectly consequent to the characterisation of human nature that the anatomist of the passions develops in his works. It is a corollary to Mandeville’s naturalistic explanation of the origin, acceptance and function of morality. Human beings accept an idealised conception of themselves and act in accordance with this conception. That is, humans see themselves as rational creatures and share a criterion of moral worth based on this belief. But moral

29 30

David Hume, “Of Refinements of the Arts and Sciences”; Adam Smith, tms vii.ii.4.12, p. 312. Fable, p. 167.

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judgement takes into account only the motives for action and recognises as virtuous only those actions performed independently of any ‘passional’ drive. Yet the ‘passional’ drive is the only motive for action that Mandeville recognises, at least in the 1714 edition of The Fable of the Bees.31According to Mandeville it is then impossible for human beings to meet the criteria of moral worth. The use of a moral language, its very acceptance and its motivating effectiveness, are all derived from a natural passion, or rather from a modification of pride. Herein lies the originality and spring of Mandeville’s paradoxical views, so effective in disconcerting and disturbing his readers. By contrasting his views with alternative theories that placed at the centre of the moral life the benevolent attitude of individuals and ‘great founders’ and the human capacity to recognise and practise virtue through a rational faculty, Mandeville explains the institution of morality on the basis of natural dispositions, which are not, however, adequate to meet the criteria of merit imposed by morality itself. Individuals simply simulate behaviour worthy of approval and are so dominated by pride and vanity that they are unable to recognise their own motives. Social relations are based not only on hypocrisy, but also on systematic self-deception. As Tito Magri has penetratingly observed in his introduction to the Italian translation of The Fable of the Bees, morality according to Mandeville derives – as to its institution and function – from a process in which individuals share false beliefs about their own nature and motivations. Virtue is the result of a system of self-deception in which the individual controls his selfish passions through an additional passion that is not recognised as such.32 2

Men of Fashion, Bullies in Morality

Pride, in Mandeville’s definition is “the natural faculty by which every mortal that has any Understanding overvalues, and Imagines better Things of himself than any other impartial Judge, thoroughly acquainted with all his Qualities and Circumstances could allow him. We are possess’d of no other Quality so beneficial to Society, and so necessary to render it wealthy and flourishing as this, yet it is that which is most generally detested.”33 In the Remark C of The Fable of the Bees Mandeville defines honour by explaining its connection with pride and shame: “By Honour, in its proper and genuine Signification, we

31 32 33

See Douglass 2020a. Cf. Tito Magri, “Introduzione” to B. Mandeville, La Favola delle Api (Roma-Bari: 1987), pp. xxvii–xxxi. Fable I, p. 124.

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mean nothing else but the good Opinion of others, which is counted more or less Substantial, the more or less Noise or Bustle there is made about the demonstration of it.”34 The reverse of honour, continues Mandeville, is dishonour, which “consist in the Bad Opinion and Contempt of others” and as honour is considered a reward for good actions, so dishonour is a punishment for bad ones. Honour and dishonour are here equivalent to praise and blame, the general shape of a form of relationship between individuals, without specifying the particular behaviours subject to approval or disapproval and corresponds to a precise symptomatology, an explanation in terms of the operating of passions in human nature. “The Good and Evil of Honour and Dishonour are imaginary,” explains Mandeville, but pride and shame are authentic passions, expressed in a specific set of symptoms.35 Shame consists in a “sorrowful Reflection on our own Unworthiness, proceeding from an Apprehension that others either do, or might, if they knew all, deservedly despise us.”36 It is a passion which influences “the most important Actions of Life,” over-ruling reason and requiring “as much Labour and Self-denial to be subdued, as any of the rest.”37 In the passions of pride and shame are rooted many social virtues, as “is demonstrable from the plain and different Effects, that in spite of our Reason are produced in us as soon as we are affected with either.”38 His French predecessors had mainly offered impressionistic and aphoristic accounts of amour-propre. Mandeville went further, developing a naturalistic anthropology, influenced by the materialist philosophy of Hobbes and Gassendi and by his medical studies.39 To assess the status of these two passions as “Realities in our Frame, and not imaginary Qualities,” in a dense paragraph Dr. Mandeville portrays their physiological mechanism: When a Man is overwhelm’d with Shame, he observes a sinking of the Spirits; the Heart feels cold and condensed, and the Blood flies from it to the Circumference of the Body; the Face glows, the Neck and Part of the Breast partake of the Fire (…) But when, gratifying his Vanity, he exults in his Pride, he discovers quite contrary Symptoms; His Spirits swell and fan 34

35 36 37 38 39

Fable I, pp. 63–64 Cf. Hobbes, Leviathan, Ch. x; Elements, i, viii, 5; Quentin Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes, Studies in Rhetoric and Politics (Cambridge: 2018), pp. 179–180; Keith Thomas, “The Social Origins of Hobbes’ Political Thought,” in, Hobbes Studies, ed. K.C. Brown (Cambridge, MA: 1965), pp. 185–236. Fable I, p. 68. Fable I, p. 64. Fable I, p. 64. Fable I, p. 68. Hundert, p. 37; Luban, 2015.

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the Arterial Blood; a more than ordinary Warmth strengthens and dilates the Heart; the Extremities are cool; he feels light to himself, and imagines he could tread on Air …40 But the operations of pride and shame do not involve any behaviour of their own. The desire of esteem is an ‘empty concept’, “is wholly indeterminate with respect to the modes of behaviour that may result from it.” “The approbata and admirata” in a given society vary in different people, different cultures, periods and classes.41 A ‘socio-historical account’ of the norms governing esteem and admiration in his time is thus a central element of Mandeville’s philosophical anthropology. The social norms that regulate publicly praised or blamed acts, words and behaviour – the contemporary codes of honour and demeanour, and their more extreme and controversial expressions – are thus not simply the occasional material for Mandeville’s anatomy of human nature, but a coherent and necessary component of his philosophical research.42 In the years when Mandeville was most likely writing the Fable of the Bees, the endemic practice of duelling between polite gentlemen once again rose to the forefront of public debate. One of the most famous and savage duels in British history took place in November 1712, when the two main participants, James Hamilton, 4th Duke of Hamilton, and Charles Mohun, 4th Baron Mohun, both died of multiple wounds. The ferocity of the sensational incident led to a public outcry and sparked a bitter dispute over the background and exact circumstances of the duel, fuelled by strong Tory suspicion that it was a political plot to assassinate the Duke, who had recently been appointed Ambassador Extraordinary to Paris, where he was expected to negotiate the peace agreement that would end the War of the Spanish Succession, favoured by the Whigs.43 The Hamilton-Mohun duel also ignited a wide, violent campaign against duelling, “the most prevailing and deeply rooted Crime that ever Nation had so generally Espoused.”44 Opponents of the duel associated it with “Atheisme, Blasphemy, Uncleannesse, (…) Strange Fashions, lewd Comedies & C: which have obtained the Credit of 40 41 42 43 44

Fable I, p. 68. Lovejoy 1961, p. 93. Luban 2015. Harry T. Dickinson, “The Mohun-Hamilton Duel: Personal Feud or Whig Plot?,” in Durham University Journal, 1965, pp. 159–65; Gilmour 1993, pp. 266–268; Peltonen 2003, pp. 189– 195, 210–11, 216. Peltonen 2003, pp. 210–211; Donna T. Andrew, Aristocratic Vice: The Attack on Duelling, Suicide, Adultery, and Gambling in Eighteenth-Century England (New Heaven: 2013); D. Defoe, The Review, n 16, April 29, 1704 (see also nr.19, 21–23) (April-May 1704).

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Gallantry, Courage, Witt & C.”45 From the 1660s onwards, religiously oriented courtesy texts argued strenuously against duelling. It was considered the most typical expression of the secular code that Christian commentators saw as responsible for much of the immorality of the modern age.46 The idea that modern honour has been reduced to the mere observance of the duelling code is a recurrent complaint. Traditional antiduelling arguments described the ‘Point of Honour’ as a “form of Wild Man-hood,” a “Chimera,” a “lunacy” to which duellists sacrifice “all that ought to be dear to them.”47 Fashionable “men of exalted pride” terrorized by shame, “who conquer the fear of Death, the violentest of all Human Passions, by that of Infamy,” ready to sacrifice their lives to avoid shame, are clearly recognisable social figures in early eighteenth century Europe.48 As Crito, George Berkeley’s spokesman in Alciphron, asserted: “I could never find that honour, considered as principle distinct from conscience, religion, reason and virtue, was more than an empty name (…) men of fashion [are] a sort of bullies in morality.”49 But the unscathed appreciation of the duel through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and its domestication in the English ideal of the gentleman shows what a key role it played in the discourse on civility and polite forms of social intercourse. “In an age wherein fame seems only to be won by the sword,” when the rapier was a characteristic component of every upper-class man’s attire, fencing was part of his education, and warlike virtues still at the heart of the male culture of honour, the duel, the public culture of resentment, was a valuable resource for those who wanted to make a dramatic display of their entitlements and show – or pretend – a certain status.50 The first decades of the eighteenth century were in fact the golden age of duelling in England. The history of legislation concerning

45 46

47 48 49 50

The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. S. De Beer, Oxford 1955, Vol. v p. 121, vol. iv pp. 401, 501. Cf. Jeremy Collier Short view of the immorality and profaneness of english stage” (1698) pp. 93, 186. J. Hales Golden Remains 1658; Clement Ellis, The Gentle Sinner, or the England’s Brave Gentleman 1660 p. 185; Ethice Christiana, or The School of Wisdom 1664 pp. 29–30; Richard Allestree, The Gentleman’s Calling 1667 p. 132 T. Pestel, Sermons and Devotions old and new, London 1658, pp. 326–328. Richard Allestree, The Gentleman’s Calling 1667 p. 132, 134; Osborne, Advice to a Son, pp. 36, 48. Bayle, Miscellaneous reflections, occasion’d by the comet which appear’d in December 1680. Chiefly tending to explode popular superstitions, London, John Morphew, 1708, vol. ii p. 331 §162. George Berkeley, Alciphron, iii dialogue, p. 58. The Art of Complaisance or the Means to oblige in conversation, London 1673, p. i, ‘To the Reader’; Peter Langford, Englishness Identified: Manners and Character, 1650–1850 (Oxford and New York: 2000), p. 150.

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duelling is in itself a testimony to its spread and success. Despite the fact that already by the end of the 16th century English magistrates agreed that duelling was to be treated under the law of voluntary manslaughter, duellists were generally charged with unpremeditated murder, a formula very close to accidental murder during a brawl (chance medley manslaughter). Between 1663 and 1720 ten different bills to tighten legislation against duelling and sending and accepting challenges were debated in the British Parliament, all of which failed to become law.51 At the opening of the parliamentary session on April 9, 1713 Queen Anne urged a legislative effort, declaring that “the impious Practice of Duelling requires some speedy and effectual remedy.”52 But the bills For Preventing of Duelling discussed in both Houses between April and June 1713 did not pass. The next one did not pass either; it was debated and rejected again between March and May 1720. John Locke’s definition of the duel notes the contradictory meanings of the duel of honour and summarises its internal tensions in an exemplary manner: The challenging and fighting with a man (…) is called Duelling: which when considered in relation to the Law of God, will deserve the name of Sin; to the Law of Fashion, in Some Countries Valour and Virtue; and to the municipal Laws of Some Government, a capital crime.53 Bernard Mandeville fully agrees with the absurdities inherent in the ideal of the fashionable English gentleman, in particular the bent for duelling: “Honour in its Figurative Sense is a Chimera without Truth or Being (…) it is only to be met with People of the better sort, as some Oranges have Kernels, and others not, tho’ the out-side be the same.”54 In great families, honour has a hereditary character, continues Mandeville “like the Gout” and a gentleman who does not feel it has only to put on a sword and he will infallibly feel all its symptoms in less than twenty-four hours.55 In order to preserve this principle, the man of honour must simply follow its rules:

51

52 53 54 55

Jeremy Horder, “The Duel and the English Law on Homicide,” in Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, xii, 1992, pp. 37–63; James F. Stephen, A History of Criminal Law in England (London: 1883), Vol. iii, p. 99; Failed Legislation 1660–1880. Extracted from the Commons and Lord Journals. Ed. by Julian Hoppit, Hambledon Press (London 1997); Donna T. Andrew, “The code of Honour and its critics: the opposition to duelling in England 1700–1850,” Social History, 5, 1988, pp. 409–434. Journal of the House of Lord, vol. xix, pp. 515–516. John Locke, Essay on Human Understanding (1690) ii, xxviii, 15; Peltonen 2003. Fable I, 198. Fable I, pp. 198–199.

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Himself is oblig’d always to be faithful to his Trust, to prefer the publick interest to his own, not to tell lies, not defraud or wrong any Body, and from others to suffer no Affront, which is a term of Art for every Action designedly done to undervalue him.56 According to Mandeville, the punctilious gentleman of early eighteenthcentury London is quite far from the chivalrous and courtly ideal that he more or less consciously imagines himself to embody. His code of behaviour seems to be exemplified only by his willingness to engage in a duel: The Men of ancient Honour, of which I reckon Don Quixote to have been the last upon Record, were very nice Observers of all these Laws, and a great many more than I have named; but the Moderns seem to be more remiss; they have a profound Veneration for the last of them (‘to suffer no Affront’, to be ready to fight a duel, Ed.) but they pay not and equal Obedience to any of the other, and whoever will but strictly comply with that I hint at, shall have abundance of Trespasses against all the rest conniv’d at.57 3

Natural and Artificial Courage

By accounting for the success and endurance of the practice of duelling and the motives that drove many of his contemporaries to engage in this highly ritualized form of violence, Mandeville developed a lengthy analysis of the passion of courage, scrutinizing its psychological structure in common with animals, its modification and function in society, and its developments in the stages of civilization. Mandeville distinguishes between natural and artificial courage, i.e. between a natural and original tendency and the forms that this passion has taken through the process stimulated by the formation of social ties. In his university dissertation Disputatio philosophica de brutorum operationibus (1689) he had endorsed Descartes’ description of animals as reflex-driven machines with no intellectual capacities. In the Fable of the Bees, the analysis of courage begins with a comparison between human and non-human animals, with Mandeville emphasising the continuity, rather than the disparities, between humans and animals, thus distancing himself from his earlier view. By presenting human beings as fundamentally closer in nature 56 57

Fable I, p. 199. Fable I, p. 199.

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to non-human animals, Mandeville emphasised the differences between his ‘experimental naturalism’ and teleological or foundational theories.58 Natural courage arises when anger overcomes the fear that man, like other higher animals, naturally feels when faced with what frustrates the fulfilment of his two primary desires: hunger and lust.59 The notion of courage as a product of the passion of anger is found in Aristotle, but the most popular formulation in Mandeville’s time was that of Hobbes, who identifies anger and ‘sudden courage’.60 Natural Courage, writes Mandeville, belongs to “Man in his Savage State; for if we examine him as a Member of a Society and a taught Animal, we shall find him quite another Creature: As soon as his Pride has room to play, and Envy, Avarice and Ambition begin to catch hold of him, he is rous’d from his natural Innocence and Stupidity.”61 Man in society can be a very dangerous animal: his appetites and needs have multiplied, and so have the opportunities to encounter obstacles in their satisfaction.62 Explicitly referring to the ‘cunning legislators’ introduced in the Enquiry into the Origin of Virtue. Mandeville uses again the metaphor of the politician. The politician is seen as a manipulator of passions, capable of shaping and disseminating new idealised images of the self in order to curb the dangerous tendencies of men in society, imposing greater social control in a situation where the desires and needs of the individual have multiplied: The first Care therefore of all Governments is by severe Punishments to curb his Anger when it does hurt, and so by increasing his Fears prevent the Mischief it might produce. (…) as the Provocations he will receive to Anger will be infinite in the civiliz’d State, so his Fears to damp it will be the same, and thus in a little time he’ll be taught by his Fears to destroy his Anger, and by Art to consult in an opposite Method the same Self-Preservation for which Nature before had furnished him with Anger, as well as the rest of his Passions.63

58 59 60 61 62 63

Simonazzi 2001, p. 19 Eugenio Lecaldano, Hume e la nascita dell’etica contemporanea (Roma-Bari: 1991), pp. 98–100; Callanan 2015; Mandeville explicitly refutes Descartes on animals in Remark P (Fable I, pp. 173–174, 181). Fable I, p. 205; Cf. Maurice M. Goldsmith, “Introduction,” to An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour and the Usefulness of Christianity in War, facsimile edition (London: 1971), pp. xii–xiii. Fable I, p. 205; Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, iii.11, [1116b 22–35]. Fable I, pp. 205–206. Fable I, p. 206. Fable I, p. 206.

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Natural courage is short-lived and difficult to control, being based on anger. Therefore, it is not only useless in civilised society, but also harmful. Society increases man’s dependence on others as well as opportunities to be shamed and angered, so fear must likewise be increased by threats of social sanctions imposed on aggressive actions towards others. But in order to defend society. the clever politician devises an “Equivalent for Courage” that will make man fight, an artificial courage, a principle of valour strong enough to overcome the fear of death.64 Sheer self-preservation, the fear of death peculiar to natural courage, gives way to artificial courage, a passion that sharpens sensitivity to the opinion of others and places social recognition above all other values. Mandeville’s argument in explaining the martial virtues of duellists does not refer exclusively to a specific rank, nor even to a particular gender; rather, in the duel Mandeville identifies a paradigmatic and extreme expression of a constant and universal mechanism of human nature. “The great Art to make Man Courageous” consists literally in inspiring individuals “with as much Horror against Shame, as Nature has given him against Death,” in stimulating those artificially instilled passions of honour and shame that motivate women to modesty and men to fight. Paraphrasing a passage from Pierre Bayle’s Miscellaneous Reflexions, and taking up the episode of the rape of the Roman matron Lucretia by Tarquin, the subject of the debate on the ‘woman question’ but also of numerous legal and religious discussions on rape and suicide, Mandeville notes that her suicide after the rape was “a certain sign that she valued her Virtue less than her Glory, and her Life less than either,” Thus, says Mandeville, her self-destruction testifies to the strength of shame in human nature: “that there are things to which Man has, or may have, a stronger Aversion than he has to Death, is evident from Suicide. He that makes Death his choice, must look upon it as less terrible than what he shuns by it”.65 In this sense chastity and courage are wholly artificial virtues: “The Courage then which is only useful to the Body Politick, and what is generally call’d true Valour, is artificial, and consists in a Superlative Horror against Shame, by Flattery infused into Men of exalted Pride.”66

64 65 66

Goldsmith 2001, p. 142. Fable I, p. 210. The whole passage on Lucretia is a paraphrase of Bayle’s Miscellaneous Reflections (1708) ii. 371–2. §180. Cf. Mercedes Maroto Camino, “My Honour I’ll Bequeath unto the Knife,” Public Heroism, Private Sacrifice and Early Modern Rapes of Lucretia, in Imagining Culture: Essays in Modern History and Literature, Jonathan Hart (ed.) (Abingdon-on-Thames: 2016), in part. pp. 95–101.

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The observations and examples that Mandeville provides about the incredible strength of artificial courage, the chameleon-like result of the effects of selfish passions, are inspired by – if not directly paraphrased from – several passages of the Miscellanous Reflexion on the Comet by Pierre Bayle.67 This is an illuminating point for assessing the relationship between Mandeville and Bayle, in particular the way in which the Dutch doctor distanced himself from an author by whom he was deeply inspired when the latter seemed to abandon the fundamental axiom of his philosophical anthropology on the human inability to escape the mechanisms of the dominant passions and instead act according to general principles. While Mandeville enthusiastically followed Bayle on the arguments about the irrationality of human behaviour and recalled Bayleian investigations aimed at demonstrating how all human actions and institution can be explained exclusively in terms of the passions, he was unwilling to follow Bayle on arguments that introduced elements unrelated to the dynamics of the passions.68 Closing his long explanation on natural and artificial courage, Mandeville returns to modern honour. “I have made this Digression chiefly to shew the Strength of human Nature, and what meer Man may perform by Pride and Constitution alone.” The artificial courage produced by vanity is therefore no less effective than the natural one: “Man may certainly be as violently rous’d by his Vanity, as a Lion is by his Anger.”69 When the notions of honour and shame “are received among society” it is not difficult to make men fight by stimulating their pride and fear of shame. The vanity of common soldiers is conquered “at the cheapest rate imaginable”: uniforms of the coarsest manufacture, decorations and blandishment are so efficacious as to make one wonder “how wretches can be so silly as to be proud of being call’d gentlemen soldiers?”70 But artificial courage too, “without any other Qualification to sweeten him (…) would be very Pernicious to the Civil Society.” In a dense paragraph Mandeville further describes the “Original of Honour,” its mythology and the advent of modern honour. The ideal of chivalric honour in Mandeville’s account moved away from the fiction of literary invention and into the historical  – albeit conjectural – reality of human nature. Mandeville attacks the ideal of modern honour by linking its roots as social behaviour to fictional and chivalric 67 68 69 70

P. Bayle, Pensées diverses écrites à un docteur de Sorbonne, à l’occasion de la comète qui parut au mois de Décembre 1680, à Rotterdam (1683). Scribano 1980, p. 27. Fable I, p. 216. Fable I, 217; Olsthoorn 2019; Irwin Primer, Mandeville on War, in Mandeville and Augustan Ideas: New Essays, ed. by C.W.A. Prior (Victoria: 2000), pp. 117–140.

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literature, but at the same time articulating its deep psychological causes and its fundamental usefulness as a social bond: Politicks therefore discovered in Men a mixt-mettle Principle, which was a Compound of Justice, Honesty and all the Moral Virtues join’d to Courage, and all that were possess’d of it turned Knights-Errant of course. They did abundance of Good throughout the World, by taming Monsters, delivering the Distress’d, and killing the Oppressors: But the Wings of all the Dragons being clipt, the Giants destroyed, and the Damsels every where set at liberty, except some few in Spain and Italy, who remain’d still captivated by their Monsters, the Order of Chivalry, to whom the Standard of Ancient Honour belonged, has been laid aside some time.71 If ancient honour was as massive and heavy as the armour of the knightserrant, Modern Honour “at the beginning of the last Century” had been melted over again with “the same Weight of Courage, half the Quantity of Honesty, and a very little Justice, but not a Scrap of any other Virtue, which has made it very easy and portable to what it was.”72After ridiculing the duel, without softening his condemnation of the absurdities of the practice and without even toning down his caustic tone, Mandeville offers a defence of the duel (in a way that in a later writing he will define as ‘ironic’) once again plundering the traditional arguments of courtesy literature.73 Mandeville defended duelling for the same reasons that Steele and Addison attacked it: duelling was the ultimate expression of the supremacy of fear of shame over other passions; of concern for the opinion of others, the desire to be well regarded. For Mandeville, good manners of aristocratic and courtly origin have a fundamental function in contemporary societies, “as to the Duelling Part which belongs to it, I pity the Unfortunate whose Lot it is” clarifies Mandeville but finds it absurd to accuse duellists of having a mistaken notion of honour, since the practice of duelling is implicit in a concept of honour based on courage: “either there is no Honour at all, or it teaches Men to resent Injuries and accept of Challenges. You may as well deny that it is the Fashion what you see every body wear, as to say that demanding and giving Satisfaction is against the Laws of true Honour.”74 Those who campaign to suppress duelling are unaware of “the Benefit the Society receives from that Fashion. Without it If every ill-bred Fellow might use what 71 72 73 74

Fable I, p. 218. Fable I, 218; Hundert 1994, p. 70. Fable II, p. 101. Fable I, p. 219.

