Upon coming back from a brief break from blogging, I’ve come to realize that I am so far behind schedule with my intellectual history series so as to leave me in a bit of despair. There are A LOT of topics which I wish to blog on as well (topics such as emotions, argumentation, axiology and religion), but I feel that such topics would be treated in a far more detailed and responsible manner after I’ve completed my survey of Western thought. So without further adieu, let’s continue with our journey.
Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733) was a Dutchman whose writings, which were primarily written in English about English society, would be an important influence in the not-too-distant Scottish Enlightenment. One can easily see many of the ideas which were central to both David Hume as well as Adam Smith’s moral theorizing prefigured in Mandeville’s far more pessimistic analysis of morality and economics. It will be the purpose of this post to outline some of these ideas which were central to Mandeville’s thought.
Being highly involved in politics in his early adult life, Mandeville came to realize, as Hume later would as well, that political administration, as well as economic relations required more than a small degree of self-interested corruption in order to keep the social machine well-lubricated. It was this element which he saw in social relations which led to his most central thesis, namely that the private vices of people, properly but loosely channeled, led to and indeed was a necessary prerequisite of most public benefits.
An articulation of this thesis can be seen in Mandeville’s most popular work The Fable of the Bees, wherein British society is transparently depicted as a hive of bees which is rich, powerful, learned and free. Within the hive, the population busies themselves by fulfilling the luxurious “needs” of their commercialistic society. Despite the fact that the bees are indulging in a large degree of materialistic vanity, the overall effects of such turn out to be beneficial for the hive as a whole.
Indeed, at one point in the fable, the hypocrisy, greed and corruption is recognized by some for what it is and is thus eradicated from the hive, upon which the hive as a whole completely deteriorates. The obvious moral of this episode is that each individual seeking merely that which is sufficient for their needs and nothing more, the central virtue which can be taken from Jesus’ New Testament teachings (especially as found in Luke), is actually detrimental to society and its well-being.
The point of Mandeville’s work is that moral virtue and economic/political greatness as simply incompatible attributes. One can have a moral society or one can have a great society, but one cannot have both at the same time, for the key to prosperity and greatness is a properly channeled indulgence of personal vices.
But how, exactly, are these personal vices to be “properly channeled?” The answer for Mandeville is through the promotion of individual moral virtues. We shall see, however, that Mandeville rejects any form of natural law or social contract ethics in favor of a far more cynical account of ethical behavior. He defends an egocentric account of morality in which people are led to indulge in the psychological benefits of flattery and pride over the material benefits which are sacrificed due to the egoistic power of praise and blame. Thus, Mandeville says that the key to social life in general if for lawmakers and social leaders to teach that “it is more beneficial for [everybody] to conquer rather than indulge his Appetites, and much better to mind the [public] than what seem’d his Private interest.”
Thus, while private vices, which are the antithesis of virtue, are what make a society great, the proliferation of wide-spread virtue is what makes society possible at all. Society works best, accordingly, by the ambitious in society seeking to gratify their pride by making their virtues as public as possible, thus inspiring the lower classes to emulation, all the while keeping a private life of vice hypocritically hidden from public view. To put it shortly, “the moral virtues are the political offspring which flattery begot upon pride.”
In this philosophy we see the beginnings of consequentiality ethics, wherein the consequences of both public morality as well as private vice are what justify both. This consequentialism, which is centered in what Hume would later call “utility”, was seen to be in obvious tension with the Judeo-Christian sense of morality, morals which we could anachronistically call deontological in nature. Nevertheless, the significance which consequences could play in an understanding of economics would come to be indispensable. Indeed, one could say that in Mandeville’s philosophy and its use of “invisible hand” reasoning we see the beginnings of what would come to be known as classical economics.
