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THE INFLUENCE OF BERNARD MANDEVILLE

BY F. B. KAYE

Even to scholars Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees is now little more than a name and the recollection of a long-dead scandal. Yet the book had an extraordinary effect on the history of thought, an effect international in scope and still felt. Indeed, so great was Mandeville's influence that he can, I believe, be shown to be a major dignitary of eighteenth century thought. To demonstrate this is the aim of the present paper.

After this introduction it may seem a humorous anti-climax to answer the question: What was The Fable of the Bees? but the way in which history has slighted the work renders such an answer necessary. The book opens with a twenty-page rhymed allegory called The Grumbling Hive, first published by itself in 1705. This hive is described as made up, like any human state, of the elements of selfishness, pride, ambition, viciousness, and dishonesty. Yet all this evil is the stuff out of which is made the complicated mechanism of a great and prosperous state with

Millions endeavouring to supply

Each other's Lust and Vanity (Fable, 1, 3).1

Indeed, it is precisely this lust and vanity, as it shows itself in the desire for power, the love of splendor, the round of fashions, and the give-and-take of prodigality and avarice, that is the motive force of the whole commonwealth.

Thus Vice nurs'd Ingenuity,

Which join'd with Time and Industry,
Had carry'd Life's Conveniences,

Its real Pleasures, Comforts, Ease,

To such a Height, the very Poor

Liv'd better than the Rich before (Fable, 1, 11).

The bees, however, are not satisfied to have their viciousness mixed with their prosperity. All the cheats and hypocrites disclaim

'My page references apply equally to a number of editions-to those of 1724, 1725, 1728, and 1732 of the first part, and to the editions of 1729 and 1733 of Part II of the Fable.

about the state of their country's morals, and pray the gods for honesty. This raises the indignation of Jove, who unexpectedly grants them their wish.

But, Oh ye Gods! What Consternation,

How vast and sudden was th' Alteration! (Fable, 1, 13)

As Pride and Luxury decrease,

So by degrees they leave the Seas

All Arts and Crafts neglected lie;

Content, the Bane of Industry,

Makes 'em admire their homely Store,

And neither seek nor covet more (Fable, 1, 21).

In this way, through the loss of its vices, the hive at the same time loses all its greatness.

Now comes the moral:

Then leave Complaints: Fools only strive

To make a Great an Honest Hive.

T enjoy the World's Conveniences,
Be fam'd in War, yet live in Ease,
Without great Vices, is a vain
EUTOPIA seated in the Brain.
Fraud, Luxury and Pride must live,
While we the Benefits receive.

So Vice is beneficial found,

When it's by Justice lopt and bound;

Nay, where the people would be great,
As necessary to the State,

As Hunger is to make 'em eat (Fable, 1, 23-4).

In 1714 Mandeville republished The Grumbling Hive with a prose commentary of about two hundred pages appended. This commentary was in the form of some twenty essays-or "Remarks," as he called them-each Remark serving as note to some line or lines of the little rhymed allegory. This time he named his book The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices Publick Benefits. In 1723 he added several new passages, among them two long prose essays (one of them an attack on charity schools); in 1724, he included a "Vindication" of his book from the attacks already accumulating; and in 1728 (by title-page, 1729) he published a Part II, of size equal to the first volume.

Obviously, such a framework gave Mandeville the opportunity of incorporating any thought he liked on any topic he liked; and he took advantage of the fact. An extraordinarily fertile speculator,

he throws out original or suggestive opinions-some of much interest-on education, evolution, feminism, criminology, medicine, duelling, vegetarianism, public stews, psychology, economics, French literature, and theology. Among his educational conceptions, for example, is a foreshadowing of the Montessori system (Fable, II, 183-5 and 211). Then, too, Mandeville's theories in Part II of the Fable concerning the evolution of society were quite extraordinary.2 He seems unique at the time in appreciation of the great slowness of the thing, the small part in it played by the individual, the unsteadiness of its progression, and its control by physical law. A similar anticipatory modernity will be found in Mandeville's embryonic feminism. These, however, are side issues for this paper, and are noted merely in passing.

3

We shall be occupied here with Mandeville's influence in three fields only: literature, ethics, and economics.

I

Mandeville's purely literary influence was not considerable. The Fable had no direct imitators. Its influence was limited to the offering of tid-bits for amalgamation or paraphrase by other writers. Such an influence, however, it did have, and on some big figureschiefly, Pope, Johnson, Adam Smith, and Voltaire. Pope paraphrased the Fable both in the Moral Essays and in the Essay on Man. The manuscript of the latter, it should also be noted, had,

'There are, before Mandeville, only embryonic and fragmentary considerations of the growth of society from an evolutionary point of view. Of the ancients (Horace, Satires, I, iii, Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, book 5, and Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, lines 442-506) Lucretius is the most elaborate. The moderns until Mandeville added nothing. There is either no or slight anticipation of Mandeville in Matthew Hale (Primitive Origination of Man), Bossuet (Discours sur l'Histoire Universelle, ed. 1845, pp. 9-10), or Temple (Essay upon the Original and Nature of Government); nor is he anticipated in such works as those of Giordano Bruno, Bodin, Thomas Burnet, Whiston, John Woodward, John Keill, or Vico.