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Language he pleas’d, without being called to an Account for it, all Conversation would be spoil’d.” “The Act it self is uncharitable” remarks Mandeville, yet “It is strange that a Nation should grudge to see perhaps half a dozen Men sacrific’d in a Twelvemonth to obtain so valuable a Blessing, as the Politeness of Manners, the Pleasure of Conversation, and the Happiness of Company in general.”75 Mandeville acknowledges that the cost of this blessing is but a brutal form of sheer homicide: The only thing of weight that can be said against modern Honour is, that it is directly opposite to Religion. The one bids you bear Injuries with Patience, the other tells you if you don’t resent them, you are not fit to live. (…) Religion plainly forbids Murther, Honour openly justifies it: Religion bids you not shed Blood upon any Account whatever: Honour bids you fight for the least Trifle: Religion is built on Humility, and Honour upon Pride: How to reconcile them must be left to wiser Heads than mine.76 The conventions that govern polite interaction, although founded solely in selfinterest, in human sensitivity to praise rather than in some external authoritative source, are fundamental and inalienable constituents of a stable society: However, such as it is, there would be no living without it in a large Nation; it is the tye of Society, and though we are beholden to our Frailties for the chief Ingredient of it, there is no Virtue, at least that I am acquainted with, that has been half so instrumental to the civilizing of Mankind, who in great Societies would soon degenerate into cruel Villains and treacherous Slaves, were Honour to be removed from among them.77 75 76 77

Another ‘classic’ theme of the tradition of civility. William Thomas, The Historie of Italie (1549); Peltonen 2003, pp. 192–3. Fable I, p. 222. Fable I, p. 215.

Chapter 4

Politeness and Virtue Cet honneur ètranger, parmi nous inconnu, N’est qu’un fantôme vain qu’on prend pour la vertu C’est l’amour de la gloire, et non de la justice la crainte du reproche, et non celle du vice Voltaire, Alzire, iv; iii

∵

In the expanded edition of The Fable of the Bees published in 1723 the fashionable rituals of polite and honourable behaviour of his contemporaries are the heart of Mandeville’s anatomy of human nature. The two new essays and the extended Remarks included in the Fable, along with the pamphlet advocating the governmental management of prostitution that Mandeville published in 1724 represent a new phase in Mandeville’s thought. In the collaboration to The Female Tatler Mandeville had outlined his theories and arguments in polemical contrast with Richard Steele and in the Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue had twisted the civic humanistic ideal of the public-spirited founding fathers into a genealogy of morals through verbal manipulation, mocking Steele’s praise of human benevolence and rationality as baby-sitter blandishments. In the 1723 edition of the Fable Mandeville defends his theories in the philosophical sphere addressing a new polemical target, the social philosophy of Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury. Chapter 4 reviews Mandeville’s anatomy of modern honour and politeness in the new writings added in 1723 and in the Modest Defence of the Publick Stews, his 1724’s pamphlet on prostitution where, along with courage, chastity also finds an explanation as an artificial virtue.

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Mandeville’s Rise to Fame

As Mandeville himself acknowledged, the 1714 edition of The Fable of the Bees “was never carpt at or publickly taken notice of.”1 His vast fame originated after 1723, with the second edition. In this volume, together with the original poem, the Enquiry on the Origin of Moral Virtue and the expanded Remarks two new essays appeared: A Search into the Nature of Society and the Essay on Charity and Charity-Schools. The latter provoked, more than the other writings, that clamour and that ‘success of scandal’ which from then onwards made Bernard Mandeville “an author unfortunately famous for his pernicious writings.” In the Essay on Charity and Charity-Schools Mandeville argues that the entire movement of the charity schools, a philanthropic enterprise associated with the Societies for the Reformation of Manners, could be explained in terms of selfish passions rather than disinterested philanthropy. The Societies for the Reformation of Manners generally operated through informants and whistleblowers, reporting to the local magistrates the transgressors of the laws against vice and immorality. Sermons were pronounced on the need to inform, promising the guarantee of anonymity and protection but frequently the informants were beaten, and their own name assumed a negative connotation. Partly discredited by the criticism of the means adopted, the Societies for the Reformation of Manners were flanked by the Societies for the Diffusion of Christian Culture, or spck (Societies for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge), supported by the high establishment of the Anglican Church. The focus of the hard task of promoting a reformation of manners shifted from the terrain of punishment to that of prevention. The Societies gradually engaged in the foundation and management of charity schools, collecting funds from the authorities and subscriptions from those from all walks of life. In the charity schools the children of the poor were taught the Christian virtue of humility and submission to their superiors and those simple tasks that would qualify the boys to be servants and apprentices and the girls to be maids. As with the whole reform movement, the charity schools originated from the concerns and fears of the propertied classes about the labouring poor.2 The project was enthusiastically sustained by the supporters of the public-spirit ideology. Richard Steele wrote in The Guardian: “I have always looked on this institution of charity-schools, which of late years has so universally prevailed through the whole nation, as the glory

1 Fable I, Vindication, p. 409. 2 Horne 1978, pp. 15–19.

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of the age we live in, and the most proper means that can be made use of to recover it out of its present degeneracy and depravation of manners.”3 Mandeville knowingly opposes the growing popular sentimental benevolence of his age in its new fashion, “the Enthusiastick Passion for CharitySchools,” with the unpleasant truth about the radical baseness of human nature and satirizes the hypocrisy of officious ‘do-good’ institutions and the alleged philanthropic motivations of its promoters. Drawing on Pierre Nicole’s analysis of the chameleon-like power of self-love to promote ostensibly charitable actions and agreeing with contemporary thinkers who emphasised the importance of employment levels as the key to national prosperity, Mandeville exposes the vested interests and appetite for praise of participants in the charity school movement by providing an ‘anatomy of charity’ as well as an examination of the place of the working poor within society.4 According to Mandeville, the virtue of charity is very often confused with the effect of a passion “call’d Pity or Compassion, which consists in a Fellow-feeling and Condolence for the Misfortunes and Calamities of others.” In order to alleviate this feeling of unease we are driven to perform charitable acts, which in the eyes of the world may appear as expressions of disinterested benevolence. Mandeville acknowledges the existence of disinterested feelings in human nature, but these feelings are secondary to self-love; and above all, it is not assumed that the exercise of a natural impulse can necessarily produce public benefits: Pity, tho’ it is the most gentle and the least mischievous of all our Passions, is yet as much a Frailty of our Nature, as Anger, Pride, or Fear. (…) as it is an Impulse of Nature, that consults neither the publick Interest nor our own Reason, it may produce Evil as well as Good. (…) whoever acts from it as a Principle, what good soever he may bring to the Society, has nothing to boast of but that he has indulged a Passion that has happened to be beneficial to the Publick.5 In these pages appears the vivid and oft-quoted passage describing the “horrid Banquet” of a mad sow devouring a baby, with “the filthy Snout digging in the yet living Entrails (…) the smoaking Blood” and the noise of the “Crackling of the Bones.”6 Such a scene would provoke a genuine feeling of pity in any human being: “There would be no need of Virtue or Self-Denial to be moved 3 4 5 6

Richard Steele, The Guardian 105 (Saturday, July 11, 1713). Fable I (1723), p. 268. Fable I (1723), p. 254, p. 42. Fable I (1723), p. 255.

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at such a Scene (…) an highwayman, an house-breaker, or a murderer could feel anxieties on such an occasion.”7 Jean-Jacques Rousseau explicitly refers to this passage to claim that pity, “the sole Natural virtue that the most excessive Detractor of human nature was forced to recognize,” cannot be explained by self-interest.8 But for Mandeville, acting out of pity is a way of preventing a pain “which Self-preservation compell’d us to prevent”.9 In this sense, while public acts of charity take on the appearance of virtue, its private essence is piety, a relentlessly selfish maintenance of ease.10 The education of poor children beyond their need and above their station provided by the charity schools, originated by the desire of some zealous gentleman to stand out for altruism is not a social remedy against the spread of crime. There is no direct relationship, Mandeville argues, between ignorance and crime, rather a complex series of factors, and it is a mistaken supposition that religion could be promoted by knowledge. For the good functioning of a vast and prosperous commercial society, it is essential that the class of labouring poor be numerous, and their members not encouraged, by an unnecessary education incongruous to their position, to desire advancement on the social ladder.11 A mass of hard-working and ignorant poor is a necessary ingredient for a rich and powerful society.12 The attack on the beliefs and values most appreciated in the society in which he lived provoked the reaction of the authorities against Mandeville. In the summer of 1723 the Middlesex County Grand Jury, responsible for the jurisdiction of the London area, denounced The Fable of the Bees as a book that openly: “propagate[s] Infidelity, and consequently Corruption of all Morals, and that recommend[s] ‘Luxury, Avarice, Pride, and all kind of Vices, as being necessary to Publick Welfare, and not tending to the Destruction of the Constitution.”13 The complaint was taken up by various newspapers.14 On July 23, 1723, the London Journal published a letter to Lord C. signed Theophilus Philo-Britannicus. Mandeville replied in the same newspaper on August 10, 1723, arguing that the interpretations of the Fable of the Bees offered in the Middlesex Grand Jury indictment and in the letter were insulting, dishonest 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Fable I (1723), p. 256. Jean Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (London: 1984) pp. 89–100– Force 2003, pp. 14–17. Fable I, (1723), p. 56. Jonathan Brody Kramnick, “Unwilling to be Short or Plain, in any thing concerning Gain.” The Eighteenth Century 33, no. 2 (1992): 148–75. Hundert 1994, pp. 192–197. Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (Oxford: 1998), p. 133. Fable I (1723), pp. 384–385. Matteo Revolti, “Bees on paper: the British press reads the Fable,” in Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics, 9, 1, 2016, pp. 124–141.

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and deliberately distorted. Mandeville challenged his readers to find in his book the slightest pretext for accusations of blasphemy and immorality and pledged to burn the book himself at the stake if such accusations proved true. The letter, the text of the accusation and Mandeville’s reply appeared in print in all editions of the Fable of the Bees after 1724 with the title: A Vindication of the Book, from the Aspersions Contain’d in a Presentment of the Grand Jury of Middlesex and An Abusive Letter to Lord C. In the years immediately following the publication of the enlarged edition of The Fable of the Bees in 1723 a great number of printed attacks upon the text and its author appeared: William Law, John Dennis, Richard Fiddes, John Thorold, George Bluet, Francis Hutcheson, Archibald Campbell, are only the first of a long series of adversaries and denigrators who contested the ambiguity of language, the mean depiction of human nature and accused Mandeville of being committed to spreading vice and immorality. For his critics, the Dutch doctor is a novel Hobbes, the enemy of virtue, the theorist of selfishness to oppose and refute, an obligatory polemical reference point for all those dealing with morals and religion. The author of the Fable of the Bees was represented as a dangerous atheist and libertine and accused of having denied the existence of moral distinctions and their foundation in religion. Calmer critics rebuked him for his linguistic ambiguity and his incorrect evaluation of the social and economic consequences of the practice of vice and luxury. Within months, Mandeville gained immense fame and became one of the most popular men of his time. Accusations proliferated and Mandeville was portrayed as an envoy of the devil, a man sent to earth to spread evil.15 A biographical dictionary of the end of the century reported an episode in which Mandeville offended a clergyman with his rudeness and lack of decorum of his language, and the man replied that his name reflected his character, “Man-deville, or a devil of a man.”16 Benjamin Franklin, in London in 1724, met Doctor Mandeville in a pale Ale house in Cheapside and in his autobiography, unlike the gloomy images of the creepy reprobate advanced by his detractors, remembers him as a pleasant, cheerful and witty interlocutor. It is the only known direct testimony on Bernard Mandeville’s personal character.17

15 16 17

W. Law, Remarks upon a Late Book, Entituled, the Fable of the Bees, London, 1724, p. 87. J.W. Newman, Lounger’s Commonplace Book, cit., pp. 307 and fwd. Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography and Other Writings on Politics, Economics, and Virtue, Cambridge, 2004, p. 35.

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Hypocrisy and Self-Deception

The 1723 edition of the Fable of the Bees, along with the expanded Remarks and the Essay on charity and on Charity Schools, also contained the essay An Inquiry into the Nature of Society. In this work Mandeville advances his perspective on human nature in polemical opposition to the philosophy of natural sociability advanced by Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, in his Characteristick of Men, Manners and Opinion of the Times, (published in 1711 and reprinted in 1723), a polemical focus that would become a constant in his later writings. Mandeville had previously praised Shaftesbury as “one of the most polite authors of the age” in a work that he had published in 1720: Free Thoughts on Religion, the Church and the National Happiness, agreeing with the third Earl’s defence of limited monarchy against fanaticism and the political pretexts of Tory and Jacobite clergymen.18 The denunciation of corrupt practices of the clergy through the centuries on which Mandeville grounds his defence of toleration and of the necessity of the independence of political power from the intervention of ecclesiastical hierarchies is developed through a ferocious anticlerical polemic, whose examples are almost entirely paraphrased, when not simply translations, of entire pages of the Dictionary Historical and Critical by Pierre Bayle. In the preface Mandeville acknowledged his extensive borrowing from Bayle but neglected to disclose a parallel exploitation of Shaftesbury’s major text.19 A Search into the Nature of Society opens with the remark that “the Generality of Moralists and Philosophers have hitherto agreed that there could be no Virtue without Self-denial (…) a late Author, who is now much read by Men of Sense, is of a contrary Opinion.” The Earl of Shaftesbury is introduced as a direct and symmetrical antagonist to Mandeville’s philosophical anthropology: “The attentive Reader, who perused the foregoing part of this Book, will soon perceive that two Systems cannot be more opposite than his Lordship’s 18 19

Hundert 1994, p. 122; Irwin Primer, “Mandeville and Shaftesbury: Some Facts and Problems,” in Mandeville Studies, ed. I. Primer (Den Haag: 1975), pp. 126–41. Primer, Irwin. 2001. “Introduction”, in Bernard Mandeville, Free thoughts on religion, the Church & National happiness, ed. Irwin Primer, i–xxxv. (New Brunswick: 2001). In the Free Thoughts Mandeville assumes the stand of a sincere defender of Anglican orthodoxy against the attacks of both fanatics and deist rationalism in its many facets. His declared support for the Church of England, ‘if Mandeville is not mad or naive’ is one of the possible ironies of book, noted a modern scholar and it is very likely that it represents a ‘protective device’ that would allow him to criticize all institutional churches and their clergy. See G. Schocet, “Mandeville’s Free Thoughts and the Eighteenth-Century debate on toleration and the English Constitution,” in Mandeville and Augustan Ideas: New Essays, ed. by C.W.A. Prior, Victoria els, 2000; pp. 35–49.

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and mine.”20 The opposition with which Mandeville defines his theories in contrast to Shaftesbury concerns the question of sociability, and the qualities that make human beings capable of living in society. According to Shaftesbury, writes Mandeville, man is naturally endowed with a tender feeling of affection for the whole of which he is part and with an inclination to seek the welfare of the society of which he is a member. Shaftesbury believes that virtue and vice are permanent realities and that they are the same in all times and places and “imagines that a Man of sound Understanding, by following the Rules of good Sense, may not only find out that Pulchrum & Honestum both in Morality and the Works of Art and Nature, but likewise govern himself by his Reason with as much Ease and Readiness as a good Rider manages a well-taught Horse by the Bridle.”21 Against Shaftesbury’s ethical realism, Mandeville combined aesthetic and moral judgements, emphasising the relativity of both. Human desires and customs are in a profound sense historically constructed. Social rituals are much more the product of culture than of nature.22 Even our idea of natural beauty “varies according to the different Tastes of Nations and Ages” and “in Morals there no greater certainty”.23 It is the effect of custom and habit that makes what is often only the result of whim appear natural. For the Dutch physician, “the Sociableness of Man arises only from these Two things, viz. The multiplicity of his Desires, and the continual Opposition he meets with in his Endeavours to gratify them.”24 Man is not endowed with an innate feeling of sociability towards his fellows, which, even if admitted, would still lack the explanatory power to justify many aspects of social interaction. According to Mandeville, in order to explain the origin and functioning of society, there is no need to bring into play social feelings, let alone ideas about virtues and vices, but it is sufficient to observe the domestication of originally antagonistic passions into forms of competition compatible with social coexistence. Societies are not founded on “the Amiable Virtues and Loving Qualities of Man, but on the contrary (…) all of them must have had their Origin from his Wants, his Imperfections, and the variety of his Appetites (…) the more their Pride and Vanity are display’d and all their Desires enlarg’d, the more capable they must be of being rais’d into large and vastly numerous Societies.”25 Concurring with those authors who emphasized the component of self-satisfaction and hypocrisy implicit in the code of good manners as a technique of social relations 20 21 22 23 24 25

Fable I (1723), pp. 323–324. Fable I (1723), p. 324. Luban 2015, pp. 16–17. Fable I (1723), pp. 328, 338. Fable I, p. 344. Fable I (1723), p. 346.

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Mandeville had denounced Richard Steele’s attempts to discipline and moralize modern honour as a fallacious construction, an example of the hypocrisy required of people for whom a philosophy of manners had become the effective substitute for a coherent moral theory. Many originally French treatises on civility endorsed the values of flattery, complaisance and outward politeness, and the image of the courtier as a hypocritical flatterer was already a well-established theme in European literature.26 “The very essence of politeness seems to be to take care that by our words and actions we make other people pleased with us as well as with themselves” wrote La Bruyère.27 Hobbes had made of complaisance, “that every man strive to account himselfe with the rest,” the fifth law of nature. Locke argued that good breeding lies in two things: “first, a disposition of the mind not to offend others; and, secondly, the most acceptable and agreeable way of expressing that disposition. From the one, men are called civil; from the other, well-fashioned.”28 Locke also warned against ‘affectation’, which although characterized by the “laudable aim of pleasing, always misses it”; being ultimately “an awkward and forced imitation of what should be genuine and easy, wanting the beauty that accompanies what is natural.”29 The contrast between formal affected behaviour on the one hand, and natural and simple behaviour on the other, is one of the key themes in Addison and Steele’s periodical literature, part of their effort to check mere outward politeness and egoism in favour of genuine sociability, simplicity and openness in manners, and to promote a solid relationship between virtue and politeness, where the latter is ultimately grounded in the benevolent disposition of the mind.30 In the first issue of The Tatler, Steele had stated, as his general purpose, “to expose the false arts of life, to pull off the disguises of cunning, vanity, and affectation, and recommend a general simplicity in our dress, our discourse, and our behaviour.’31 By the 1720s The Tatler and The Spectator “had already begun to recede into the mists of literary and journalistic history” while “Shaftesbury’s posthumous reputation was at its zenith.”32 From the early satires on the fashionable man of honour with his propensity to draw 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

Rosario Villari, Elogio della dissimulazione. La lotta politica nel Seicento (Roma-Bari: 2003); Bryson 1998, p. 203; Peltonen 2003, p. 224. La Bruyère, Characters (p. 386) Markku Peltonen, “Politeness and Whiggism, 1688–1732,” in The Historical Journal, 48, 2, 2005, pp. 391–414. Hobbes Leviathan Ch. xxi, John Locke. Some thoughts concerning education § 143. Locke, Some thoughts concerning education, § 66. Spiros Tegos, “Adam Smith on the Addisonian and Courtly Origins of Politeness,” Revue Internationale De Philosophie 68, no. 269 (3) (2014): 317–42. The Tatler 1, Dedication. Cf. Peltonen 2005. Cfr. The Spectator, No. 280 Monday, January 21, 1712. Hundert 1994, p. 118.

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his sword and the explanation of martial virtues in terms of ‘artificial courage’, ultimately the fear of shame, Mandeville’s anatomy of human nature develops into an articulate and broader attack on the whole conception of politeness that he sees sketched out by Steele and Addison and raised into a coherent system, worthy of an articulate response, by Shaftesbury. And choosing the third Earl, the most esteemed moralist of his generation, as a polemical target, is for Mandeville a way to elevating his anatomy of honour and politeness and his conception of moral sense as a form of hypocrisy and self-deception in the arena of philosophical debate.33 For Mandeville, Shaftesbury and their audience the term politeness became the key model of honourable behaviour; it encapsulated the key elements of the identity of a gentleman. Politeness is a philosophy, a life system, a complete system of conduct. In a period of decline of the Court and the Church as centres of cultural and ideological production, and at a time when the Glorious Revolution had definitively established the dominance of gentlemen in English society and political life, the language of manners became not only a political language to be complemented with that of civic virtue to justify and defend the new financial institutions and government interests, or simply a code regulating the ‘etiquette’ of public life, but a strong cultural model, a new way to reformulate the ideal of respectability in an era experienced and perceived as new.34 The goal Shaftesbury set for his Characteristicks was “to recommend morals on the same foot, with what in a lower sense is call’d Manners; and to advance philosophy (as harsh a Subject as it may appear) on the very Foundation of what is call’d agreeable and polite”.35 Shaftesbury conceived philosophy as an educational and civilizing enterprise, in which the attitude to the scrutiny of moral dilemmas was combined with the trust in the socializing force and in the common standard of the taste of good manners: “To philosophize, in a just Signification, is but to carry Good-breeding a step higher. For the Accomplishment of Breeding is, To learn whatever is decent in Company, or beautiful in Arts; and the Sum of

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35

Paul Sagar, The Opinion of Mankind Sociability and the Theory of the State from Hobbes to Smith (Princeton: 2018), pp. 42–44. Lawrence E. Klein, The Rise of Politeness in England, 1660–1715, unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, The John Hopkins University, 1983; (University Microfilm, Ann Arbor 1985); “Liberty, Manners and Politeness in Early Eighteenth-Century England,” in Historical Journal, 32, 3, (1989) pp. 584–585; Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness. Moral discourse and cultural politics in early eighteenth-century England (Cambridge: 1994); Pocock 1985, Phillipson 1994; Francesconi 1998; Peltonen 2005. Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinion, Times; (Misc. iii, ii, i; e iii, ii, ii) ed. by L. Klein (Cambridge: 1999). p. 408.

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Philosophy is, To learn what is just in Society, and beautiful in Nature, and the Order of the World.”36 The ‘greatest Fault’ that Mandeville unearths in Shaftesbury’s philosophy is the idea that men may be naturally virtuous, “without any Trouble or Violence upon Themselves.” For Mandeville, the central flaw in Shaftesbury’s philosophy is that in lowering the bar of virtue, in imagining it at hand, it opens the door to self-delusion. “The imaginary Notions that Men may be Virtuous without Self-denial are a vast Inlet to Hypocrisy, which being once made habitual, we must not only deceive others, but likewise become altogether unknown to our selves.”37 Human beings, primarily concerned with themselves and averse to the expression of selfishness in others, have developed the practice of hiding their natural inclinations. Driven by the desire to praise and aversion to shame – and not by a rational ambition of being good – they are led to sincerely imagine that their fine manners are synonymous with virtuous conduct: “we are ever pushing our Reason which way soever we feel Passion to draw it, and Self-love pleads to all human Creatures for their different Views, still furnishing every individual with Arguments to justify their Inclinations.”38 Mandeville had introduced his ‘rigoristic’ definition of virtue as a total control of passions in the Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue, in the first edition of the Fable, outlining consequently only two alternatives as regards the path to virtue: either indulging or conquering our passions. In the 1723 addition to the Remark T Mandeville presented a further distinction, between those actions motivated by: “a Victory over the Passions, and those that are only the result of a Conquest which one Passion obtains over another; that is, between Real, and Counterfeited Virtue.”39 Politeness, as a matter of fact, presupposes an education to hypocrisy. Representing polite manners as by definition hypocritical and governed by flattery and complaisance Mandeville made use again of an issue at the heart of the entire tradition of theatrical civility and politeness, which viewed good manners as an outward expression of one’s own – literally – good breeding, and contrasted good manners as a technique of social relationships without any moral implication, agreeing with La Rochefoucauld, Nicole, Esprit and other earlier critics of the ‘Comedy of Manners.’40 “A Man need not conquer his Passions, it is sufficient that he conceals them. Virtue bids

36 37 38 39 40

Characteristics, pp. 407–408. Fable I (1723), pp. 323 and 331. Cf. Douglass, 2020a, p. 9. Fable I (1723), p. 333, Primer 1991. Fable I (1723), p. 230. Peltonen 2003, pp. 281–284; Bryson 1998; Klein 1983.

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us subdue, but good Breeding only requires we should hide our Appetites.”41 The fact that “if there are Seven or Eight Apples or Peaches among Six People of Ceremony,” Mandeville explains, the person who is offered to choose first will always take that one that “a Child would know to be the worst,” to  – allegedly – exhibit his concern for others, it to be read not an expression of inner benevolence, but, as a matter of fact, a “Fashionable Habit, acquir’d by Precept and Example, of flattering the Pride and Selfishness of others, and concealing our own with Judgment and Dexterity,” and this “Modish Deceit” is “commonly known by the name of Manners and Good-breeding.”42 The most formal politeness rested on exactly the same tame passions as the most seemingly genuine behaviour. For Mandeville there is no difference between affectation, posturing, foppery and courtesanship and an apparent standard of unaffected civility seemingly linked to virtue in close relation to the inner self: “It is Shame and Education that contains the Seeds of all Politeness, and he that has neither, and offers to speak the Truth of his Heart, and what he feels within, is the most contemptible Creature upon Earth, tho’ he committed no other Fault.”43 Living in society for Mandeville means learning the techniques for masking and hiding one’s selfish attitude, which alone allow for prolonged and constructive interaction between praise-seeking individuals: “since we cannot prevent the Ideas that are continually arising within us, all Civil Commerce would be lost, if by Art and prudent Dissimulation we had not learn’d to hide and stifle them; (…) In all Civil Societies Men are taught insensibly to be Hypocrites from their Cradle.”44 Hypocrisy and self-deception, together with the idealised view humans have of themselves, are key elements in Mandeville’s theory of sociability. Individuals conform to social norms out of pride-based reasons. They perform socially beneficial acts from selfcentred motives and such performances are commonly mistaken for ‘real’ virtue. Human beings only ever practice ‘counterfeited’ virtue, but they delude themselves that it is real. Yet, in order to live in society they need to believe themselves to be better than they are, to think of themselves as rational beings, capable of ‘rational self-management’, in other words, they need to share false beliefs about themselves and their motives.45 In this sense, for the Dutch physician and philosopher, shame is a necessary ingredient of sociability: “it is a Frailty in our Nature; all the World, whenever it affects them, submit to it with 41 42 43 44 45

Fable I (1723), p. 73. Fable I, p. 77. Fable I (1723), p. 73. Fable I (1723), p. 349. Douglass 2020a p. 10.

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Regret, and would prevent it if they could; yet the Happiness of Conversation depends upon it, and no Society could be polish’d, if the Generality of Mankind were not subject to it.”46 In summarizing the content of whole of The Fable of the Bees Irwin Primer identified “two separate but related inquiries,” on the one hand a elucidation of the particular subtitle, how societies benefits from the vices and crimes of its members, the multifarious ways in which private vices are liable to be turned into collective benefits; and on the other, an analysis of the operation of passions as a ‘reader of disguised human motives’.47 With a similar and parallel distinction, Daniel Luban has argued for an unresolved tension in Mandeville’s thought between his philosophical sources and his ‘empirical subject matter’ between ‘moralism’ and ‘materialism’, a contrast between his view of human beings as primarily ‘esteem-seekers’ and as ‘sensuous utility maximisers’.48 It is not the purpose of this book to examine Mandeville’s views on ‘economic’ matters. No one doubts that Mandeville ‘discovered’ the division of labour, defended luxurious consumption and, most important of all for economic historians, expressed the view that the pursuit of individual selfinterest can be beneficial to society.49 Yet, Mandeville never wrote explicitly about economic issues and his arguments concerning trade, luxury and wealth are part of a wider examination, his psychological analysis of self-love. The desire for wealth itself is a ‘declination’ of pride, a form of esteem-seeking and Mandeville’s anatomy of the hidden working of pride and shame applies not only to market relations but to social interaction more broadly.50 The bulky dominance of the ‘economic’ reading of Mandeville’s works has also had the side effect of viewing his account of civility and politeness as entirely oriented towards commercial relations, in sharp contrast to the aristocratic world of courtly manners. Sociability for Mandeville has been interpreted as commercial sociability, whose world of luxury, fashion and consumption; of private vices and public benefits was far removed from courtly tradition of politeness.51 On the contrary, as Markku Peltonen’s important contribution to Mandeville studies assessed, “the entire theory of politeness far from being antithetical

46 47 48 49 50 51

Fable I, pp. 68. Primer, 1991. Luban, 2015. Renee Prendergast, “Bernard Mandeville and the doctrine of laissez-faire,” Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics. 9, 2016, pp. 101–123. Simonazzi 2011, pp. 109–128; Robin Douglass, “Bernard Mandeville on the Use and Abuse of Hypocrisy.” Political Studies, December 2020. Peltonen 2003 pp. 266 and 298–300; Hundert 1994 pp. 34, 73–74.

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to the commercial world, made it in fact possible.”52 In his philosophical anthropology of men and women of honour Mandeville relied on the early literature of courtesy and civility, endorsing a well-establish tradition of theatrical politeness, which posited the essentially hypocritical nature of good manners: “Luxury and Politeness ever grew up together, and were never enjoy’d asunder.”53 Commerce, luxury, politeness and the point of honour are all part of the same historical process, all based on the same interest for “greatest Sollicitude, to outward Appearance,” ultimately grounded in pride, or more precisely, in self-liking. As Mandeville had remarked in The Female Tatler, graphically connecting four key concepts in a single sentence: “the strict Observance of the point of Honour, is a necessary Evil, and a large Nation can no more be call’d Polite without it, than it can be Rich and Flourishing without Pride or Luxury.”54 Courtly manners and traditions, rather than being alternative to the manners of commercial society played a decisive role in the progress of polite sociability. Even the small and frugal courts were “stately Academies of all manner of Pleasure and Diversions, where Men learn to excite, as well as to indulge their Appetites, and all the Passions and Sensations are refin’d upon.”55 In Mandeville’s account of politeness “sociability regarded theatrical civility which in turn depended on the theory of honour and duelling.”56 3

The Ticklish Foundation of Female Virtue

Most of the revisions and the addenda to the Remarks in the 1723 edition of The Fable of the Bees are concerned with women. Targeting Shaftesbury’s conception of man’s natural sociability as grounded in natural feelings, Mandeville further develops his analysis of ‘artificial’ values, and, together with duelling and male artificial courage, the theme of female honour becomes the illustrative focus for his arguments about nature and virtue.57 In the lengthy expansion to Remark C on the effects, the force and the function of the passion of shame, Mandeville details how “the Greediness we have after the Esteem of others, and the Raptures we enjoy in the Thoughts of being liked” are a consistent reward for the taming of our strongest passions, and “consequently keep us at a great Distance from all such Words or Actions that can bring Shame 52 53 54 55 56 57

Peltonen 2003 p. 299. Fable II, p. 156. The Female Tatler 52 (November 4, 1709). Free Thoughts, p. 337. Peltonen 2003, p. 299. O’Brien 2009, pp. 21–25.

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upon us.”58 The kind of modesty that has “a pretension of chastity as its object,” consists in a sincere and painful effort to stifle and conceal before others that inclination which nature has given to us to propagate our species. “The Lessons of it, like those of Grammar, are taught us long before we have occasion for, or understand the Usefulness of them.”59 Women are not naturally ashamed of their sexuality, and the blush on the cheeks of a “Virtuous Young Woman” concerning sexual matters, argues Mandeville, disappears when “she is sure she is undiscover’d.”60 In Mandeville’s view, ideals of virtue are not the product of nature or reason but the results of politics, culture and of the strict sexual education imposed on women and men by exploiting their sense of shame. The rules of modesty enacted upon women entails avoiding unfashionable denudation (varying according to times and places) and a strict control of their language and their gestures. By simply observing the behaviour of adult women, girls apprehend caution in covering themselves before boys, “and the same Caution being inculcated to her by Precept, as well as Example, it is very probable that at Six she’ll be ashamed of shewing her Leg, without knowing any Reason why such an Act is blameable, or what the Tendency of it is.”61 For men it is different. Mandeville follows and pillages Pierre Bayle’s articulated commentary on women but disagrees with Bayle’s claim that women are by nature more lustful than men.62 While education equally trains all members of polite society to control and repress their sexual impulses to a greater degree than they otherwise might, women are forced to exercise an even stronger selfcommand. Simply because man’s sexual appetite “is more violent and ungovernable,” and therefore men are believed to be unable to follow the norms of modesty easily, they “may take greater liberty”; while women must carry a heavier social burden.63 Human beings are so successfully trained to feel shame that the distinction between lustful men and chaste women appears a wholly natural difference, rather than socially determined: “The Multitude will hardly believe the excessive Force of Education, and in the Difference of Modesty between Men and Women ascribe that to Nature what is altogether owing to early Instruction,” and it is remarkable, comments Mandeville “that the most polish’d and best instructed are generally the most ignorant as to this Affair.”64 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

Fable I (1723), p. 68. Fable I (1723), p. 69. Fable I (1723), p. 65. Fable I (1723), p. 69. Bayle, Miscellaneous Reflections clxii, clxiil. Fable I, (1723) pp. 70–71. Fable I, (1723) pp. 68–69; p. 143.

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The taming by education of the natural impulses of lust represents for Mandeville a paradigmatic example of the modification of passions in society, of the “Difference between Man in the wild State of Nature and the same Creature in Civil Society.”65 In society, “where the Rules of Religion, Law and Decency, are to be follow’d, and obey’d before any Dictates of Nature, the Youth of both Sexes are to be arm’d and fortify’d against this Impulse, and from their Infancy artfully frighten’d from the most remote Approaches of it.”66 But this situation rouses deep and tragic implications for women. The ‘double standard’ allows men to pursue sexual gratification without much fear of public disapproval, but women are left to defend their reputation of chastity against social censure: “it is the Interest of the Society to preserve Decency and Politeness; that Women should linger, waste, and die, rather than relieve themselves in an unlawful manner.”67 “Because impudence is a Vice it does not follow that Modesty is Virtue – it is built upon Shame, a Passion in our nature, and it may be either good or bad, according to the Action performed to that motive” remarks Mandeville, opening a reflection on the ultimate consequences of the demands of the artificial virtue of chastity, that is on abortion and infanticide.68 Pierre Bayle, both in the Dictionary and in the Miscellaneous Reflections had showed an intense interest in sexual morality, assuming, according to various commentators, an exceptionally open minded view of women. In his Dictionary article, on the literary works of Guy Patin (1601–1672) the French physician and professor of medicine at the College Royale, particularly concerning Patin’s description of Paris as “infected with an horrible corruption,” Bayle had addressed the issue of abortion and infanticide (avoiding clarifying the question of whether he considers them morally identical).69 Since the ordinances of Henry ii in 1557, explained Bayle, women who obtained abortions have been punished more severely than any other criminals. The fear of public opinion acted on them with more force than their conscience, or the fear of legal punishment. In this sense social sanctions are much more effective than religion, since abortion is much rarer where female chastity is less valued. Comparing the power of conscience with the point of honour, the ineffectiveness of the first over the latter, Bayle argued that the “ideas of the point of honour are the strongest bank which stop the torrent of incontinence (…) If religion had more power on women than the point of honour, would there be 65 66 67 68 69

Fable I (1723), p. 143. Fable I (1723), p. 143. Fable I (1723), p. 144. See Nacol 2015. Fable I (1723) p. 73. Wootton 1997, p. 214.

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so many found that stifle their children?” Practising infanticide women act in contempt of God, and in spite of their religion, because “they will not lose their share in human honour.”70 Bayle’s discussion of abortion is finely balanced between recommending that it be treated as a crime, and arguing that, certain illegitimate pregnancies and perhaps even abortion should be treated with less severity. The double standard which valorises female chastity is primarily responsible for infanticide.71 Mandeville, as in The Virgin Unmask’d, sketches a scene of life, a story to exemplify the social effects of the double standard and to explain, from a woman’s point of view, the dynamics that lead to abortion and infanticide. “People of Substance” may Sin without being noticed, but servants and poor women have seldom the opportunity of concealing a “Big Belly.” An unfortunate girl of good birth, “left destitute” and forced to work as a chambermaid, may preserve her chastity for years, “and yet at last meet with an unhappy Moment in which she gives up her Honour to a Powerful Deceiver, who afterwards neglects her.” Women like her, observes Mandeville, are so overwhelmed by social insistence upon female chastity, and by the fear of public blame, that they are likely to risk committing abortion and infanticide. “The more violently the dread of coming to Shame hurries her away, the more Wicked and more Cruel her Resolutions will be, either against her self or what she bears.”72 The counterfactual evidence that chastity is an artificial virtue proper of civil society is to be found in the fact that “Common Whores (…) hardly ever destroy their Children (…) not because they are less Cruel or more Virtuous, but because they have lost their Modesty to a greater degree, and the fear of Shame makes hardly any Impression upon them.”73 The case of modesty concerning lust is an emblematic example of the process of civilization and its dynamics also under another point of view. To refer to the development of customs and practices that channel human impulses into forms compatible with the social intercourse of civil society, Mandeville again refers to the myth of the ‘Politicians’ who by exploiting the idea of human superiority over other animals and rewarding individual self-control with praise established social norms. The ‘Artful moralists’ managed the natural appetites to the mutual advantage of all, “playing our Passions against one another” and leading us to develop a “superlative Dread and mortal Aversion against Shame” 70

71 72 73

Scribano 1981, pp. 186–220; Wootton 1997; Maria-Cristina Pitassi, “Entre libido et savoir: les images de la femme chez Bayle”; and Anthony Mc Kenna, “Pierre Bayle: moralisme et anthropologie,” both in Pierre Bayle dans la république des lettres, ed. by A. McKenna, A. & G. Paganini (Paris: 2004), pp. 307–319 and pp. 321–347. Wootton 1997, pp. 215–216. Fable I (1723), p. 75. Fable I (1723), p. 75. Cf. Fable II, 227–228.

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and to learn to subdue, conceal and disguise “our darling Passion, Lust” to the point of being almost unable to recognize it as such when we feel it. In this particular passage, the ‘skilful politicians’ have not just an obviously metaphorical meaning referring to an evolutionary progress of sentiments of pride and shame – as it is evident by the clearly super-human task attributed to them – but they are again exploited to make fun of the ‘public-spirited’: Oh! the mighty Prize we have in view for all our Self-denial! can any Man be so serious as to abstain from Laughter, when he considers that for so much deceit and insincerity practis’d upon our selves as well as others, we have no other Recompense than the vain Satisfaction of making our Species appear more exalted and remote from that of other Animals, than it really is; and we in our Consciences know it to be?74 Among other accusations The Predicament of the Middlesex Grand Jury condemned the author of The Fable of the Bees for the “apology of the very Stews themselves (…) with the Design to debauch the Nation.”75 Mandeville’s response seems to have been to expand the argument into an independent publication. The defence of the practice of prostitution and the observations on its function that Mandeville advances in the Remark H of the Fable and in the Modest Defence of the Public Stews, published in 1724 have been pointed at as the “fullest technical account of how vice may lead to public benefits,” and Mandeville himself is well aware and exploits the paradoxical force of the issue. Commenting the lines of the original poem on “Parties directly opposite, Assist each other, as ’twere for Spight”; in the Fable Mandeville rhetorically asked: “Who would imagine, that Virtuous Women, unknowingly, should be instrumental in promoting the Advantage of Prostitutes? Or (what still seems the greater Paradox) that Incontinence should be made serviceable to the Preservation of Chastity? and yet nothing is more true.”76 In the following pages of the Remark H of The Fable of the Bees Mandeville illustrated the multiple advantages of state-regulated prostitution: if the state would allow men to take advantage of “Courtezans and Strumpets,” England could then preserve the virtue of its honest women. This view of prostitution as a necessary evil and a bulwark for the morals of the rest of society goes back a long time before Mandeville: “Remove prostitutes from human affairs,

74 75 76

Fable I (1723), p. 145. Fable I (1723), pp. 95 and 385. Hundert 1994 p. 216; Fable I (1723), pp. 94–95.

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and you would pollute the world with lust,” warned Augustine of Hippo.77 In the Miscellaneous Reflections Bayle reported that courtesans in Italy are so respected to “compose a Body in the State,” and the “cogent Argument” by which the Italians explain their attitude of toleration is: “To prevent a worse Evil, an Impurity of a more execrable Kind, and to provide for the safety of Women of Honour.”78 Mandeville literally copied in the Remark H the whole paragraph, (kindly acknowledging his debt to ‘Monsieur Bayle’) and presented with approval the case of Amsterdam, where brothels are permitted in somehow separated areas, and ‘good Rules and strict Discipline’ are observed in these “Markets of Love.”79 A Modest Defence of the Publick Stews appeared in 1724. The essay is dedicated to the “Gentlemen of the Societies,” and the subject is at first developed as a criticism to the repressive method used by the Societies for the Reformation of Manners to combat prostitution, with a style that parodies and lampoons the Reformers and makes of the text a form of literary satire.80 To supplant the repressive methods of the Societies for the Reformation of Manners Mandeville proposes to control prostitution by opening public brothels thus providing, from a Private Vice a conspicuous set of Publick Benefits: better hygiene, medical supervision, control of venereal diseases, health insurance for prostitutes; and also, when there is well-organized sex for hire, men would spend less of their time undermining the chastity of their female peers. It is a dense and complex pamphlet. Is the entire work an elaborate irony? The opposition between social advantages and moral evaluations, between ‘Private Vices’ and ‘Publick Benefits’ is traced here more explicitly than in other works. Mandeville wore at the same time the mask of the cynical satirist and that of the wise lawmaker and social reformer. Ironical or not, it is a text on the best means to channel male lust into a social profit, where Mandeville presents a detailed ‘anatomy of chastity’, an explanation of how chastity developed into an artificial virtue. Departing from “the Constitution of Female while in the State of Innocence,” a sort of state of nature in the development of chastity, Mandeville elaborates a detailed description of the anatomy of female genital organs and on the physiology of women’s sexual excitement, basically arguing in favour of a structural equivalence of male and female genitals. Mandeville does not 77 78 79 80

Augustine of Hippo, De Ordine, ii, 4. Pierre Bayle, Misc, § 165, Vol. 2, p. 335. Nacol 2015, pp. 80–81. A Modest Defence of the Publick Stews, (1724) Facsimile reprint, Los Angeles 1973, Dedication p. 1. Cf. Dario Castiglione, “I piedi del pavone. Ragionamento sopra una satira cinica,” appendix to the italian translation of the Modest Defence: Modesta Difesa delle Pubbliche Case di Piacere (Palermo: 1989).

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believe that sexual desire is weaker in women than in men. If desire were not so fairly easily excited, neither men nor women could perform their normal sexual function. Mandeville refers to “our late Discoveries, in Anatomy,” which can “find out no other Use for the Clitoris, a perfect copy of the Penis, ‘tho in Miniature” but to stimulate female desire “with its frequent erections.”81 In the sixteenth-century the clitoris had been the object of a controversy between two preeminent Italian anatomists, Gabriel Fallopius and Realdo Columbus. Each claimed to have ‘discovered’ the clitoris, ‘the primary locus of Venereal pleas­ ure in women’, but Kaspar Bartholin, the distinguished seventeenth-century Danish anatomist argued in turn that both Fallopius and Columbus were vainglorious in claiming the “invention of the first Observation of this Part,” since the clitoris had been known to everyone since the second century ad. The rediscovery of the clitoris in seventeenth century medical literature is part of that broad shift from the isomorphic, hierarchical one-sex model in which women are imperfect versions of men to the modern understanding of the sexual difference. Arguing for the equivalence rather than for gender hierarchy is the first step toward the development of understanding of the sexual difference. Recent scholarship has shown how the significant numbers of informed commentators in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century rejected the view that female biology provided a sound basis for female subjection and contested the attempts to ground social differences between the sexes on presumed anatomical diversity.82 Mandeville was certainly up to date with medical and anatomical theories and practices. He could have read the works of Dutch physician, anatomist, and physiologist Reigner de Graaf, or Daniel Tauvry, A New Rational Anatomy or the well-known Anthropologia Nova; or, A New System of Anatomy, by James Drake, which included some of de Graaf’s diagrams of the female reproductive system.83 The Midwives Book; or, The Whole Art of Midwifery Discovered, by Jane Sharp, the first English woman to publish a book on midwifery in 1671, had four editions by 1725. It stressed the equivalence in reproduction of men’s and women’s roles, the analogy between the clitoris and the penis, the importance of the female orgasm for conception and complained of the inadequacies of female education. Irvin Primer, in his critical edition of the Modest Defence, remarks that Mandeville would surely have known this book.84 The whole point of the accurate description of 81 82 83 84

Modest Defence, p. 45. Laqueur 1990, in part. pp. 64–68; Cohen 1997, pp. 121–142. Daniel Tauvry, A New Rational Anatomy, containing an explication of the Uses of the Structure of the Body of Man and Some some other Animals according to the Rules of Mechanicks, London 1701; in part. pp. 126–130. Primer 2006, p. 70.