See Fable, II, 187-9, and also the passage in Mandeville's Virgin Unmask'd, ed. 1724, pp. 115-7, beginning: "They have enslaved our Sex." "Elwin considers the following passages derived from Mandeville: Moral Essays, I, 13-14 and 25-26; Essay on Man, п, 129-30, 157-8, and 193-4. That the Essay on Man, II, 129-30 and 157-8, owes anything to Mandeville, however, is doubtful, although the other lines are probably Mandevillian.

instead of the present line II, 240, this direct paraphrase of the sub-title of the Fable of the Bees:

And public good extracts from private vice.

It is just possible also that Pope derived the famous "To err is human, to forgive, divine" from a passage in another well-known book by Mandeville-the Free Thoughts."—Dr. Johnson, who said that Mandeville opened his views into real life very much, and whose economic theories were borrowed from Mandeville,' limited his literary indebtedness to a passage in one of his Idlers (No. 34), which is a paraphrase of a witty portion of the Fable (I, 106), and to some able discussions with Boswell about the book.-Adam Smith's literary obligation extends to at least one famous passage, but this matter will be considered later as incidental to Smith's debt to Mandeville in the field of economics.-The literary borrowings of Voltaire, whose great general indebtedness will also be touched on later, consisted in the paraphrasing in French verse of some seven pages of the Fable (I, 190-6), Voltaire's poem being called Le Marseillois et le Lion (Euvres, ed. Garnier, 1877-85, X, 140-8); and of passages in Le Mondain and the Défense du Mondain, and in the Observations sur MM. Jean Lass, Melon et Dutot; sur le Commerce, which have parallels in the Fable.s

All this, however, constitutes an unimportant phase of Mandeville's influence. His great effect was on ethics and economics, and a very practical effect it was; no mere interchange of theories, but one bound up with the destinies of England and of France.

Before undertaking an analysis of this effect, however, I wish to give some impression of the enormous vogue of the Fable, and the eighteenth century's interest in it, for in the light of this vogue points of relationship between the Fable and subsequent developments take on fuller significance.

The Fable first attracted attention in 1723, when Mandeville added to it his "Essay on Charity and Charity-Schools." There

'Free Thoughts (1729), p. 61: "If to err belongs to human fraility, let us bear with their errors."

Boswell, Life, ed. Hill, New York, 1889, III, 292.

"See below, note 66.

Derivations from Mandeville in these three works are noted in André Morize's interesting dissertation, L'Apologie du Luxe au XVIIIe Siècle et Le Mondain" de Voltaire (Paris, 1909).

upon, the newspapers focussed on it at once, and within a year whole books began to be aimed at it. At the same time the public commenced to exhaust an edition a year. Then it went into foreign editions.10 Meanwhile, other books by Mandeville were being frequently printed in England and, translated, on the Continent."1 Moreover, his works must have been made familiar to thousands who never saw the books by the many reviews of them (often of considerable length) in periodicals such as the Bibliothèque Britannique and the Histoire des Ouvrages des Savans,12 in theological bibliographies like those of Masch, Lilienthal, and Trinius, and in encyclopedias like Chaufepié's and the General Dictionary. The many attacks, also, on the Fable not only illustrated the fame of the book, but diffused this fame still further—a celebrity often commented on by contemporaries.13 The following is a partial list

'New editions were published in 1724, 1725, 1728, 1729 and 1732 (all by Tonson), and of Part II in 1729, 1730, and 1733 (all by Roberts). Further editions appeared in 1734, 1755, 1772, 1795, and 1806.

French versions in 1740 and 1750; German versions in 1761 and 1818 and, possibly, 1817.

"The Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Diseases had three or four printings; the Virgin Unmask'd, at least five; the Modest Defence of Publick Stews at least six English editions and some nine French ones; the Free Thoughts, five English editions, one German edition, an edition in Dutch, and four in French.

12 For instance, the Bibliothèque Angloise for 1725 gave the Fable 29 pages and Bluet's reply to the Fable the same amount of space; the Bibliothèque Raisonée for 1729 reviewed the Fable in 44 pages; the Bibliothèque Britannique in 1733 gave 52 pages to Mandeville's Origin of Honour; Maendelyke Uittreksels for 1723 devoted 71 pages to the Free Thoughts; and the Mémoires de Trévoux (1740) allotted the Fable over a hundred pages.

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13 For instance: "La Pièce . . . fait grand bruit en Angleterre" (Bibliothèque Angloise for 1725, XIII, 99); "Avide lectum est in Anglia et non sine plausu receptum (Reimarus, Programma quo Fabulam de Apibus examinat, 1726); "The Fable... a Book that has made so much Noise " (Present State of the Republick of Letters for 1728, II, 462); “La Fables des Abeilles a fait tant de bruit en Angleterre" (preface to French version of Fable, ed. 1740, 1, i); "Nicht nur die Feinde der christlichen Religion, sondern auch viele Christen zählen ihn unter die recht grossen Geister " (J. F. Jacobi, Betrachtungen über die weisen Absichten Gottes, 1749); "Such is the system of Dr. Mandeville, which once made so much noise in the world" (Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. 1759, p. 486); "La fameuse fable des abeilles . . . fit un grand bruit en Angleterre " (Voltaire, Œuvres Complètes, ed. Garnier, 1877-85, XVII, 29).

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