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female anatomy is for Mandeville to stress the “Violence of Female Desire,” in relation to “what a terrible Risque a Woman runs to gratify it (…) the Minds of Women are observ’d to be so much corrupted by the Loss of Chastity, or rather by the Reproach they suffer upon that Loss”.85 It is exclusively a social fact, that women are expected to remain chaste and suffer if they don’t. “Dissolute” women, namely those who satisfy their desire outside the realm considered socially acceptable, are corrupted, and doomed to suffer, but exclusively because of other people’s opinion: “These Woman (…) are commonly Guilty of almost the whole Catalogue of immoral Actions: (…) Not that these are necessary Concomitants of Lewdness, or have the least Relation to it, as all lewd Men of Honour can testify; but the Treatment such Women meet with in the World, is the Occasion of it.”86 Certainly, as Dario Castiglione remarked, Mandeville shows a conception of sexuality as a mechanical pursuit of pleas­ ure, premodern, expressed in the simplified language of passions, but it is this very language that gave him the opportunity to underline in the context of his philosophical anthropology the unequal conditions between men and women, relative to the shared standards of approbation and disapprobation: a common sexual impulse and a distinct public moral evaluation; ‘the double standard’, the view that unchastity, in the sense of sexual relations before marriage or outside marriage, is for a man, if an offence, none the less a mild and pardonable one, but for a woman a matter of the utmost gravity.87 For women, chastity is peculiarly vulnerable, explains Mandeville, it requires efforts to be preserved. Women have to cope with the strength of their sexual desire. The conflict between their violent natural wishes and their (weak) “inborn modesty & innate reservedness” requires a sense of interest, to be brought to a successful result. To counterbalance their violent natural desire, women have “a strong notion of honour carefully inculcated into them from their infancy.” As a matter of fact, their worldly interest relies solely on their reputation of chastity. Artificial chastity is then a ‘compound’, or better – a coincidence of Sense of honour and interest: “When a woman has her interest and fortune depending upon her reputation, as all the middle rank of womankind have, she is a woman of honour, of course. Interest is inseparable indeed from Female of honour.” Alike some “Men differ in the liveliness of their Olfactory, Auditory or Optick Nerves,” so in women there is a variety in intensity of amorous desires. In order to detail the shaping of female chastity and the struggles it entails, Mandeville develops a typology of women, classified 85 86 87

Modest Defence, p. 41. Modest Defence, pp. 16–17. Castiglione 1989, in part. pp. 95–99.

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according not only to their inclination to sexual activity but also to their concern for reputation and their social status. The first type of women is less pervaded by sexual desire than others, and at the same time have strict notions of honour. The second type, women who value their reputation as much as the first but are naturally amorous – the Wanton Women of Honour – they try to “purchase pleasure without the Expense of Reputation” that is, maintain their reputation by concealing their amorous affairs. The third kind, middling women, who want to marry well. The fourth, the lower class of women, those who cannot promote their interest by preserving chastity, they have no chance of gaining a fortune through marriage. In a world dominated by men’s rules, it is demanded of women that they manage and administer their chastity just as men manage property, capital and credit. In this sense, closing this long digression, as he calls it “a cursory view of the sex in their several Classes and according to their several Circumstances” Mandeville declares that “Female Chastity is, in its own Nature, built upon a very ticklish foundation.”88 The ticklish foundation on which female chastity rests is its vulnerability: its enormous social value, the fact that it depends on men as well, and the dangers for women because of their extremely limited access to education, to a proper intellectual growth, to the development of the ability to compete with and resist men. 88

Modest Defence p. 49.

Chapter 5

Cleomenes and Horatio My dear Boy, be a good Christian as long as you live, but be a Man of Honour too, and never put up an Affront (…) I love my Religion well, but I love my Honour more h. Fielding, Tom Jones

∵

For his last major research works, Mandeville returned to the dialogical form he had adopted in his early book on women and in the medical treatise. In the six dialogues that make up the The Fable of the Bees Part II and the four of An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour and the Usefulness of Christianity in War, published between 1728 and 1731, Cleomenes, admirer of Mandeville and attentive reader of the Fable of the Bees and Horatio, a refined, typical representative of the Beau Monde and convinced supporter of Shaftesbury’s philosophy of natural sociability, confront each other in a series of polite conversations. Chapter 5 follows their discussions on the origins of politeness, on a new term coined to account for the hidden workings of praise-seeking and on the conjectural history of sociability and government. 1

Portrait of a Complete Gentleman

On December 17 1728, The Fable of the Bees Part II appeared in print.1 Mandeville had probably elaborated on the material of a preceding manuscript written in 1726 in defence of the original Fable, that as he mentions in the Preface “has been seen by several of my Friends,” but was never printed.2 The decision to publish a second part is justified as a response to the charge of having had the 1 F.B. Kaye, “Mandeville on the Origin of Language,” Modern Language Notes 39, 1924, pp. 136– 42. Kaye reports that the book is advised in the Daily Courant for 17 and 19 December, and the Daily Post for December 18, 1728. 2 B. Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees. Part II. By the Author of the First (London: 1729), ed. by F.B. Kaye, in 2 voll., Oxford, Clarendon Press 1924, p. 3.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004428430_008

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“Intent of debauch the Nation and promote all Manners of Vice.”3 Recalling a similar criticism of John Gay for his Beggar’s Opera, of encouraging vice and debauchery simply by exposing them, Mandeville vindicates his perspective of disenchanted anatomist of human nature. Twenty-four years after the publication of The Grumbling Hive the Dutch physician is still engaged in his battle against “such Wrongheads in the World, as will fancy Vices to be encouraged, when they see them expos’d.”4 Mandeville, “despite the controversy raised by the first has not yet fallen asleep” continues his anatomy of human nature and “the same unbiass’d Method of searching after Truth and enquiring into the Nature of Man and Society, made use of in that, is continued in this.”5 The second volume of the Fable of the Bees actually has little in common with the first volume other than the title. In the last four years of his life, not only Mandeville wrote more pages than he had written in the previous 59 years, but he also took advantage of the versatility of the dialogical form to expound more systematically what he had gradually recognised: the fundamental function played by the desire for esteem in determining human behaviour.6 Mandeville never deleted anything from his earlier texts, providing discussion and criticism of his earlier publications in a continuous process of revision and reformulation, somehow presenting his critics with a moving target.7 In his dialogues, Mandeville developed a psychologically richer account of his position and its philosophical implications, while at the same time abandoning most of his provocative statements on the paradoxical usefulness of vice. At the outset of the first dialogue of the Enquiry into the Origin of Honour and the Usefulness of Christianity in War the conversation offers a revealing overview on the whole of Mandeville’s perspective of research. “I Wonder you never attempted to guess at the Origin of Honour, as you have done at that of Politeness, and your Friend in his Fable of the Bees has done at the Origin of Virtue” asks Horatio to Cleomenes.8 In Mandeville’s self-assessment of his previous works the two volumes of The Fable of the Bees and the Enquiry into the Origin of Honour and the Usefulness of Christianity in War are to be considered as a trilogy devoted to reconstructing a naturalistic, conjectural genealogy of human value systems: virtue, politeness and honour.9 In Fable II indeed, in answering Horatio’s com3 4 5 6 7

Fable II, p. 6. Fable II, p. 7. Fable II, 22–23. Tolonen 2013, p. 134; Simonazzi 2011, p. 36. Jennifer Welchman, “Who Rebutted Bernard Mandeville?” History of Philosophy Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Jan., 2007), pp. 57–74. 8 Honour, p. 1. 9 Sagar 2018, p. 90.

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plaint that the author of the first volume The Fable of the Bees ridiculed war, martial courage and honour, Cleomenes dismisses Mandeville’s defence of duelling as ironical and clarifies that what “he laughs at and exposes throughout the book” was “Politeness itself.”10 Mandeville defends his conception of human nature and of society in polemical contrast with Shaftesbury’s ‘Social system,’ that elevated manners as a core part and expression of man’s natural sociability: Virtue however is a very fashionable Word, and some of the most luxurious are extremely fond of the amiable sound; tho’ they mean nothing by it, but a great Veneration for whatever is courtly or sublime, and an equal Aversion to every thing, that is vulgar or unbecoming. They seem to imagine, that it chiefly consists in a strict Compliance to the Rules of Politeness, and all the Laws of Honour, that have any regard to the Respect that is due to themselves.11 In the dialogues the two interlocutors have two opposite visions of politeness. Horatio is fascinated by Shaftesbury’s elegant way of writing, by his subtle irony and by the skill with which he has been able to combine virtue with good manners. In short, he is a keen follower of the ‘Social System’ of the third Earl of Shaftesbury. Speaking as one who extols the intrinsic goodness of human nature, Horace rebukes Mandeville’s research perspective: “The Business of his Philosophy is just the Reverse to that of the Herald’s Office; (…) your Author is ever searching after, and inventing mean contemptible Origins for worthy and honourable Actions.”12 He is indeed “very much exasperated against the Author and his whole Scheme,” having ridiculed in his book “martial Courage and Honour.”13 His host and interlocutor Cleomenes, Mandeville’s defender and spokesman, shows the autobiographical traits of the Dutch doctor and scholar: he is a cultured and educated man, trained in the study of anatomy, medicine and various branches of natural philosophy, dedicated to the study of human nature and of his own passions. Cleomenes has, in his studies, come across The Fable of the Bees. He appreciates the disenchanted perspective of analysis in Mandeville’s philosophy, and the ability to recognize the motivating force of passions, particularly the selfish and self-interested ones, in all areas of human life. These may also jeopardize man’s ability to reflect on himself, even 10 11 12 13

Fable II, 100, 101. Fable II, p. 12. Fable II, pp. 20 and 31. Fable II, 20.

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in philosophical research: the very idea of human rationality could result in a form of overconfidence harbinger of mistakes: “That the great Preeminence we have over all other Creatures, we are acquainted with, consists in our rational Faculty, is very true; but it is as true, that the more we are taught to admire ourselves, the more our Pride encreases, and the greater Stress we lay on the Sufficiency of our Reason.”14 Using Shaftesbury as an exemplary symbol of the moral hypocrisy of the fashionably well-educated who delude themselves into believing that they are truly virtuous, moral, charitable, kind and sufficiently religious, Mandeville elaborates the ‘Portrait of a Complete Gentleman’ to show that all the admirable qualities Shaftesbury attributes to natural virtue can instead be explained as arising from pride. “It is incredible, what strange, various, unaccountable and contradictory Forms we may be shaped into by a Passion, (…) there is no Benevolence or good Nature, no amiable Quality, or social Virtue, that may not be counterfeited by it”.15 The representative of the Beau Monde that Mandeville portrays is the owner of a rich and well-furnished country house. He is friendly and always good-humoured, frank and honest, witty and never offensive. He is modest and cautious not to offend others, as politeness demands. He is temperate in eating, and never excessive in his drinking. His dress is fashionable and well-cut, and he expresses himself in a polite language, natural and intelligible, not trivial or pretentious. He is charitable to the poor and in religion is not superstitious nor fanatic. A good manager of his properties, he is well balanced and reasonable with his subordinates. Scrupulous in business, he is affable and tactful. As Cleomenes explains, all these ‘amiable qualities’ are not rooted in a principle of virtue, or in a natural sense of sociability, but proceed from the passions of vanity and pride, from a boundless desire for approbation which constantly dominates human nature. A gentleman’s education is based on the passions of shame and self-love, and when people judge themselves, pride often blinds them and dims the skills to recognize one’s own motive. Certainly, Cleomenes allows that it is not a pleasant truth “that such a clear and beautiful Stream could flow from so mean and muddy a Spring as an excessive Thirst after Praise, and an immoderate Desire of general Applause from the most knowing Judges.”16 But, as a matter of fact, all behaviours apparently motivated by virtue, socially judged as expressions of natural sociability and of refinement of manners can be explained with the “Instinct of high value” that characterizes humans: “there are no good Offices or Duties, 14 15 16

Fable II, p. 15. Fable II, pp. 100–101. Fable II, p. 74. Luban 2015, Douglass 2020a.

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either to others or ourselves, that Cicero has spoken of, nor any Instances of Benevolence, Humanity, or other Social Virtue, that Lord Shaftsbury has hinted at, but a Man of good Sense and Knowledge may learn to practise them from no better Principle than Vain-glory.”17 Polite manners are grounded, according to Mandeville, in hypocrisy and self-deceit and in every part of a gentleman’s behaviour there is an unavoidable gap between being and appearing, “a Disagreement between the outward Appearances, and what is felt within.”18 Cleomenes suggests a “decisive Tryals” to reveal in a reliable way “whether a Person acts from inward Goodness and a Principle of Religion, or only from a Motive of Vain-glory.”19 The test that Mandeville’s mouthpiece proposes to convince his sceptic interlocutor is to examine the attitude of the amiable gentleman when challenged to a duel. Once all the efforts to honourably avoid combat are exhausted, Horatio is brought to admit, there’s nothing left than fight. It is undeniable that duelling is a sin, a mortal sin; but to elude it, to refuse a challenge is out of the question: “You may Blame the Rigorous Laws of Honour and the Tyranny of Custom, but a Man that will live in the World must and is bound to obey them.”20 In conclusion, such a polite, “just and prudent a Man, that has the Good of Society so much at Heart” is led to fight, to act knowingly against the laws of his country and the dictates of religion, because of the “strict Obedience he pays to the Laws of Honour, which are superior to all others.”21 Men fight duels not because they love virtue and justice but simply because they fear shame more than death: Entirely to quit the World, and at once to renounce the Conversation of all Persons that are valuable in it, is a terrible Thing to resolve upon. Would you become a Town and Table Talk? could you submit to be the Jest and Scorn of Publick-Houses, Stage, Coaches, and Market-Places? Is not this the certain Fate of a Man, who should refuse to fight, or bear an Affront without Resentment? Be just, Cleomenes; is it to be avoided? Must he not be made a common Laughing-stock, be pointed at in the Streets, and serve for Diversion to the very Children, to Link-boys and Hackney Coachmen?22

17 18 19 20 21 22

Fable II, p. 48. Fable II, Pref. p. 18. Fable II, p. 81. Fable II, p. 87. Fable II, p. 82. Fable II, p. 88.

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Either authentic or forged, the challenge published by Richard Steele in 1709 in The Tatler reflects Cleomenes’s arguments in an exemplary manner: Sir, Your extraordinary behavior last night, and the liberty you were pleased to take with me, makes me this morning give you this, to tell you, because you are an ill-bred puppy, I will meet you in Hyde Park an hour hence; and because you want both breeding and humanity, I desire you would come with a pistol in your hand, on horseback, and endeavour to shoot me through the head to teach you more manners. If you had fail of doing me this pleasure, I shall say you are a rascal in every post in town: and so, sir, if you will not injure me more, I shall never forgive what you have done already.23 Duelling is the evidence that the domineering element in human nature, even more powerful than the instinct of self-preservation, is the desire for other’s appraisal. The inner conflict that a man challenged to a duel ought to face, does not concern his religious principles or his ideals of virtue, but two fundamental passions: “to speak without Disguise, the Struggle in your Breast was between the Fear of Shame and the Fear of Death; had this latter not been so considerable, your Struggle would have been less.”24 Thus, Mandeville exploits the civility tradition of the point of honour and his most extreme expression, duelling, as the exemplary evidence in his philosophical anthropology of “the prodigious Force and exorbitant Power of this Principle of Self-Esteem, where it has been long gratify’d and encourag’d.”25 Duelling, the most extreme display of ritualized violence among the European ruling elites since the Renaissance, represents, in Mandeville’s view, the expression of a constant and universal principle in human nature, “a Passion that is born with us is unalterable, and Part of our Frame, whether it exerts itself or not,” constantly at work in the whole of the human species: “The same Passion, that makes the well-bred Man and prudent Officer value and secretly admire themselves for the Honour and Fidelity they display, may make the Rake and Scoundrel brag of their Vices and boast of their Impudence.”26 The analysis of the ‘double standard’ relative to masculine and feminine sexuality is again a case study to review the status of the artificial passions and the mechanism of pride and shame. Nature has 23 24 25 26

The Tatler 25, June 7, 1709. Fable II, 92. Fable II, 92. Fable II, 91.

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not endowed women with more pride than men “but they have a great deal more from Education.” To them is required a greater amount of pride than men because they are exposed from an early age.27 Women, explains Cleomenes, have “all the Artillery of our Sex to fear,” they can be tempted with promises and actual bribes, and “this may be done in the Dark, and when no Body is by to dissuade her.” Gentlemen rarely meet the necessity to exhibit their courage, that it to say to fight a duel, “before they are six or seventeen.” And they do it in public, in front of their peers: “In the Affair of a Quarrell” they have “many Witnesses of their Behaviour, that awe them to their Duty, and in a manner oblige them to obey the Laws of Honour (…) The Pride likewise that produces Honour in Women has no other Object than their Chastity; and whilst they keep that Jewel entire, they can apprehend no Shame.”28 2

Self-Liking and the Origin of Politeness

Questioned by Horatio on the very origins of politeness and on how it is possible to teach men “to be proud of hiding their Pride,” Cleomenes develops a distinction between two passions, basic constituents of human nature.29 Twenty years earlier on the pages of The Female Tatler, Mandeville had distinguished between two dominant passions in human nature, writing that men are “Lovers of Self-Preservation” and at the same time “great Admirers of Praise,” therefore able to learn to live together simply because the leading component of their selfish drive is the desire for approval of others. In the 1714 edition of The Fable of the Bees Mandeville had used the terms pride, self-love and vanity somehow as synonyms, to refer to a passion common to all humans, and strongly motivating. In the dialogues of the second part of The Fable of the Bees, Cleomenes further develops the distinction by differentiating two different passions: selflove and self-liking. “That Self-love was given to all Animals, at least, the most perfect, for Self-Preservation, is not disputed; but as no Creature can love what it dislikes, it is necessary, moreover, that everyone should have a real liking to its own Being, superior to what they have to any other.”30 With this new term Mandeville aims at stressing the difference, within the self-interested passions: between, on the one hand, the animal instinct of preservation, the love for one’s physical being; and on the other the feeling of overestimation of one’s 27 28 29 30

Fable II, 122–123. Fable II, 123–124. Fable II, 132. Fable II, p. 129. Cf. Horne 1993, p. 232.

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self, which in man is continually dependent on the approval of others to be confirmed and reassured. Self-love urges living creatures to stock up on all that is necessary for survival, to defend themselves from the elements and to secure themselves and their children. Self-liking is the passion that drives to establish comparisons with others, motivates to look for opportunities to show with gestures, looks and speeches, their self-esteem.31 Human pride is always accompanied by the secret apprehension that the value we place on ourselves is not entirely justified. Along with a high opinion of themselves, individuals have a desire for others to share this opinion: to encrease the Care in Creatures to preserve themselves, Nature has given them an Instinct, by which every Individual values itself above its real Worth ; this in us, I mean, in Man, seems to be accompany’d with a Diffidence, arising from a Consciousness, or at least an Apprehension, that we do over-value ourselves : It is this that makes us so fond of the Approbation, Liking and Assent of others ; because they strengthen and confirm us in the good Opinion we have of ourselves.32 Self-love prompts self-preservation, self-liking prompts the search for recognition. In this way pride can become the root of all social virtues, and therefore the protagonist of civil development through a process of sublimation of aggression and its transformation in emulation and in forms of competition compatible with associated life. To the spontaneous social instinct, the natural benevolence of Shaftesbury, Mandeville contrasts not so much human bellicosity, but the very drive to confront and excel others. Men cannot do without their fellows because confrontation is a double necessity for them: in the relationship with others, men find comfort and confirmation of the opinion of their superiority and impose it with the means that the associated life makes progressively viable.33 The distinction between self-love and self-liking could also be read as a reaction to the objection advanced by Joseph Butler.34 Bishop Butler never mentions Mandeville in his writings, but the allusions in both his Fifteenth Sermons published in 1726, three years after the publication of the enlarged edition of the Fable and in the later The Analogy of Religion are unmistakable.35 Butler’s 31 32 33 34 35

Fable II, p. 130. Daniel Kapust, Flattery and the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: 2018), pp. 148–150. Fable II, 130. Scribano 1980, pp. 155–160. Sagar 2018, pp. 46–47. Hundert 1994, p. 118. Hundert, 1994, pp. 126–7.

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analysis of self-love represents a sharp objection to Mandeville and in general to the theorists of selfishness, on their own grounds, departing from the study of human nature. The author of the Fifteen Sermons had remarked on the lexical deficiency of the English language in distinguishing two substantially different drives for action, a confusion exploited by the theorists of natural selfishness to develop their sophisms: “There is (…) a distinction between the cool principle of self-love, or general desire of our own happiness, as one part of our nature, and one principle of action; and the particular affection towards particular external objects, as another part of our nature and another principle of action.”36 The point at stake is, according to Butler, the fundamental difference between self-love and all the other passions. These would have something external to the subject, while their self-love would have, so to speak, only an internal object. In this sense, it would be virtually impossible to act in opposition to self-love, which should be clearly distinguished from any hidden manifestation of vanity.37 To Horatio, who had interpreted the whole issue of self-love and self-liking as a digression, Cleomenes replies that it is a sufficient notion to account for politeness and its history: “all the Precepts of good Manners throughout the World have the same Tendency, and are no more than the various Methods of making ourselves acceptable to others, with as little Prejudice to ourselves as is possible.”38 The natural symptoms of the high self-esteem that human beings display and experience in theirs fellows are mutually offending, to the point of forcing individuals to conceal the enormity of their self-regard: “the Disturbance and Uneasiness, that must be caused by Self-liking, whatever Strugglings and unsuccessful Tryals to remedy them might precede, must necessarily produce at long run, what we call good Manners and Politeness.”39 The different forms of mutual adulation in the history of civilization therefore have their motivating force in this constant passion of human nature: they are different ways and expressions of self-liking evolving over time, in a continuous and spontaneous process of modification of the code of gestures, and of the appropriate linguistic expressions of deference. This process took place insensibly: “Men by degrees, and great Length of Time, fall as it were into these Things spontaneously.”40 This is what Mandeville calls the “Philosophical 36 37 38 39 40

Joseph Butler, Sermon xi, in The Works of Joseph Butler, London 1839 p. 127.Cf. Preface, p. xvii. Joseph Butler, Fifteen Sermons, 1726. Cf. Castiglione 1989, p. 369; Arthur Duncan-Jones, Butler’s Moral Philosophy (London: 1952), pp. 95–115. Fable II, pp. 133 and 147. Fable II, p. 138. Fable II, p. 138.

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Reason” of the changes in the conduct of men over the ages: “the Art of good Manners has nothing to do with Virtue or Religion, tho’ it seldom clashes with either. It is a Science that is ever built on the same steady Principle in our Nature, whatever the Age or the Climate may be, in which it is practis’d.”41 Somehow forerunning Norbert Elias’s reconstruction of the history of manners, Mandeville sketches the ‘progress of politeness’ from its birthplace – the courts – to the whole of society. We are assiduously instructed and educated in a set of ceremonies and rules of behaviour to the extent of forgetting they are not natural: “that even before we are Men we hardly look upon a mannerly Deportment as a Thing acquired, or think Conversation to be a Science.”42 The rituals of courtesy, explained Cleomenes, originated in the courts, where the “Postures and Flexions of Body and Limbs” have had an important function in paying tribute to principles and tyrants: “we have no Reason to think, that the Compliment of saying, Your Servant, began among Equals; but rather that, Flatterers having given it to Princes, it grew afterwards more common.” These techniques of flattery progressively became more familiar and spread across the whole of society “and were made use of reciprocally in the way of Civility.”43 By comparing good manners with other human arts that have evolved in minimal degrees over the centuries, thanks to anonymous contributions of “Men of ordinary Capacities” Cleomenes illustrates to Horatio the characteristics of the process of evolution of forms of civilization. A warship – certainly one of the most complex models of application of technological advancements and of the organization and division of labour of the early eighteenth century – is the example chosen by Cleomenes to underline the gradualism and spontaneity of the process through which the arts, but also societies and human institutions have reached the level of civilization acknowledged by his contemporaries: “What we often ascribe to the Excellency of Man’s Genius, and the Depth of his Penetration, what is in Reality owing to length of Time, and the Experience of many Generations, all of them very little differing from one another in natural Parts and Sagacity.”44 Good manners, like sailing and the art of making and managing ships and all others human institutions progressed from “mean Beginnins (…) to great Perfection” by an impersonal, slow process.45

41 42 43 44 45

Fable II, p. 155. Cf. Index to Fable ii, ‘Politeness’. Peltonen 2003, pp. 271–72. Fable II, p. 150. Fable II, pp. 151–152. Fable II, p. 142. Fable I, 152.

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A Conjectural History of Sociability

Given his rebuttal of Shaftesbury’s conception of an original fondness of the human beings for one another, Horatio questions Cleomenes on the very origins of society.46 What requires an explanation is how individuals become governable and not simply submissive. In the 1723 edition of The Fable of the Bees Mandeville had defined society as a political body in which man “either subdued by Superior Force, or by Persuasion drawn from his Savage State, is become a Disciplin’d Creature, that can find his own Ends in Labouring for others.”47 In Fable ii, Cleomenes starts from the observation that human beings are inevitably selfish: no Creature can labour for others, and be easy long, whilst Self is wholly out of the Question: Therefore a Creature is then truly governable, when, reconcil’d to Submission, it has learn’d to construe his Servitude to his own Advantage; and rests satisfy’d with the Account it finds for itself, in the Labour it performs for others. To obey rulers because they will punish disobedience is to be submissive: “he who barely submits to another, only embraces what he dislikes, to shun what he dislikes more.”48 It is a distinction by which Mandeville stresses the distance between his view of political ties based on the dynamics of pride and shame, from the Hobbesian view of the origins of political power.49 Social cohesion requires a developmental history. For Mandeville sociability is not a starting point but the result of a long journey of development of human abilities, the fulfilment of a long apprenticeship which is not the result of rational choices. The transition from the “Savage State” to civil society is explained by Mandeville in a close confrontation with other theories that reveals his peculiar characterization of the relationship between nature and artifice. In contrast to the natural law tradition, Mandeville characterizes the state of nature not only with the absence of any form of pre-political principle but also of all cultural acquisitions, even the most basic, including language and rationality. Man is not naturally sociable as Shaftesbury pretends, but on the other hand is 46 47 48 49

Fable II, p. 177. Fable I, p. 347. Fable II, p. 184. Mauro Simonazzi, “Self-liking, onore e religione nella Ricerca sull’Origine dell’Onore e sull’Utilità del Cristianesimo in Guerra di Bernard Mandeville,” in Il Pensiero Politico, 1999, 3, pp. 352–382; Martin Otero Knott, “Mandeville on Governability,” Journal of Scottish Philosophy, 12 (1), 2014, pp. 19–49.

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not born unfit for society as Hobbes wrote. The error – both of Shaftesbury and of Hobbes – has been to attribute to men in their natural condition skills and capabilities that are in themselves results of the civilization process: “Nature had design’d Man for Society, as she has made Grapes for Wine.” All human features can be defined as “natural”, but it is “human Sagacity that finds out the Uses we make of them.”50 The Works of Art and human Invention are all very lame and defective, and most of them pitifully mean at first: Our Knowledge is advanced by slow Degrees, and some Arts and Sciences require the Experience of many Ages, before they can be brought to any tolerable Perfection. Have we any Reason to imagine, that the Society of Bees, that sent forth the first Swarm, made worse Wax or Honey than any of their Posterity have produced since?51 The society of the bees – and here Mandeville leaves aside the allegory that gave the title to his work  – is born, grows, reproduces itself (and produces honey) following fixed and unalterable laws of nature, unlike human artefacts. It took human beings centuries of trial and error and the accumulated experience of generation after generation to develop the faculty of reasoning, the ability to express themselves verbally and [enter into] to live in society.52 Those elements traditionally regarded as marks of sociality and those characteristics that the deists had considered natural par excellence: moral values, language, reason, monotheistic religion; are all placed by Mandeville on the side of the artifice. “Thinking, and Reasoning justly, as Mr. Lock has rightly observed, require Time and Practice. (…) Man is a rational Creature, but he is not endued with Reason when he comes into the World; (…) Speech likewise is a Characteristick of our Species, but no Man is born with it.”53 Only habit and repeated intercourse can stimulate the development of those characteristics that many authors mistakenly attribute to man in his original state: “Men become sociable, by living together in Society.”54 Opposing the orthodox view, grounded in the Scriptures, that language had been given to man by God and that words conveyed the essential qualities of things in natural accord with the creation of which language itself was part, 50 51 52 53 54

Fable II, p. 185. Fable II, pp. 186–187. Fable II, 189. Cf. Scribano 1980, pp. 109–117; Magri 1987, pp. xviii–xix; Daniele Francesconi, “Mandeville sull’origine della società,” in Il Pensiero Politico, 1996, pp. 407–433. Fable II, p. 190. Fable II, p. 189.

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Mandeville offered an evolutionary view on the origin and development of language as a purely human creation, developed by savage man through slow ages of uncertain and undeliberate evolution. Étienne Bonnot de Condillac’s Essai sur l’origine des connoissances humaines (1746) has been regarded as path-breaking text in the history of linguistics, that influenced all subsequent discussions on the origin of language, but many of the central ideas as well as part of the formulation of the Essai had been anticipated by Mandeville.55 In Cleomenes’ account, language developed gradually from the first “wild couple.” Devoid of an instinct for language and unable to develop it deliberately, primitive men also lacked any idea that they needed language, or that its absence posed “any real Inconvenience to them.”56 Humans, like other animals, are born with a capacity of making themselves understood without speech “by dumb Signs” and gestures. “As to my wild Couple, as you call them, I believe there would be a very good Understanding, before many Sounds past between them,” warns Cleomenes.57 The transition from a primitive language of dumb signs, made of gestures, looks and sounds, suitable for expressing some elementary emotions to vocal sounds took place “by slow degrees (…) and length of time,” and “a dozen Generations proceeding from two Savages would not produce any tolerable Language.”58 Gradually the first wild couple would find out particular sounds for “the Things they were most conversant with” and teach them to their children, which would improve and expand the existing set of vocalizations, thanks to “the Volubility of Tongue, and Flexibility of Voice” which are greater in the young ones. “This must have been the Origin of all Languages, and Speech it self, that were not taught by Inspiration.”59 According to Mandeville language was not given to Adam by divine inspiration before degenerating in the post-Babel world, rather it is a human creation that emerged and developed through time, in the evolutive process which marks the passage from the primitive natural state to the formation of the first social institutions, from nature to artifice. Mandeville’s interest focuses both in the formation of language as a stage in the civilizing process and in its use as a social instrument. Cleomenes expressly denies that “the Design of Speech is to

55

56 57 58 59

F.B. Kaye, “Mandeville on the Origin of Language,” Modern Language Notes 39, 1924, pp. 136–42; Rüdiger Schreyer, “Condillac, Mandeville, and the Origin of Language,” in Historiographica Linguistica: International Journal for the History of Linguistics 5, 1978, pp. 15–43. Fable II, p. 285. Fable II, p. 337. Fable II, p. 213. Fable II, p. 341; Kapust 2018, pp. 146–148.

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make our Thoughts known to others.”60 The original and paramount function of language was not to communicate, but rather to persuade.61 The first Sign or Sound that ever Man made, born of a Woman, was made in Behalf, and intended for the use of him who made it; and I am of Opinion, that the first Design of Speech was to persuade others, either to give Credit to what the speaking Person would have them believe; or else to act or suffer such Things, as he would compel them to act or suffer, if they were entirely in his Power.62 In speaking we do not want to be understood in the sense of openly disclosing our thoughts and sentiments so that others might know them. We are originally driven to speak through our natural and self-interested passions. The nonverbal elements of communication, the very practice of amplifying and accentuating spoken language with gesture, the “Heightning and lowring the Voice, at proper Season” are manifestations of “the natural Ambition and strong Desire Men have to triumph over, as well as persuade others,” literally “a bewitching Engine to captivate mean Understandings” writes Mandeville, making use of the very same expression he had deployed in the earlier Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue to describe flattery itself.63 Mandeville’s conjectural history of the development of human society begins with the savage family, formed on the basis of self-preservation and the drive to procreate. None of these natural ties are however sufficient to unite the couple in a stable way, let alone the couple to the offspring. The origin of families is coincident with the birth of patriarchal power. Here relationships of submission and reverence are established, not as the result of an attitude of wisdom and love by the parents towards their children, which would presuppose an higher degree of knowledge and reasoning, but out of that mixture of love and fear provoked by the unstable and capricious behaviour of adults. This argument is developed as a comment and rebuttal of Sir William Temple’s theory on the patriarchal origin of the government, of which Cleomenes quotes large excerpts from An Essay upon the Original and Nature of Government (1672), to suggest that a first habit to the relationship with others develops within the family group, but this does not provide a direct passage to larger social forms, 60 61 62 63

Fable II, p. 342. Simonazzi 2011, pp. 88–91. Fable II, pp. 342–343. Edward J. Hundert, “The Thread of Language and the Web of Dominion: Mandeville to Rousseau and Back,” in Eighteenth Century Studies 21 (1988), pp. 169–91. Fable II, p. 345. Hundert 1994, pp. 88–91; Kapust 2018, pp. 146–148.

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nor the pre-political existence of the family constitute evidence for natural sociability.64 In Mandeville’s reconstruction the first step towards society is motivated by human weakness and vulnerability to the threat of wild animals that drives families, disunited and deeply conflictual, to unite in common defence. The reason why people associated it is not, like in Hobbes, to be identified in the threat of physical danger from one another, but is ignited by the menace represented by wild animals.65 The second passage is the forming of a shared system of sentiments of approval and disapproval, the establishment of prohibitions and penalties upon certain actions within the group. “The second Step to Society, is the Danger Men are in from one another: for which we are beholden to that stanch Principle of Pride and Ambition, that all Men are born with.”66 It is once men are related that the innate search for superiority and domination over the others enters into play. Mandeville’s philosophical anthropology is grounded on two fundamental assumptions. The first: man is a selfish animal, constantly dominated by self-interested passions. Even when he thinks to behave rationally, he is actually driven by a further passion which he does not recognize it as such. The second: we are aware that a public exhibition of pride and self-esteem is unpleasant; we learn to curb our pride, our self-interest, because we are disturbed by the performance of similar feelings in others. For Mandeville, society is established on real desires and passions, independent of reason, which spontaneously model men’s behaviour in terms of regularity and uniformity, without them even being necessarily aware of it. Sociability is the result of a game of passions in which reflection and rationality have a derivative and marginal role, and the crucial aspect is represented not by rational choices or political inventions but by the progressive formation of a shared system of feelings of approval and disapproval. The transition to civil society does not serve as much to repress competitive and potentially dangerous passions as in Hobbes’ philosophy, but to redirect them. The origin of society coincides with the progressive domestication of selfish, potentially destructive, tendencies in forms of competition for social recognition not harmful to the community as a whole.67 The account of human sociability provides the foundation for the conjectural history of government. The third step in Mandeville’s conjectural history of the origins of society is the invention of writing and the establishment of 64 65 66 67

Fable II, p. 231. Sagar 2018, pp. 89–92. Fable II, pp. 230, 242, 261. Fable II, p. 311. Otero Knott 2014, pp. 19–49.

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written laws, with the invention of writing being paramount to fix rules and laws that otherwise would lose effectiveness.68 The laws are intended to consolidate the habit of channelling originally aggressive passions into forms of competitiveness compatible with associated life.69 Among the principal laws of all countries, the Christian Decalogue itself can also be used as a counterproof of the presence of selfish tendencies in human nature. The ten commandments, like all other laws, Cleomenes points out, have been devised to remedy human weaknesses; they are themselves a testimony to the strength of self-love, which legislators have always been committed to fighting. We are commanded to love our neighbours as ourselves precisely because self-liking is the dominant passion in human nature.70 Laws are collective works, like language itself, indifferent to the efforts of the individuals. They are a concentration, a distillation, of human knowledge and wisdom, the result of a selection by trials and errors. And here too are the “vile ingredients” that produces the most effective systems of rules for a prosperous society: “the wisest Laws of human Invention are generally owing to the Evasions of bad Men, whose Cunning had eluded the Force of former Ordinances, that had been made with less Caution,” the major contributions to the improvement of laws comes precisely from those who have tried to get around them, thus stimulating further adjustments.71 In explaining the origin of society in The Fable of the Bees Part II Mandeville abandons the metaphorical figure of the superhuman politician as a cunning manager able to tame mankind by praise, in favour of a slow, unplanned, evolutionary process. When I have a Mind to dive into the Origin of any Maxim or political Invention, for the Use of Society in general, I don’t trouble my Head with enquiring after the Time or Country, in which it was first heard of (…) but I go directly to the Fountain Head, human Nature itself, and look for the Frailty or Defect in Man, that is remedy’d or supply’d by that Invention. By insisting on gradualism and impersonality Mandeville was probably also answering Willam Law, who in his Remarks upon a late book entituled The Fable of the Bees had accused him of crass ignorance for not having provided information on the effective circumstances of the invention of society by the 68 69 70 71

Fable II, p. 269. Cf. Fable II, p. 283. Fable II, pp. 319–323. Fable II, p. 383.

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skilful politicians: “Chronology and geography, I presume, are Studies not polite enough for you attention, or else I suppose you would have told us the Time when, and the Place where all this happen’d?”72 Here, together with the written laws of the ‘real’ politicians, the human art of politics finds its place in Mandeville’s evolutionary account of human institutions. “All sound Politicks, and the whole Art of governing, writes Mandeville, are entirely built upon the knowledge of human nature” which in itself is “Child of Time.”73 Here, too, there is no room for noble fathers, founding heroes or supremely benevolent leaders: Solon, Lycurgus, Socrates, Plato were not isolated genius, but rather diligent scholars, researchers who had travelled and could use the wisdom accumulated by their predecessors. It took ages before the mechanisms of human nature were rightly understood: “it is the Work of Ages to find out the true Use of the Passions, and to raise a Politician, that can make every Frailty of the Members add Strength to the whole Body, and by dextrous Management turn private Vices into publick Benefits.”74 Cleomenes develops a number of similarities between the art of politics and other machineries, other complex human constructions resulting from the independent actions of many individuals over a long period of time, without a common pre-arranged plan. And as there is no need for intelligence, skill or experience in order to weave a pair of socks or wind up a clock, so to administer a city like London where a prodigious number of ordinances and regulations have stratified and evolved over time, the Magistrates simply have “to follow their nose.”75 The first safeguards of the interests of the community are constitutions, written laws refined by countless adjustments, collective works of accumulated wisdom.76 The most effective ones are those that take into account a negative anthropology: “That is the best constitution which provides against the worst contingencies, (…) and preserve itself firm and remain unshaken, though most men should prove knaves.”77 Real political agents are not standing outside the stream of the evolving, spontaneous order. But, as a matter of fact they do perform their managerial function and they deserve to be praised for this: “To be a consummate Statesman is the highest qualification human Nature is capable of possessing

72 73 74 75 76 77

William Law, Remarks upon a late book entituled The Fable of the Bees, London 1724, p. 18. Fable II, pp. 320–321. Fable II, p. 319. Fable II, p. 323. Fable II, p. 335. Free Thoughts on Religion, the Church and National Happiness (1720), ed. by Irwin Primer, 2000, p. 167.

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(…) he must have read Men as well as Books, and perfectly understand human Nature and the perfect use of the Passions.”78 The most articulated reflections on political management – both in terms of principles and practices – are to be found in the Enquiry into the Origin of Honour and the Usefulness of Christianity in War where Cleomenes and Horatio address the issue of the ‘political use of passions’ by developing an articulated account of the hidden working and the practical political uses, in Medieval and Modern Europe, of the ideals of virtue, religion and honour. 78

Fable II, p. 330.

Chapter 6

Modern Honour and the Cult of the Self By separating the man of honour from the man of virtue, the greatest profligates have got something to value themselves upon, (…) though guilty of the most shameful and most dangerous vices. They are debauchees, spendthrifts, and never pay a farthing they owe; but they are men of honour, and therefore are to be received as gentlemen in all companies. David Hume, Essays1

∵

The conversations between Cleomenes and Horatio continue in the Enquiry into the Origin of Honour and the Usefulness of Christianity in War (1731), Mandeville’s last research book, which makes honour the central point of his anatomy of human nature. Chapter 6 follows Cleomenes and Horatio’s discussions on the efficacy of the newly coined term ‘self-liking’ to address the concept of honour in its universal dimension and its historical manifestations. Reconstructing the recent history of pride and how political power has exploited idealised social models of self-promotion, Cleomenes offers an account of the rise and spread of modern honour culture, and how the age of politeness implemented a ‘cult of the self’ in the form of a substitute religion of honour’. The chapter concludes with some brief remarks on Adam Smith’s reading of the core of Mandeville’s challenge to sentimental ethics. 1

Martial Virtue

In a pamphlet published in 1725 on the evils of the current system of crime and punishment, Mandeville observed that public executions of criminals had lost their original purpose as a deterrent, being reduced to an occasion for the condemned, favoured by drunkenness, to exhibit a misunderstood sense of 1 David Hume, On the rise and progress of the art and sciences, in Essays, Political, Moral, Literary, ed. Eugene Miller (Liberty Fund, 1985), p. 627.

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courage in approaching the gallows in front of a huge crowd, gathered in a carnival atmosphere.2 In this context, he had developed a further reflection on the origin of courage and its universal appreciation. All living creatures, explains Mandeville, are endowed with an instinct for self-preservation. Man “knows no fear equal to the Horror he has against Death,” and courage is indeed praised as the ability to dominate the fear of death, as a victory over the instinct of self-preservation allegedly motivated by a spirit of sacrifice for the community. Yet in many cases – duelling, or the felons about to be hanged – courage is the result of self-interested passions. It is evident, that the original Reason why Courage is generally esteemed, is, because it is taken for granted, that both the Principle we act from, and the End we labour for in conquering our Fears, are praise-worthy, and have a visible Tendency, either to the Good of others, or our own spiritual Felicity. (…) What perverse and miserable Judges are we then, that applaud a Person’s Intrepidity in fighting a Duel, when in the Act itself, we see him willfully violate the Laws of God and Man?3 In the Preface to the Enquiry on honour Mandeville further develops the argument by articulating a peculiar etymological analysis of the term virtue. In his view, its primitive sense meant individual vigour and strength in facing deadly dangers. “The Greek for Virtue, is Ἀρήτη which is derived from Άρης the God of War and properly signifies Martial Virtue.” The same word in Latin, “Virtus,” had for the Romans the meaning of fortitude and contained in itself the same meaning that could have been attributed to it by adding the adjective bellica. “In the early stages of human history” conjectures Mandeville, “Strength and Courage must have been the most valuable Qualifications,” but the reason for their appreciation is less obvious than it may appear.4 Human beings have begun to estimate courage as a form of dissimulation of the self-centredness all men know to be born with, as the first form of apparently altruistic motivation: “Besides the Consideration of the great Service, all Warriors receive from 2 An Enquiry into the Causes of the Frequent Executions at Tyburn: and a Proposal for some Regulations concerning Felons in Prison, and the Good Effects to be Expected from Them by B. Mandeville, m.d. (London, J. Roberts, 1725). William Hogarth visually represented the scene in plate 11, ‘The Idle Prentice Executed at ‘, of the plot-liked series of engravings Industry and Idleness, 1747. See Mauro Simonazzi, Pena, detenzione e esecuzione nell’Inghilterra moderna, in B. Mandeville, Ricerca sulle cause delle frequenti esecuzioni a Tyburn, Translated and edited. by M. Simonazzi (Genova: 2006), pp. 5–41. 3 Tyburn, pp. 31–32. 4 Honour, Preface, p. iii.

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this Virtue, there is a very good Reason in the Nature of Things it self, why it should be in higher esteem than any other.”5 Courage was not estimated as a demonstration of attachment to society and to the common good but rather as an expression of self-control, the victorious struggle over the most powerful of passions, the fear of annihilation of our dear self: the fear of death.6 Only later the term virtue acquired a broader meaning, always preserving the root of self-domination; of “self-denial” in Mandeville’s words. “There is no Virtue that has a Name, but it curbs, regulates, or subdues some Passion that is peculiar to Human Nature.”7 While anticipating that he sees no reasons to consider those “Conjecture, or Opinion of mine” detrimental or disrespecting for virtue  – which, he adds, is always preferable to vice  – Mandeville claims that moral language is irreducibly human, artificial, earthly. It has no other origin than the game of human passions: It is wrong to under-roast Mutton for People who love to have their Meat well done. The Truth of this, which is the most trifling Thing I can readily think on, is as much Eternal, as that of the Sublimest Virtue. If you ask me, where this Truth was, before there was Mutton, or People to dress or eat it, I answer, in the same Place where Chastity was, before there were any Creatures that had an Appetite to procreate their Species.8 Attributing essentially human virtues to a divinity is to be reckoned a form of blasphemy: “With what Propriety then can we attribute any Thing to him that was invented, or at least signifies a Strength or Ability to conquer or govern Passions and Frailties?”9 By tracking down the original social function of moral language Mandeville provides a genealogical foundation to the strict standard of moral merit he had adopted in all of his writings, in which real virtue requires the conquest of the selfish passion, not merely its subdual in the service of a more powerful one. The opposite doctrine “is a vast Inlet to Hypocrisy, as I have shown at large,” because it allows people deluding themselves about the very sources of their own behaviour. To Shaftesbury’s ethical realism Mandeville opposed the conventional nature of human value systems. Individuals may acquire an “Habit of Virtue” so as to practice it without perceiving the efforts of self-denial “but then it is manifest, that this Habit is the 5 6 7 8 9

Honour, Preface, p. iv. Cf. Montaigne, Essais, ii, viii (Des recompences d’honneur) Honour, p. v. Honour, p. ix. Honour, p. viii. Honour, p. ix.

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Work of Art, Education and Custom; and it never was acquired, where the Conquest over the Passions had not been already made.”10 To Horatio initial questions about why he has not yet attempted a close examination of the origin of honour “as you have done at that of Politeness, and your Friend in his Fable of the Bees has done at the Origin of Virtue,” Cleomenes replies by calling into question the profound ambiguities of the concept.11 The word honour “is used in such different Acceptations, is now a Verb, then a Noun, sometimes taken for the Reward of Virtue, sometimes for a Principle that leads to Virtue, and, at others again, signifies Virtue itself” and it is “built upon a Passion in Human Nature, for which there is no Name.”12 To make up for the lack of accuracy of the moralists in their description of passions Cleomenes vindicates the invention of the expression “self-liking” as a passion distinct from self-love. His interlocutor Horatio demonstrates to be an attentive listener: I now understand perfectly well what you mean by Self-liking. You are of Opinion, that we are all born with a Passion manifestly distinct from Self-love; that, when it is moderate and well regulated, excites in us the Love of Praise, and a Desire to be applauded and thought well of by others, and stirs us up to good Actions: but that the same Passion, when it is excessive, or ill turn’d, whatever it excites in our Selves, gives Offence to others, renders us odious, and is call’d Pride. As there is no Word or Expression that comprehends all the different Effects of this same Cause, this Passion, you have made one, viz. Self-liking, by which you mean the Passion in general, the whole Extent of it, whether it produces laudable Actions, and gains us Applause, or such as we are blamed for and draw upon us the ill Will of others.13 Mandeville reproduces in italics in the text of the Enquiry into the Origin of Honour the whole paragraph on the physiological effects of these passions he wrote in the 1714 edition of The Fable of the Bees, to conclude that pride and shame are “different Affections of one and the same Passion,” and if Mandeville took them to be two distinct passions, assured Cleomenes, “it was an Errour, which I know he is willing to own.”14 With the newly coined term he takes up 10 11 12 13 14

Honour, Preface, p. x. Honour, p. 1. Honour, ‘the Contents of the First Dialogue’, unnumbered page; p. 2. Honour, pp. 6–7. Honour, p. 12.

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and further clarifies the distinction between honour in general and modern honour that he had there traced. In its first literal sense, honour is a “Technic Word in the Art of Civility, and signifies a Means which Men by Conversing together have found out to please and gratify one another on Account of a palpable Passion in our Nature that has no Name and which therefore I call Self-liking.”15 In this sense the word honour both as a verb and as a noun is ancient as the oldest language, meaning the different ways and expressions of the original self-liking that have evolved over time and space, in a continuous and spontaneous process of modification of the pattern of gestures and appropriate linguistic expressions of deference. The passion of self-liking, that sentiment of overvaluation of one’s self which is constantly reliant on other people in order to be confirmed and reassured, is the key natural disposition which develops in artificial values and unwritten institutes of social intercourse.16 Modern honour is a recent invention: “a principle of Courage, Virtue, and Fidelity, which some men are said to act from, and to be aw’d by, as others are by Religion (…) this Signification of the Word Honour is entirely Gothick, and sprung up in some of the most ignorant Ages of Christianity.”17 The full title of the book is An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour and the Usefulness of Christianity in War. In their dialogues Cleomenes and Horatio address the two value systems of honour and Christianity in their political use as means of social control, in particular in promoting martial virtues and making new soldiers brave and ready for the battlefield.18 Religion too is explained by Mandeville exclusively in terms of a dynamic of passions. It originates from the innate fear of an invisible cause all men are born with. When this invisible power is publicly worshipped it represent a formidable tool of social control and “For these Purposes all Religions are equally serviceable, and the worst is better than none.”19 It is a shared opinion, observes Cleomenes, that those who are pervaded by a religious sentiment are the best soldiers because they fight obstinately, with fanaticism and fury, in particular when persuaded that God is on their side.20 But it is a mistake to follow the general belief “that the best Christians make the best Soldiers.”21 There is no usefulness whatsoever for Christianity – the teaching of Jesus – in war.

15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Honour, p. 14. Fable II, p. 130. Honour, p. 14. Primer 2000, pp. 117–40. Honour, p. 24. Honour, pp. 130–142. Honour, p. 133.

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I verily believe, that there are no better Soldiers, than there are among the Christians; and I believe the same of Painters; but I am well assured, that the best in either Calling are often far from being the best Christians. The Doctrine of Christ does not teach Men to Fight, any more than it does to Paint.22 In war the utility of Christian religion is none, if we speak of the true evangelical message, but the original principles of purity and negation of worldly values have been manipulated by priests and skilful rulers in order to gain adepts and power. The preachers in the armies have made a political use of religion, distorting the message of the Gospel, in order to inspire courage in battle and to convince the soldiers of the rightness of their cause.23 An “everlasting maxim in politics” is indeed to convince the fighters – “how small soever the differences may be between the contending Parties” that “their Enemies are likewise the Enemies of God,” that God is on their side.24 In his attack to the idea of the usefulness of Christianity in war Mandeville was challenging many preachers and writers who had accepted the view that soldiers ought to be good Christians and that they would be better soldier for clinging to their faith. One of the best-known text in this genre, is Richard Steele’s The Christian Hero, published in 1701 and reprinted several times in the following decades.25 Human institutions and system of values, according to Mandeville originated from natural passional dispositions and gradually evolved under the pressure of external circumstances. Constraining Mandeville’s arguments into a pattern of correspondences between the three fundamental human value systems of virtue, religion and honour and the natural passions on which they are grounded, virtue appears to be connected to the fear of death, whose praise, the praise of self-control in the face of a deadly danger gave origin to the commendation of self-control in general. Religion has his roots in the fear of an invisible cause institutionalized in a ‘civil religion’. Honour is built on the fear of shame, at the basis of all codes of honourable conduct. The two volumes of The Fable of the Bees – actually, the whole of Mandeville’s works – are devoted in demonstrating the impracticability of ideals of virtue as social ties and means of efficient social regulation. In the Enquiry into the Origin of Honour and the Usefulness of Christianity in War Mandeville offers a survey of the dynamics of Christianity and honour in the recent stages of the civilization 22 23 24 25

Honour, p. 33. Honour, pp. 130–142. Honour, pp. 59–60. Primer 2000, p. 132.

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process. The relation between honour and religion is particularly clear considering their social function. Already in the Free Thoughts, and then in the second part of the Fable of the Bees, Mandeville had insisted, in disagreement with his mentor and inspirer Pierre Bayle that religion originates exclusively from dynamics of passions. According to Bayle, the causes of the rise and spread of the belief in the supernatural were to be found in the ingenious invention of politicians, who by exploiting fear and ignorance had devised a clever imposture, capable of subjugating human beings. As for the question of speculative and virtuous atheism Bayle had presented it not only as not worse than superstition, but as a positive value, representing atheists as martyrs for an idea in the name of virtuous principles. For Bayle atheism does not necessarily imply immorality, atheists are strongly protected against many pitfalls to which religion exposes other men, are immune from that disease of the human psyche which is credulity.26 As a contemporary anonymous reviewer of the Enquiry into the Origin of Honour noted, Mandeville distances himself from Bayle by rejecting the idea that for a divinity idolatry could be a greater offence than atheism.27 Religion is not an invention of politicians, it originates from the innate fear of an invisible cause, natural to every individual. All Human Creatures are sway’d and wholly govern’d by their Passions, whatever fine Notions we may flatter our Selves with; even those who act suitably to their Knowledge, and strictly follow the Dictates of their Reason, are not less compell’d so to do by some Passion or other, that sets them to Work, than others, who bid Defiance and act contrary to Both, and whom we call Slaves to their Passions.28 Rulers and governors may benefit by guiding men to indulge in an existing passion, but it certainly it is not in their power to “contradict the Passions or deny the Existence of them.”29 Questioned about “the Work of Moralists and Politicians” Cleomenes shed further light on this elusive concept by openly endorsing the myth of the cunning politicians, inventors of morality as a shorthand explanation for a gradual and spontaneous evolutionary process:

26 27 28 29

Scribano 1980, pp. 27 and 36; Mori 1996 p. 33; P. Bayle, Pensées diverses écrites à un docteur de Sorbonne, à l’occasion de la comète qui parut au mois de Décembre 1680, à Rotterdam (1683). Bibliotheque Britannique, ou Histoire des Ouvrages des Savans de la Grande Bretagne, Vol. i, Part i (Avril–Juin), 1733, pp. 13–14. Honour, p. 31. Honour, p. 28. Cf. Fable II, pp. 206–208.

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I give those Names promiscuously to All that, having studied Human Nature, have endeavour’d to civilize Men, and render them more and more tractable either for the Ease of Governours and Magistrates, or else for the Temporal Happiness of Society in general. I think of all Inventions of this Sort, the same which told you of Politeness, that they are the joint Labour of Many, Human Wisdom is the Child of Time.30 Mandeville’s mature thought is characterized by the idea of an unintentional development of human institutions, a natural selection of system of shared feelings of approval and disapproval that gave rise to the ability to live in society and to the development and stabilization of a language related to recognized values. The art of politics itself is the result of a gradual process, of cumulative experience. Mandeville here abandons the figure of the skilful politician entrusted with superhuman tasks as a metaphor of the civilization process in favour of real politicians in flesh and bones. Real-life politicians and rulers are and remain part of a network of relationships, a hierarchy of mutual servitudes, wheels of vast systems, machineries forged over time.31 Even if the possibility and usefulness of a management of social processes in view of the public good are limited, still the rulers must possess the ability to identify the passions at the basis of human actions and wherever possible, address them in the right direction. “Human Nature ought to be humour’d as well as studied: Whoever therefore takes upon him to govern a Multitude, ought to inform himself of those Sentiments that are the natural Result of the Passions and Frailties which every Human Creature is born with.”32 Politicians cannot change human nature, but they must know and understand it well, in order to turn into public benefits the individual self-interested attitudes, exploiting precisely those idealized representations of human nature that most dominate at different times, by humouring, encouraging and promoting existing systems of symbols for the promotion of the self and play with every individual’s desire for praise, however ill-deserved. The principle of honour, especially of modern honour, explains Cleomenes, is characterized by “many Allowances and gross Indulgences to Human Nature” irreconcilable with moral virtue and “diametrically opposite to the doctrine of Christ.” Yet, “the further we look back for these Seven or Eight Hundred years, the more we shall find Honour and Religion blended together.”33 Christianity, like other religions originated from the game 30 31 32 33

Honour, p. 41; Fable II 128. Fable II, p. 184, Cf. Free Thoughts, p. 188. Honour, p. 20. Honour, p. 45.

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of human passions, and similarly to other structures of social interaction, it developed without any deliberate intention, through the permanence of what from time to time proved functional to collective well-being or to the maintenance of social order. In these terms Mandeville distinguishes between the origin of religion and its social function. Alike honour, religion has been exploited by priests and skilled rulers as a social tie, but with less success, because of the difficulties of practicing a true Christian religion. Once again Mandeville employs characteristic arguments of the deist and libertine tradition and uses them for polemical purposes, both to underline  – in contrast with Deism  – the impossibility of rationalizing the message of the Gospel and reconciling it with social utility and to expose the hypocrisy and duplicity of those religious traditions. Christian priests above all, that in order to acquire and control their followers have distorted the original principles of purity and rejection of worldly values.34 2

The History of Pride

Cleomenes singles out two major historical steps in the dynamics of religion and honour in shaping idealized social models of promotion of the self. The first took place in the early centuries of the Christian era, when the Church of Rome demonstrated a formidable worldly wisdom in its devices “to enslave the Laity.”35 Rudiments of barbarian courage were codified in the morality of honour with the creation of the orders of knighthood, transforming the “Simplicity of the Gospel and the Doctrine of Christ into Gaudy Foppery and vile Superstition.”36 By blending rites seemingly sacred with the emblems of vain-glory, creating a mixture of pomp and superstition and “Indulging Some in their Vices, Humouring Others in their Folly, and Flattering the Pride of All” the Church of Rome managed to reconcile “in outward Shew, the Principle of Honour with that of the Christian Religion, and make Men stupidly believe, that the Height of Pride is not inconsistent with the greatest Humility.”37 The notion of honour was thus of capital importance to educate an aristocracy given to the use of arms, to stimulate in them that artificial courage needed to make them fight as fearless warriors, policing at the same time violence in the whole society. In this way honour in medieval and post-medieval Europe 34 35 36 37

Cf. Simonazzi 1999, pp. 352–382. Honour, p. 58. Honour, p. 46. Honour, pp. 46–47.

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has been not only an instrument for the defence of the interests of a privileged elite but also a means for social regulation.38 The second major step in Mandeville’s history of self-liking took place at the beginning of the seventeenth century, with the advent and the spread of the new standard of modern honour and the duelling code. In radically altered social conditions, with the growing power of centralized monarchies the methods employed by the medieval church to tame expressions of courage had lost their psychological force. A display of martial courage by means of a challenge to a duel, regardless of the outcome of the fight, thus became a widespread practice of great symbolic value throughout Europe as a demonstration of the martial bravery that elites could no longer exhibit in war: Where the Principle of Honour was in high Esteem, Vanity and Impatience must have always prompted the most proud and forward to seek after Opportunities of Signalizing themselves, in order to be stiled Men of Honour. This would naturally occasion Quarrelling and Fighting, as it did and had frequently done before the Time I speak of. As Duelling was made a Fashion, the Point of Honour became, of Course, a common Topick of Discourse among the best bred Men: By this Means the Rules for Quarrelling and Punctilio in Behaviour, which at first were very uncertain and precarious, came to be better understood, and refin’d upon from Time to Time, till, in the Beginning of last Century, the Sense of Honour was arrived to such a Degree of Nicety all over Europe, especially in France, that barely looking upon a Man was often taken for an Affront.39 To review the legislation on duelling, its history, the reason of the general failures and the small successes in halting this fashion is sufficient to pinpoint the passions in human nature on which this practice – and the whole code of honour – is based: “The first Check that was given to Duelling, was in the Minority of Louis xiv, and from the Method by which it was prevented at last, it is evident, that Honour is an Idol, by Human Contrivance, rais’d on the Basis of Human Pride.”40 Mandeville, as Daniel Defoe before him, describes the French system of the Court of Honour, created in 1653 by Louis xiv, where the disputes among nobles were settled by their peers.41 The core difficulty 38 39 40 41

Honour, pp. 100, 121–122. Honour p. 63. Honour, p. 65. Daniel Defoe wrote about the French courts of honour in The Review (issues16, 19, 21–23; 1704). A source for Mandeville’s remarks could have been another text attributed to Defoe: The court of honour: or, the laws, rules, and ordinances, establish’d for the suppression of

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of any anti-duelling legislation relies in the effort of abolishing the custom of the single combat “without parting with the Notions of Honour; destroying of which must have been certain Ruin to a warlike Nation, that once had received them.”42 This is the reason why the laws of honour, Mandeville observes, operate in reverse to all others. Instead of controlling and attempting to curb the passions that produce friction, the rules of honour seek “to prevent Mischief, by soothing and flattering the Frailties they point at.”43 The fact that the punishments devised consisted essentially of humiliation and a public apology by the offender is proof that the passion on which those laws are based is selfliking. The unique relationship between the laws of honour and the passions on which they are based has made them particularly attractive and easy to follow, compared to other value systems. The question of the alleged usefulness of religion in war is also a way of measuring the progress of courtesy and honour in its time, and to account for the final stage in the redirection of self-liking into socially useful and safe form of expression. The temporary success of the Puritan revolution, according to Cleomenes, was due to the political efforts of Oliver Cromwell and other ‘saints’ in promoting “an outward Shew of Piety,” departing, as a matter of fact, from true Christianity.44 Cromwell was a “vile wicked Hypocrite, who, under the Cloak of Sanctity, broke through all Human and Divine Laws to aggrandize himself,” basically motivated by ambition and the thirst for immortal fame.45 But he was also and overall a “crafty Politician” whom had studied, understood and was “thoroughly well acquainted with Human Nature.”46 If this skilled manipulator had been born fifty of sixty years later, in the age of Marlborough’s wars, explains Cleomenes, he “would sooner have endeavoured to make all his Soldiers dancing Masters” rather than bigots.47 What in Oliver’s Days was intended by a Mask of Religion and a Shew of Sanctity, is now aim’d at by the Height of Politeness, and a perpetual Attachment to the Principle of modern Honour. There is a Spirit of

42 43 44 45 46 47

duels in France…. Translated from the French original. Publish’d on occasion of the bill now depending … relating to duels. With some observations thereon, by Sir Richard Steele, J. Roberts, T. Jauncy, W. Graves, and J. Stagg, London 1720. The text presents various analogies with Mandeville’s Enquiry, see the preface and the pp. 16 and fwd., and 48 and fwd. of the 1720 edition. Honour, p. 75. Honour, p. 69. Honour, p. 164, p. 231. Honour p. 163. Honour, p. 164, p. 205. Runciman 2010, pp. 58–64. Honour, 233.

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Gentility introduced among military Men, both Officers and Soldiers, of which there was yet little to be seen in the last Century, in any Part of Europe, and which now shines through all their Vices and Debaucheries48 Modern honour has gradually replaced religion on the battlefield. Every commander take recourse to honour to encourage the soldiers to fight: “a finer Stratagem to raise the Passion of Self-liking in Men, than had been invented yet; for by this Means the Gratification of their Vanity is made Part of the Discipline; and their Pride must encrease in Proportion to the Strictness, with which they observe this Duty.”49 Polite, modern manners are but the latest stage in the history of pride. “Honour is of the same Origin with Virtue (…) The Invention of Honour has been far more beneficial to the Civil Society than that of Virtue, and much better answer’d the End for which they were invented.”50 For Mandeville, virtue and honour have the same origin: the hypersensitivity of human nature to the judgement of others. They are simply a form of controlling one’s selfish passions, motivated in turn by another passion, the pursuit of the approval of others. The code of honour is therefore as useful as, and more than, virtue or religion in encouraging the individual to abide by the rules of social behaviour. Men are more influenced by shame and the fear of being publicly blamed than by religious precepts or the thought of punishment in a future life. “A virtuous Man thinks himself obliged to obey the Laws of his Country; but a Man of Honour acts from a Principle which he is bound to believe Superiour to all Laws.”51 By provocatively showing the incompatibility of honour with virtue and religion, Mandeville simultaneously exalts its function as a hierarchical principle and social bond: “But the Invention of Honour, as a Principle, is of a much later Date; and I look upon it as the greater Atchievement by far. It was an Improvement in the Art of Flattery, by which the Excellency of our Species is raised to such a Height, that it becomes the Object of our own Adoration, and Man is taught in good Earnest to worship himself.”52 Reading over again the history of recent civilization through the history of self-liking, of that search for signs of public esteem that underlies the human capacity for socialisation, Mandeville is able to situate modern honour and politeness in the broader framework of the civilization process. The morality of honour in post-medieval Europe was not only an instrument for defending 48 49 50 51 52

Honour, p. 232. Honour, p. 233. Cf. 161. Honour, p. 54. Honour, pp. 42–43; Monro 1975, p. 139 Burtt 1992, p. 140. Honour, p. 4.

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the interests of a privileged elite, but also a pervasive form of social regulation. Modern honour is a form of an entirely secular morality, a principle of conduct fully internal to human nature, it is a shared system of feelings of approval and disapproval wholly independent of teleological considerations or transcendental values. In the new substitute religion of modern honour, individuals have made themselves idols and worshippers of themselves at the same time. Man is an essentially selfish creature which keeps nothing “constantly before his Eyes, as his own dear Self.” On these grounds evolved a religion of honour, a cult of the self: “It was not the Contrivance of one Man, nor could it have been the Business of a few Years, to establish a Notion, by which a rational Creature is kept in Awe for Fear of it Self, and an Idol is set up, that shall be its own Worshiper.”53 To Horatio’s objection that in fearing shame individuals are afraid of the judgment and the eventual ill opinion of others, and not of themselves, Cleomenes replies that it is not “the good or bad Opinion of others that affects us with Joy or Sorrow, Pleasure or Pain; but it is the Notion we form of that Opinion of theirs, and must proceed from the Regard and Value we have for it.”54 The process that Mandeville sketches here seems to entail that our instinctive tendency to search in others confirmation of our opinion of ourselves is somehow modified, bringing us to internalize it, to develop the habit of admonishing ourselves, together with the awareness that what really counts is the approval of those who share our standards. Ultimately it is our own standards, our own approval, that we appeal to.55 “The Object then of Reverence, and the Worshiper, who pays it, meeting and remaining in the same Person, may not such a Person be justly said to adore himself (…) when a Man asserts a Thing upon his Honour, is it not a Kind of Swearing by himself, as others do by God?”56 By denouncing that contemporary moral discourse, as a matter of fact, promoted self-deception and by stressing the hypocritical nature of all social intercourse, Mandeville was combining with the modern view of men as selfseeking, the tradition of courtesy and civility, essentially characterized – from the Renaissance Italian treatises to the Enlightenment’s politeness  – by a compulsive focus on pride and vanity, and continually marked by an internal tension between being and appearing, complaisance and sincerity, internal and external honour. In an age that had made honour a form of self-worship, by anatomizing the manners of his contemporaries Bernard Mandeville 53 54 55 56

Honour p. 41. Honour, p. 41. Monro 1975, p. 139. Honour, p. 87.

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developed a theory of sociability based on sensitivity to praise, from the pride taken in deluding one-self of being a rational animal in the original state-craft manipulation, to the oxymoron of the premeditate, polite manslaughter which is duelling. “That what I call Vices are the Fashionable Ways of Living, the Manners of the Age, that are often practis’d and preach’d against by the same People.”57 In explaining the title of his 1651 work, Hobbes refers to the biblical quotation from the book of Job, of Leviathan as the “King of all the children of pride”.58 If Hobbes’s subjects were the children of pride, who could be kept in line by fear, Mandeville’s philosophical anthropology deals with adult psychological competitors, as he declared: “the Prey and proper Food of a full grown Leviathan.”59 In Fable II, replying to Horatio’s accusation of falling “into the same Error, which you say Hobbes has been guilty of” in depicting the essential “necessitous and helpless Condition” of human beings, Cleomenes adamantly clarified that he was focusing on “Men and Women full grown” gentlefolks of “25 or 30 Thousand Pounds a Year,” with an army of servants and a comprehensive coach pool “and the more extensive their Knowledge is, the higher their Quality, and the greater their Possessions are, the more necessitous and helpless they are in their Nature.”60 Beyond satirical intentions and paradoxical formulations, in all his writings Mandeville endeavoured to remain faithful to a definite methodological option, characterised by the rejection of explanations in terms of final causes, abstract hypotheses and explanatory principles other than those achievable by experience and observation, giving a reconstruction of human nature adequate to the criteria of an experimental and empiricist philosophy. That of Dr. Mandeville appeared to contemporaries as a “licentious system,” marked by sophisms and inconsistencies but by elaborating the idea that the desire for esteem and the fear of shame, controlled by political laws and mediated by rituals of good manners were sufficient to guarantee social coexistence and material progress, Mandeville challenged his contemporaries to question the moral implications of advanced societies, not only promoting the search for a new scene of thought to evaluate the behaviour of the inhabitants of modern commercial societies, but raising also a broader and deeper ethical issue.

57 58 59 60

A Letter to Dion, Occasion’d by his Book call’d Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher, by the author of “the Fable of the Bees” (London: J. Roberts, 1732), p. 31. Hobbes, Leviathan, Part 2, Ch.28; (Job. 41.34); Sagar 2018, p. 36, p. 43. Fable I (1723) p. 355. Fable II, p. 199.

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Mandeville’s Challenge

In summing up Mandeville’s legacy, Maurice Goldsmith pointed out that Hutcheson, Hume and Smith all explicitly rejected what they identified as Mandeville’s views, yet all adopted or absorbed some of the most important aspects of his account of society and morality. They accepted the Dutch doctor and philosopher’s idea that self-regarding behaviour is beneficial to society but discarded Mandeville’s ‘rigoristic’ definitions according to which luxury, selfinterest, pride and the search for honour, are to be reckoned among the vices.61 Only by redrawing the borders between virtue and vice, moving its basis to more utilitarian considerations, were they able to overcome the Mandevillean paradox of the incompatibility of virtue with commerce and honour legitimizing at the same time an acceptable degree of pride, private interest and acquisitive spirit as factors of social stability and economic growth. David Hume assigned to Mandeville an outstanding role in reshaping the criteria of moral evaluation: Those who prove, or attempt to prove, that such refinements rather tend to increase of industry, civility, and arts, regulate anew our moral as well as political sentiments, and represent, as laudable or innocent, what had formerly been regarded as pernicious and blamable.62 Criticizing Mandeville’s ‘licentious system’ Adam Smith has no difficulties in acknowledging personal interest as a decisive motivation of human nature. He considers it not simply non-vicious, but indispensable for moral and economic life: “self-love may frequently be a virtuous motive of action”63 An interested behaviour – if kept among rules of prudence – may be the proper object of that sentiment of sympathetic consideration which stands at the basis of moral approbation. The definition of luxury  – and of that vice  – advanced by Mandeville, are for Smith excessively rigorous. In late eighteenth-century Britain it is no longer a scandalous paradox that private vices are public benefits:

61

62 63

M.M. Goldsmith, “Regulating anew the Moral and Political sentiments of Mankind: Bernard Mandeville and the Scottish Enlightenment”, Journal of History of Ideas, 49, 1988, pp. 603–606. See also Eugenio Lecaldano, Hume e la nascita dell’etica contemporanea (Roma-Bari: 1991) pp. 228–237; Hundert 1994, p. 221. D. Hume, An Enquiry concerning the principles of morals, London 1751. A. Smith, tms, vii.ii.4.8.

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If the love of magnificence, a taste for the elegant arts and improvements of human life, (…) is to be regarded as luxury, sensuality and ostentation, even in those whose situation allows, without any inconveniences, the indulgence of those passions, it is certain that luxury, sensuality and ostentation are publick benefits.64 Yet, Mandeville’s thought, his anatomy of the hidden working of ‘self-liking’ and his reduction of virtue and honour to the pursuit of praise, posed a challenge to a broader and deeper ethical question common to all societies and not exclusive to commercial ones, though probably more acute in the latter: whether morality could be reduced to a concern for the opinion of others.65 By invoking a strictly naturalist argument to explain the hidden working of selfliking Mandeville was able to place upon his opponents the burden of demonstrating that his reduction of fellow-feeling to self-regard was false.66 The purpose of this concluding paragraph is to shed further light on Mandeville’s philosophical anthropology, isolating this specific issue from the ‘moral problem of commercial society’ and examining Adam Smith’s response to Mandeville’s challenge on this particular point, namely that the individual shaped by the morality of sympathy would be pre-eminently a slave to the strong need men have for the approval of their fellows, a criticism that seems to have dogged Smith’s moral philosophy since 1759.67 In a reply to a (lost) letter by Gilbert Eliot of Minto Adam Smith expresses a specific concern about having ‘sufficiently’ answered Mandeville’s assessment on this issue: I would (…) beg of you to read what I say upon Mandevilles system and then consider whether upon the whole I do not make Virtue sufficiently independent of popular opinion. I think, I have made it sufficiently plain that our judgements concerning the conduct of others are founded in Sympathy.68 64 65 66 67

68

A. Smith, tms vii.ii.4 11–12. Thomas A. Horne, “Envy and Commercial Society, Mandeville and Smith on ‘Private Vices, Public Benefits’”, in Political Theory ix, 1981, pp. 551–569. Hundert, p. 137. Paul Sagar, “Smith and Rousseau, after Hume and Mandeville.” Political Theory 46, no. 1 (February 2018): 29–58; Ryan Hanley, “Commerce and Corruption. Rousseau’s Diagnosis and Adam Smith’s Cure,” European Journal of Political Theory 7(2) 137–158, 2008; Nicholas Phillipson, Adam Smith. An Enlightened Life (New Haven: 2010), p. 619. Cf. Fable, ii, p. 75. Letter to Gilbert Eliot of Minto of October 10, 1759; in Adam Smith, The Correspondence, Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, Ed. by E.C. Mossner and I.S. Ross, Vol. vi (Oxford: 1987), pp. 91–97; D.D. Raphael, The Impartial Spectator: Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy (Oxford: 2007), pp. 36–37.

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The most direct response to Mandeville’s reduction of moral behaviour to vanity is elaborated by Smith with the distinction between love of praiseworthiness, of being genuinely worthy of praise as opposed to sheer vanity, the love of mere praise: “The love of praise-worthiness is by no means derived altogether from the love of praise. Those two principles, though they resemble one another, though they are connected, and often blended with one another, are yet, in many respects, distinct and independent of one another”.69 Despite what is assumed in the existing literature, Jean Jacques Rosseau is not Smith’s original target in elaborating the difference between love of praise and love of praiseworthiness. Paul Sagar and Robin Douglass have convincingly argued that this distinction, although employed by Smith against Rousseau (in his words an “Hypocritical Pedant”) was originally worked out as a refutation of Mandeville.70 The broader discussion of the praise/praiseworthiness distinction was added by Smith in 1790, in the 6th edition, in the heavily revised and extended Chapter 2 of Part iii. He had already addressed it in a chapter of Part vii, one of the oldest of the tms, dedicated to a critique of Mandeville. No other author is honoured with such an extensive treatment. By 1790 Smith was aware that his attempts to distance himself from the author of The Fable of the Bees needed further effort. In an anecdote about Smith published by The Times of London on 16 August 1790, a few weeks after his death, Smith was said to have embraced entirely the position of merchants in his lectures, and “converted the chair of Moral Philosophy into a professorship of trade and finance.”71 Edward Gibbon regretted that Smith “proves, perhaps too severely, that the most salutary effects have flowed from the meanest and most selfish causes.”72 Thomas Reid in a letter to his friend and philosophical confident Lord Kames, dated October 27, 1778 bluntly wrote that: “I have always thought Dr. Smith’s System of Sympathy wrong. It is indeed onely a Refinement of the selfish System.”73 These observations seem to confirm the practice, common in the late eighteenth century, of reading The Wealth of Nations along the grid provided by Mandeville’s Fable, 69 70

71 72 73

tms iii.2.2. Paul Sagar, “Smith and Rousseau, after Hume and Mandeville.” Political Theory 46, no. 1 (February 2018): 29–58; Robin Douglass, “Morality and Sociability in Commercial Society: Smith, Rousseau-And Mandeville​”, in The Review of Politics, 79, 2017, pp. 597–620, Correspondence, 98. Smith to Hume, July 6, 1766; p. 167. Hundert p. 234; Donald Winch, “Adam Smith: Scottish moral philosopher as political economist,” The Historical Journal, 35, 1992, pp 91–113. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Volume 8, Paris, Baudry’s European Library, 1840, Nota 92, p. 288, Chap. 70. David Fate Norton and J.C. Stewart-Robertson; “Thomas Reid on Adam Smith’s Theory of Morals,” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 41, No. 3 (1980), pp. 381–398.

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thus effectively separating Smith’s moral philosophy from his political economy, somehow pre-dating the so-called Adam Smith’s Problem.74 In Chapter 2 of Part iii of the tms, to defuse the idea that all virtuous actions derive from vanity, Smith emphasises the strength and naturalness in human nature of the desire to be the object of praise: “Men (…) desires not only praise, but praise-worthiness; or to be that thing which, though it should be praised by nobody, is, however, the natural and proper object of praise.”75 Smith argues that “Nature has endowed men not only with a desire of being approved, but with a desire of being what ought to be approved.” The first desire could only have prompted men to the affectation of virtue, and to the concealment of vice. The second desire, to be what ought to be approved, was necessary to inspire him with the real love of virtue. “In every well-formed mind this second desire seems to be the strongest of the two.”76 His arguments are evidently aimed at refuting Mandeville: Some splenetic philosophers, in judging of human nature, have done as peevish individuals are apt to do in judging of the conduct of one another, and have imputed to the love of praise, or to what they call vanity, every action which ought to be ascribed to that of praise–worthiness. I shall here – after have occasion to give an account of some of their systems, and shall not at present stop to examine them.77 Smith writes here in the plural, recalling the plural title of vii.ii.4, “Of Licentious Systems” which in edition 1 to 5 of the tms ranked La Rochefoucauld together with Mandeville, but in the 6th edition the reference to La Rochefoucauld was deleted, after the protest of a descendant of the Duke at having his ancestor’s name associated with that of Mandeville.78 It appears to be one of the oldest part of the tms, probably elaborated from Smith’s early lectures on moral philosophy and the history of ethics.79 Smith’s attack on Mandeville follows two main lines, one concerning the definition of terms, the other his description of moral psychology. The first argument of the author of the Theory of Moral Sentiments is that Mandeville reduced a quite wide range of passions and motives to the single concept of vanity alone. According to Smith, Mandeville in this regard exploited the 74 75 76 77 78 79

Hundert 1994, 234. tms iii.2.1. tms iii.ii 24 and iii.2.7. tms iii.2.27. tms Note 1 to p. 308; Smith’s Correspondence, p. 233. D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie, “Introduction”, in tms, p. 4; Sagar 2016.

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ambiguity of the English language and the want of a terminology which describes the middle degree of passions, that in the majority of cases, is the one we are led to sympathize with, and to approve. Mandeville’s “ingenious sophistry” is “covered by the ambiguity of language. There are some of our passions which have no other names except those which mark the disagreeable and offensive degree.”80 This is “the great fallacy of Dr. Mandeville’s book:” by representing as vicious every passion “which is so in any degree and in any direction,” he is able to treat everything “which has any reference, either to what are, or to what ought to be the sentiments of others” as vanity, “and it is by means of this sophistry, that he establishes his favourite conclusion, that private vices are public benefits.”81 Smith’s second strategy is to question Mandeville’s description of moral psychology. His stated intent is to show, against Mandeville, that “the desire of doing what is honourable and noble, of rendering ourselves the proper object of esteem and approbation, cannot, with any propriety, be called vanity” and “even the love of well-grounded fame and reputation does not deserve that name.”82 According to Smith “Dr. Mandeville considers whatever is done from a sense of propriety, from a regard to what is commendable and praise-worthy, as being done from a love of praise and commendation, or as he calls it from vanity.” Mandeville is persuaded – Smith writes – that among selfish passions, vanity is the strongest. And when one appears to sacrifice his own interest to that of others, he is simply trying to please and to be “agreeable” to other people’s self-love. Man is flattered by other people’s approval “and he flatters himself with the belief that [his conduct] is entirely disinterested.” When man seems to act for public spirit, when he seems to prefer public to private interest, he is in reality just as selfish as in any other occasion. In this way, Smith concludes – paraphrasing Mandeville – human virtue, “is the mere offspring of flattery begot upon pride.”83 Smith’s position on Mandeville, notwithstanding his eagerness to differentiate himself from the author of The Fable of the Bees, is more complicated than his straightforward attack may suggest. On the one hand, Smith denies Mandeville’s assertion that ostensibly virtuous actions aim only at gaining approval, but on the other hand he accepts that virtue aims at deserving it, and that even the most perfect one contains “some reference, though not to what

80 81 82 83

tms vii.ii.4.11. tms vii.ii.4.12. tms vii.ii.4.8. tms vii.ii.4.7. Cf. Fable I; p. 51.

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is, yet to what in reason and propriety ought to be, the opinion of others.”84 Smith also shares with Mandeville the idea that human ethical capacities are rooted in the repeated interaction of judging and being judged in turn, that we develop our conscience as members of an audience, training ourselves to meet the expectations of this audience of which we are a part. In refuting Mandeville, Smith acknowledges the striking similarities that the Dutch physician and philosopher exploited. “There is an affinity  – Smith writes  – between the desire of becoming what is honourable and estimable, and the desire of honour and esteem, there is an affinity between the love of virtue and the love of true glory, as both these passions aim at acquiring esteem and approbation.”85 In this sense, the celebrity of Mandeville’s system derived from its being very close to the truth. Mandeville’s notions, Smith writes, are “in almost every respect erroneous” yet there are some “appearances in human nature (…) which seem[s] at first sight to favour them.” Mandeville’s doctrines owe their fame to “an air of truth and probability” they have. In brief, according to Smith, Mandeville’s licentious system had a tremendous success because “in some respect bordered upon the truth.”86 Without claiming, in this brief conclusion, to offer a comprehensive assessment of the fairness and eventual success of Smith’s refutation of Mandeville, it is worth noting that the issues raised by Mandeville’s insistence on the role of the Point of Honour, in a society that we keep calling ‘commercial’, but that for the author of The Fable of the Bees, was also and overall the age of Politeness, are such that to embarrass even an impartial, well informed spectator. When Smith in the tms has to offer an example of sympathy, actually one of the very first examples, he chooses to examine the problem of resentment for an offense: “The man who resents the injuries that have been done to me, and observes that I resent them precisely as he does, necessarily approves of my resentment” and in the Lectures in Jurisprudence Smith writes:

84 85

86

tms vii.2.4.10; Luban, “Adam Smith on Vanity, Domination, and History”; Modern Intellectual History, 9, 2, (2012) pp. 275–302. tms vii.ii.9. Cf. David Hume: Of the Dignity and Meannes of Human Nature “Vanity is so closely allied to virtue, and to love the fame of laudable actions approaches so near the love of laudable actions for their own sake, that these passions are more capable of mixture than any other kind of affection; and it is impossible to have the latter without some degree of the former. (…) To love the glory of virtuous deeds is a sure proof of the love of virtue.” tms vii.ii.4.6 and vii.ii.4.14.

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Affronts in company are most atrocious crimes. (…) The injury does not consist in the hurt that is done but in the necessity it puts one to; either of exposing his life in a duel, or being for ever after despised and contemned as a poor, mean-spirited, faint-hearted wretch by those of his own rank, from whose company he will be ever afterwards excluded.87 What about an affront to a woman? The trav’ler, if he chance to stray, May turn uncensur’d to his way; Polluted streams again are pure, And deepest wounds admit a cure: But woman! no redemption knows; The wounds of Honour never Close.88 87 88

tms i.i.3.i; Lectures on Jurisprudence, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, p. 480. Edward Moore, “The Female Seducers,” in Fables for the Female Sex, J. Franklin, London 1761 (5th edition), p. 116.

Conclusions A pivotal task in Mandeville’s scholarship has been and remain the analysis of his writings in the context of the contemporary ideological disputes in which he was involved, and of the sources and the strategies he employed in his whole project. The aim of this research was to restore the question of honour to its rightful place in Mandeville’s work. Honour and the dynamics of passions on which society is built are at the core of his life-long philosophical enterprise. Writing on women’s education and standing in society, on chastity, duelling, virtue and commerce, luxury, politeness, prostitution, the origin of society and the political use of religion and honour, Mandeville “perhaps the first western thinker to develop a coherent, purely secular, conception of society,” provoked his contemporaries with the idea that codes of morality and conduct commonly held as grounded in religion, tradition and nature are not absolute, objective standards but relative, self-serving ones.1 In his thought, the key traditional virtues of male and female honour, courage and chastity, far from being outward expressions of inner virtuous attitudes, can be explained as the exemplary expression of the social effects of pride and fear of shame, manifestations of a spontaneous and artificial order resulting from a natural disposition of human passions. Pride, in the Christian canon “the beginning of all sins,” even the root of all others, has traditionally been regarded as the most anti-social of vices, the main impediment to the birth, development and proper functioning of society. But pride has also always maintained an ambiguous status, revealed by its synonyms: it corresponds to vanity, vainglory and arrogance, but also to self-respect, self-esteem and the drive to seek excellence in one’s field of action.2 In his treatment of the counter-evidential usefulness for society of the vice of pride – when redirected rather than suppressed or controlled – Mandeville inaugurated the process of secularisation and modernization of the theory of passions later developed by the Scots.3 In addition to identifying Mandeville a key author of the articulated and prolonged reflection around the centrality of individual recognition and as a 1 Israel 2007, p. 19. 2 Lorenzo Greco, “On Pride,” in Humana Mente Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2019, Vol. 35, pp. 101–123; Craig A. Boyd “Pride and Humility: Tempering the Desire for Excellence,” in Virtues and their Vices, in K. Timpe and C.A. Boyd (eds.) (Oxford-New York: 2014), pp. 245– 266; Michael E. Dyson, Pride (Oxford-New York: 2006); Stanford M. Lyman, The Seven Deadly Sins: Society and Evil. Revised and Expanded Edition (Lanham, MD: 1989). 3 Lecaldano 2003, pp. 63–66; Sagar 2018, pp. 42–49; Paul Russell, The Riddle of Hume’s Treatise: Skepticism, Naturalism, and Irreligion (New York-Oxford: 2008), pp. 245–246.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/9789004428430_010

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crucial intermediate figure between Hobbes and the authors of the Scottish Enlightenment, the perspective of honour may be useful in addressing two significant, independent but related questions in Mandeville research: the harmonic reconciliation of private and public interests and question of the possibility and limits of political intervention. Bernard Mandeville’s own complain on his early fame, of having been “strangely treated” may be reasonably applied to his later, posthumous fortune in intellectual history, for centuries almost exclusively dominated by the readings developed by historian of economic thought.4 In the twentieth century the author of The Fable of the Bees was seen as a prophet of economic individualism and market freedom, a founding father of economic liberalism, a staunch promoter and defender of ‘expansive individualism’ in an heroic and triumphant phase of capitalism, the protagonist and the embodiment of a critical transition marked by a shift from traditional morality to utilitarian ethics and by the emancipation of economics from morality.5 Bernard Mandeville become thus a cipher, “less the person who wrote an infamous book, than an ideologically charged symbol,” essentially for having allegedly set the preconditions for the emergence of the homo economicus by stressing the autonomy of the economic sphere from morality and religion.6 For Mandeville, the general outcome of the self-interested behaviour of the inhabitants of a large commercial society may be the collective good, but not necessarily. Mandeville is not a theorist of the spontaneous harmony of interests. His constant distrust in a teleological perspective – a providential view of nature in any form, and especially of human nature – also applies to political and economic balances. Mandeville’s mature thought is characterized by the idea of an impersonal process, an unintentional development of human institutions, a natural selection of systems of shared feelings of approval and disapproval that give rise to the ability to live in society, and the development and stabilization of a language related to the recognized values of virtue, honour, and respectability. With his survey of the forms of honourable conduct characterizing the moral history of post-Medieval Europe Mandeville exemplified how the harmony of interests is not independent from the actions of the legislators. The art of politics itself is the result of a gradual process. Rulers 4 Dion, p. 34. Cf. Castiglione 1989 and Castiglione 1992. 5 Roncaglia 2005, p. 84; Terence Hutchison, Before Adam Smith: The Emergence of Political Economy, 1662–1776 (Oxford-New York: 1988); p. 125; Elena Pulcini, L’individuo senza passioni. Individualismo moderno e perdita del legame sociale (Milano: 2011), pp. 73–76; Louis Dumont, “The Emancipation of Economics from Morality: Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees”, in Social Science Information 14, 1975, pp. 35–52. 6 Hundert 1994, p. 2 Castiglione 1992, p. 158.

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and administrators are and remain part of a network of relationships, a hierarchy of mutual servitudes, wheels of vast systems, machineries forged over time. Politicians cannot change human nature, but they must possess the ability to understand it in order to turn into public benefits the individual selfinterested attitudes, exploiting precisely those idealized representations of human nature that most dominate at different times. The Christian saint, the citizen of the ancient republics, the learned courtier and the noble warrior are all anachronistic ideals in the competitive commercial society of the early eighteenth century, but the principles shared in the last centuries by the ruling elites are still paramount in their function of social bond. For Mandeville the synchronic harmony of a multiplicity of individual interests is not natural and spontaneous, but rather the outcome of the intentional intervention of political authority, exercised by playing human passions against one another in the framework of those aggrandized images of the self, grounded in pride, those social roles made available by the gradual, evolutionary process. Political obligation, for Mandeville is grounded on the love of the self and not on reason, and it can only develop within a system of values that cannot be reduced only to written laws, nor to the mere economic interest. ‘What became of Mandeville’s honour and politeness in the contemporary world?’ After having been considered an obsolete value system, characteristic of pre-modern societies that were highly hierarchical, patriarchal and violent, the concept of honour has in recent decades been the subject of renewed interest from scholars, opening up a reappraisal of its potential functions.7 To bring Mandeville’s reflection on self-liking, on individuals’ awareness of overestimating themselves, and on their constant need to have their high opinion of themselves confirmed by others to the present, it is perhaps worth to examine the vocabulary of respect, loyalty, dignity and humiliation, as well as the contemporary world of frequent, fast and inclusive communication, of gossip, cooperation & reputation, online shaming, calls-out and cancellations.8 In the ‘public goods game’, players receive an initial capital and can anonymously choose to donate some or none of it to a ‘public goods’ project. Donations are increased by a given factor and redistributed evenly among all players, regardless of whether they have contributed or not. The greatest benefit is obtained if everyone donates, but individual players gain the most if they preserve their 7 P. Olsthoorn, Honor in Political and Moral Philosophy, New York, 2015; W. Kaufman, Understanding Honor: Beyond the Shame/Guilt Dichotomy, Social Theory and Practice, Vol. 37, No. 4, October 2011. 8 F. Giardini and R. Wittek, Gossip, Reputation, and Sustainable Cooperation: Sociological Foundations, in The Oxford Handbook of Gossip and Reputation, F. Giardini and R. Wittek eds. (2019), pp. 24–47.

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capital and take advantage of the generosity of others. In general, players exercise this ‘rational’ self-interest and cooperation rapidly declines. In one particular version of the test, two additional experimental conditions were added: players were instructed that the two least generous individuals after a series of rounds would be exposed to the group, as would the two players who were most generous.9 As a result, the reputational effects stimulated by shame and honour led to about 50% more donations to the public good than in a control group. In what forms could honour be a resource to motivate cooperation, encourage groups to maintain shared resources and inspire individuals to respect themselves and the others? Would it be possible to stop violence against women and reverse the abominable practice of ‘honour killing’ by shaming and dishonouring violent males? Would it be possible to reduce corruption by shaming and insulating all those corrupt politicians who accept bribes to grant public contracts, knowing that the quality of the final product will be much lower than what would be necessary or safe? Can we imagine that the tragedy of migrants dying in the Mediterranean Sea in an attempt to reach Europe could be perceived as a disgrace, a dishonour, a national shame for those countries that do not provide help or do not receive them in a dignified manner? Bernard Mandeville would label all this as “a vain eutopia seated in the Brain.”10 9

10

J. Jacquet et al., “Shame, honour and cooperation,” Biology Letters (2011) 7, 899–901. See also D. Sznycer, et al (2017). “Cross-cultural regularities in the cognitive architecture of pride,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 114(8), 1874–1879. Fable I, p. 36.

Bibliography

Works by Bernard Mandeville



Original Editions and Recent Reprints

Bernardi a Mandeville, de Medicina Oratio Scholastica Rotterdam, Regneri Leers, 1685. Disputatio Philosophica de Brutorum Operationibus, by Bernardus de Mandeville, Leyden: Abraham Elzevier, 1689. Disputatio Medica Inauguralis de Chylosi by Bernardus de Mandeville, Leyden: Abraham Elzevier, 1689. Schijnheyligh Atheist, Rotterdam 1690 (attributed to Mandeville). In authorem de usu interno cantharidum scribentum, in Joannem Groenvelt, M.D., Tutus Cantharidum in Medicina Usus Internus (2nd ed., London, 1703; 3rd edition, London, 1706). Translated by John Marten as Upon the Author, Treating of the Internal Use of Cantahrides, in John Greenfield, A Treatise of the Safe, Internal Use of Cantharides in the Practice of Physick, London, 1706. The Pamphleteers: A Satyr, London 1703. Some Fables after the Easie and Familiar Method of Monsieur de la Fontaine, London Richard Wellington, 1703. Aesop Dress’d; or A Collection of Fables Writ in Familiar Verse. By B. Mandeville M.D. (London: Printed for Richard Wellington, 1704; London, Sold at Lock’s Head, 1704). Typhon: or The Wars Between the Gods and Giants; A Burlesque Poem in Imitation of the Comical Mons. Scarron (London: Printed for J. Pero & S. Illidge, and sold by J. Nutt, 1704). The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves Turn’d Honest (London: Printed for Sam. Ballard, at the Blue-Ball, in Little Britain: And Sold by A. Baldwin, in Warwick-Lane, 1705). Pirated edition “Printed in the year 1705”. A Sermon Preach’d at Colchester, to the Dutch Congregation, by the Reverend C. Schrevelius, trans. by B.M., M.D. (London, 1708). The Virgin Unmask’d; or Female Dialogues betwixt an Elderly Maiden Lady and her Niece on Several Diverting Discourses on Love, Marriage, Memoirs and Morals &c of the Times (London: J. Morphew and J. Woodward, 1709). Reissued as The Mysteries of Virginity (London: J. Morphew, 1714); 2nd ed. by Bernard Mandeville (London: G. Strahan, W. Meers, J. Stagg, 1724), reissued (London: A. Bettesworth, C. Hitch, 1731). Reprint of 1 edition, intro by Stephen H. Good (Delmar, NY: 1975). The Female Tatler, by “A Society of Ladies” (London, A. Baldwin, 1709–10). Modern edition: By a Society of Ladies: Bernard Mandeville’s Essays in the “Female Tatler” Edited, with an introduction and notes, M.M. Goldsmith (Bristol: 1999).

164

Bibliography

A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions, Vulgarly Call’d the Hypo in Men and Vapours in Women, in which the Symptoms, Causes, and Cure of those Diseases are set forth after a Method intirely new. The whole interspers’d, with Instructive Discourses on the Real Art of Physick it self; and entertaining Remarks on the Modern Practice of Physicians and Apothecaries: Very useful to all, that have the Misfortune to stand in need of either. In three dialogues by B. de Mandeville, M.D. (London: Printed for the author D. Leach, W. Taylor, John Woodward, 1711); reissued, 1715; 3rd ed. (designated as the second edition on the title page) published as A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysteric Diseases (London: Printed for J. Tonson in the Strand, 1730). Modern edition: A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Diseases (1730), Ed. by Sylvie Kleiman-Lafon (Cham, CH: 2017). Wishes to a Godson, with Other Miscellany Poems. By B.M. (London: Printed for J. Baker, 1712). Reprint: (Exeter: 1975). The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits (London: J. Roberts, 1714), two editions. 2nd edition, Edmund Parker, 1723; 3rd edition, J. Tonson, 1724; 4th edition, 1725; 5th edition 1728; 6th edition, 1729; “6th edition,” 1732. Modern edition: The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits ed. F.B. Kaye, 2 vols. (Oxford: 1924). Reissued in facsimile edition (Indianapolis: 1988). The Mischiefs that Ought Justly to be Apprehended from a Whig-Government (London: J. Roberts, 1714). Reprint, intro. by H.T. Dickinson (Los Angeles: 1975). Free Thoughts on Religion, the Church and National Happiness, by B.M. (London T. Jauncy, J. Roberts, 1720); reissued, T. Warner, 1721; “by the author of the Fable of the Bees” (J. Brotherton, 1723); 2nd ed., enlarged, by B.M., 1729. Modern edition: ed. and intro. by Irwin Primer (New Brunswick and London: 2001). St. James’ Journal, Saturday April 20, 1723; Saturday May 11, 1723. A Modest Defence of Publick Stews: or, an Essay Upon Whoring as it is now Practis’d in these Kingdoms, “Written by a Layman” (London: A. Moore, 1724). Modern edition: Bernard Mandeville’s “A Modest Defence of Publick Stews” Prostitution and Its Discontents in Early Georgian England, ed. by Irwin Primer (New York-Basingstoke: 2006). The British Journal, Saturday January 27, 1725; Saturday February 3, 1725; Saturday February 10, 1725; Saturday February 17, 1725; Saturday February 24, 1725; Saturday April 3, 1725; Saturday May 1, 1725. An Enquiry into the Causes of the Frequent Executions at Tyburn: and a Proposal for some Regulations concerning Felons in Prison, and the Good Effects to be Expected from Them by B. Mandeville, M.D. (London, J. Roberts, 1725). Reprint: intro. M.M. Goldsmith (London: 1971). The Fable of the Bees, Part II, “By the Author of the First” (London: J. Roberts, 1729; 1730; 2nd edition, 1733. Later editions of both volumes, 1734, 1755 (2), 1772, 1795 (2). Modern editions: The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits ed. F.B. Kaye, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1924).

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Index of Names and Subjects Abbadie, Jacques 8, 68, 70 abortion and infanticide 112–113 Addison, Joseph 1, 3–4, 17, 62, 79 n. 3, 96, 105–106 anatomy 19–20, 23, 40, 43–44, 48, 56, 75, 89, 98, 106, 109, 115, 120–121, 137, 152 anger 93 animals 23, 28–29, 36, 83, 92–93, 131, 133 animal spirits 75–76 Anne, Queen of Great Britain 33, 91 Aretino, Pietro 41 Aristotle 16, 52, 74, 93 artifice and nature 92–95, 129–131 arts and sciences, development of 39, 129–130 Astell, Mary 41, 47 atheism 143 Augustine of Hyppo 59, 115 Baglivi, Giorgio 74 Bartholin, Kaspar 116 Bayle, Pierre 9, 14, 19, 23, 32, 47, 50, 52 n. 55, 59, 68, 70, 86, 90 n. 48, 94–95, 103, 111–113, 115, 143 Beau Monde 119, 122 Beccaria, Cesare 14 benevolence 122–123 Berkeley, George 9, 90 Beverwijck, Johan van 47 Bickerstaff, Isaac 51–52, 57–61 Bluet, George 102 Bortius, Johannes 25 Boyle, Robert 23 Browne, Richard 26–27 Butler, Joseph 8–9, 68, 126–127 Butler, Samuel 34 Campbell, Archibald 102 Castiglione, Dario 9, 42 n. 16, 115 n. 80, 117, 127 n. 37, 159 n. 4, 6 charity 70, 99–101, 103 charity schools 99–101 Charles II, King of England 61 chastity 1–5, 17, 20, 52–53, 94, 98, 111–112, 115, 117

Cheyne, George 72 Chorier, Nicolas 42 Christianity 141–142, 144 Chudleigh, Mary 41 civility 4, 6, 17, 20, 62–63, 69, 79, 90, 97 n. 75, 105, 107, 109, 124, 149, 151 civilization process 12–13, 58, 130, 140–144, 148 civil society 11, 81, 95, 112, 148 Columbus, Realdo 116 commerce 7, 11, 35–36, 151, 158 commercial society 7, 34, 71, 101, 109–110, 152, 159, 171 complaisance 17, 105–107, 149 Condillac, Ètienne Bonnet de 131 conjectural history 50, 119, 132–135 Cook, Harold John 8, 24 n. 11, 12, 25 n. 13, 14, 27, 66 n. 38, 74 n. 61, 76 n. 68 Costerman, Cornelius 25 courage 3, 5, 17, 53, 63, 66, 79, 92–96, 110, 121,    125, 138, 142, 145–148, 158 courts 110, 128 Crell, John 26 Cromwell, Oliver 62, 147 Darwin, Charles 10 Defoe, Daniel 39, 89 n. 44, 146 De Graaf, Reigner 116 Deism 71, 84, 130, 145 De la Court, Johan and Pieter 9, 24–25, 32 Dennis, John 9, 102 Descartes, René 9, 14, 40, 92–93 dialogical form 43–45, 72–73, 119–120 double standard 3, 18, 43, 112, 117, 124 Douglass, Robin 85 n. 27, 87 n. 31, 107 n. 37, 108 n. 45, 109 n. 50, 122 n. 16, 153 Drake, James 116 duelling 4–5, 14, 16, 18, 20, 56, 61–64, 67, 79, 89, 91–92, 96, 110, 121, 123–124, 138, 146, 150, 158 Eliot of Minto, Gilbert 152 envy 93, 152 n. 65 Erasmus, Desiderius 8, 68

197

Index of Names and Subjects Fallopius, Gabriel 116 fear 18, 21, 29, 44, 60, 70, 80, 90, 93–96, 106, 112–113, 123–125, 132, 138–139, 141–142, 148, 150, 158 female education 2–5, 41, 46–50, 53–55, 112–114, 116 Fénelon, François, de Salignac de la Mothe-  36 Fiddes, Richard 102 flattery 14, 20–21, 80–83, 95, 105, 107, 128, 132, 148, 155 Franklin, Benjamin 102 Galen 73 Gassendi, Pierre 9, 59, 68, 88 Gay, John 120 Gibbon, Edward 153 Goldsmith, Maurice Mark 4 n. 12, 13, 5 n. 14, 6 n. 17, 7 n. 20, 8 n. 24, 10 n. 30, 11, 36 n. 35, 37 n. 38, 42 n. 16, 47, 50 n. 46, 51 n. 51, 52–53, 56 n. 2, 57 n. 5, 59 n. 6, 60 n. 12, 14, 15, 16, 63 n. 28, 68 n. 44, 78 n. 1, 84, 93 n. 59, 94 n. 64, 151 government 25, 49, 58, 93, 106, 132–133 Groenevelt, Johannes 26–27 Guide, Philip 26 Hamilton, James 4th Duke of Hamilton 89 happiness 97, 109, 127, 144 Harrington, James 49 Hayek, Friedrich von 10 Henry II, King of France 112 Hippocrates 74 n. 61, 75 Hobbes, Thomas 7, 9, 11, 14, 36, 61, 79, 88, 93, 102, 105, 130, 133, 150, 159 Hogarth, William 138 n. 2 Home, Henry Lord Kames 153 honour 1–5, 12–14, 32, 44, 46, 51–54, 61–66, 70, 78–79, 87–91, 105, 110, 120, 137–140, 142–144, 151–152, 160–161 definition of 12–16, 87–88, 141 modern 13–18, 63–64, 79, 90, 95–97, 105, 141, 144–148 point of 3–4, 12, 16–17, 62, 64, 70, 90, 110–112, 124, 146, 156 Horne, Thomas 11 n. 33, 65 n. 32, 67 n. 42, 69 n. 47, 48, 99 n. 2, 125 n. 30, 152 n. 65, 180

human nature 5, 8, 11, 13, 17–19, 21, 32, 43, 67–71, 73, 77, 79, 82, 84, 86, 88–89, 94– 95, 98, 100–103, 106, 120–122, 124–125, 127, 134–135, 137, 144, 146, 148–151, 154, 156, 159–160 Hume, David 8, 10–11, 14, 68, 85, 137 n. 1, 151, 156 n. 85 Hundert, Edward J. 11, 32 n. 25, 34 n. 29, 69 n. 48, 70 n. 50, 88 n. 39, 96 n. 72, 101 n. 11, 103 n. 18, 105 n. 32, 109 n. 51, 114 n. 76, 126 n. 34, 35, 132 n. 62, 63, 151 n. 61, 152 n. 66, 153 n. 71, 154 n. 74, 159 n. 6 Hutcheson, Francis 8–9, 85, 102, 151 hypochondria 71–77 hypocrisy 6, 16, 28, 35–36, 40, 79, 87, 100, 103–109, 122–123, 139, 145 hysteria 72–75 Jansenism 69 n. 47 Johnson, Samuel 8 justice 11, 53, 64, 69, 123 Kaye, Frederick Benjamin 9 n. 27, 10, 68–69, 119 n. 1, 2, 131 n. 55 La Bruyère, Jean de 68, 105 La Calmette, François de 27 La Fontaine, Jean de 28, 50 language, origin of 130–132 La Rochefoucauld, François de 9, 68–69, 71, 107, 154 law 91–92, 133–135 Lawrence, Elizabeth 26 Lecaldano, Eugenio 93 n. 58, 151 n. 61, 158 n. 3 Le Moyne, Pierre 53 L’Estrange, Roger 28 Locke, John 8–9, 40, 69, 74 n. 61, 76, 91, 105 Louis XIV, King of France 48, 50, 146 Luban, Daniel 17 n. 55, 88 n. 39, 89 n. 42, 104 n. 22, 109, 122 n. 16, 156 n. 84 Lucretia 52, 94 lust 93, 111–115 luxury 7, 34–35, 60, 102, 109–110, 151–152, 158 Lycurgus 135 Machiavelli, Niccolò 7, 79, 80 n. 5 Magri, Tito 87, 130 n. 52, 184

198 Mandeville, Michael de 23, 25 manners 1, 6, 16, 18–19, 46, 49–51, 61–63, 79, 96–99, 104, 109, 121–122, 124, 128, 148–150 marriage 39–42, 45–47, 117–118 Marshall, John 42 Marx, Karl 9 materialism 66 n. 38, 76–77, 109 medicine 9, 23–27, 40, 46, 56, 71–77, 112, 121 Misson, François Maximilien 53 Mitelli, Giuseppe Maria 30–31 modesty 43–44, 94, 111–113 Mohun, Charles 4th Baron Mohun 89 Monro, Hector 11 n. 33, 148 n. 51, 149 n. 55 morals 7, 62, 98–99, 106–108, 151 Nicole, Pierre 9, 32, 68–70, 86, 100, 107 Obizzi, Susanna 52 Ogibly, John 28 Paets, Adriaan 24 Parker, Thomas, 1st Earl of Macclesfield 6 Partridge, John 57 Pascal, Blaise 32, 59, 68 passions 1–2, 6–7, 11–13, 17–20, 24, 28, 32, 34–36, 43–44, 51, 56, 58, 66–68, 70, 73, 76, 78–79, 82, 84–86, 88, 93–96, 99, 104, 107, 109–110, 112, 117, 121–122, 124–125, 127, 132–134, 136, 138–142, 144, 146, 148, 152, 154–156, 158, 160 Patin, Guy 112 Pechey, John 26 Peltonen, Markku 14 n. 43, 17 n. 53, 61 n. 69, 62, 63 n. 25, 89 n. 43, 91 n. 53, 97 n. 95, 105 n. 26, 106 n. 34, 107 n. 40, 109, 110 n. 52, 128 n. 41 pity 79, 96, 100–101 Plato 32, 75, 135 Plutarch 53 Pocock, John Greville Agard 10 n. 32, 11, 33 n. 28, 45 n. 27, 106 n. 34 politeness 6, 17, 98, 105–109, 119–122, 125, 127–128, 137, 140, 148–149, 158, 160 politician, skilful 60, 81–85, 93–94, 114, 134–136, 144 Poulain de La Barre, François 47 n. 36, 48, 50–51, 168, 190

Index of Names and Subjects praise, love of 32, 46, 49, 67–68, 78, 80–81, 83–86, 88, 97–98, 100, 107–108, 113, 119, 134, 138, 140, 142, 144, 150, 152–155 pride 12–15, 18–20, 28, 32, 43, 60, 64, 67, 69, 71, 73, 78–85, 87, 89–90, 95, 108–109, 114, 122, 124–126, 129, 133, 137, 140, 148–149, 151, 155, 158, 160, 161 n. 9 Primer, Irwin 18, 19 n. 56, 42 n. 16, 65 n. 37, 95 n. 70, 103 n. 18, 19, 107 n. 38, 109, 116, 135 n. 77, 141 n. 18, 142 n. 25 prostitution 18, 21, 41, 98, 114–115, 158 public-spirit ideology 4–6, 11, 17, 52, 57, 60, 81–85, 99 Reid, Thomas 153 religion 4, 6, 19, 70, 83–84, 90, 97, 101–102, 112, 122–123, 130, 136–137, 142, 145, 147–149, 158–159 republicanism 24, 83 Roberts, John 78 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 14, 101, 153 Sagar, Paul 11, 12 n. 36, 106 n. 33, 120 n. 9, 126 n. 33, 133 n. 64, 150 n. 58, 152 n. 67, 153, 154 n. 79, 158 n. 3 Saint-Évremond 32 Sarazin, Jean-François de 50 Scarron, Paul 29 Schurman, Anna Maria van 47 Scribano, Maria Emanuela 10, 11 n. 33, 70 n. 52, 82 n. 14, 83 n. 19, 95 n. 68, 113 n. 70, 126 n. 33, 130 n. 52, 143 n. 26 self-deception 20, 87, 106, 108, 123, 149 self-denial 81–82, 85, 88, 100, 103, 107, 114, 139 self-liking 12–13, 21, 66, 110, 125–127, 134, 137, 140–141, 146–148, 152 self-love 25, 66–67, 69–70, 77, 80, 100, 107, 109, 122, 125–127, 134, 140, 151, 155 self-preservation 66, 93–94, 101, 124, 126, 132, 138 Senguerd, Wolferd 24 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of 8–9, 17, 20–21, 98, 103–107, 110, 119, 121–122, 126, 129–130, 139 Shakespeare, William 65 shame 12, 18–20, 80, 86–90, 94–96, 106–114, 122–125, 129, 140, 142, 148–150, 158, 161

199

Index of Names and Subjects Sharp, Jane 116 Simonazzi, Mauro 22 n. 4, 24, 26 n. 15, 74 n. 61, 75 n. 64, 80 n. 5, 93 n. 58, 109 n. 50, 120 n. 6, 129 n. 49, 132 n. 61, 138 n. 2, 145 n. 34 Smith, Adam 8, 9 n. 28, 11, 14, 21, 62, 85, 86 n. 29, 105 n. 30, 137, 151–157 sociability 1, 11–12, 17–20, 32, 56, 58, 60, 71, 78, 85, 103–104, 108–110, 119, 121–122, 129, 133, 150 Societies for the Reformation of Manners 30, 99, 115 Socrates 52, 135 Solon 135 spontaneous order 10, 135 state of nature 40, 66, 81–83, 112–115, 129–132 Steele, Richard 1–5, 9, 11, 17, 19, 38, 51–52, 56–57, 61–64, 67–68, 77, 84, 96, 98, 100 n. 3, 105–106, 124, 142, 147 n. 41 Stephen, Leslie 9 suicide 52, 94 Swift, Jonathan 51, 57, 61, 62 n. 20 Sydenham, Thomas 26, 74–75 Tauvry, Daniel 40 n. 8, 116 Temple, William 9, 83, 132 Thorold, John 102 Toland, John 48 n. 38, 84 n. 22 Tolonen, Mikko 11, 27, 36 n. 35, 78 n. 1, 120 n. 6

vanity 5, 28, 43–44, 56, 67, 72, 87–88, 95, 104–105, 122, 125, 127, 149, 153–155, 158 Verhaar, Bernard 23 Verhaar, Judith 23 vice 30, 35–36, 59, 61, 67–68, 77, 83, 85, 98–99, 102, 104, 114, 120, 139, 151, 154, 158 Virgil 52 virtue 2–6, 11, 32–37, 43, 45, 51–54, 57–58, 67–70, 77–83, 78–87, 94, 98–104, 107, 112–115, 120–122, 136–139, 142, 144, 148, 151–152, 154, 156 artificial 11, 18, 92–95, 98, 112–115 definition of 82–87, 103, 107–108, 139 etymology of 138–139 martial 63–67, 79, 94, 106, 137–140 Volder, Burchard de 23 war 32–36, 65–67, 121, 128, 138, 141–142, 146–147 wealth 7, 32, 34–35, 49, 59, 109 Wellington, Richard 28 William, King of England, Ireland and Scotland 49 William Law 9, 102, 135 n. 72 Willis, Thomas 75 women 1–5, 17–18, 38–55, 75–76, 110–118, 124–125, 158 Zuijlen van Nievelt, Jacob van 25