Bernard Mandeville 1670 – 1733

Bernard Mandeville was a Dutch-born English physician, satirist, and philosopher whose Fable of the Bees scandalized eighteenth-century moralists by arguing that the private vices of pride, vanity, and self-interest are precisely what produce the public benefits of a flourishing commercial society. His subtitle, Private Vices, Public Benefits, became one of the most contested and influential formulae of the early Enlightenment, and his analysis prepared the way for Adam Smith's account of the unintended consequences of self-interested action. His writings provoked Hutcheson, Berkeley, and Hume to extended response.

Bernard Mandeville was born in 1670 at Rotterdam, the son of a physician of Huguenot descent. He studied at the Erasmian Latin school in Rotterdam, took degrees in philosophy and medicine at the University of Leiden in 1691, and around 1693 settled in London, where he practiced as a physician and lived for the remainder of his life, writing in English with extraordinary fluency.

His major writings include the doggerel poem The Grumbling Hive, or Knaves Turn'd Honest (1705); its later expansion with prose remarks and essays as The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Publick Benefits (1714, with a much enlarged second part in 1729); the Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions; the Modest Defence of Publick Stews (1724); and the Free Thoughts on Religion (1720). The Fable of the Bees was twice condemned as a public nuisance by the grand jury of Middlesex.

Mandeville argued, against the prevailing moralism of his age, that what conventional morality calls vices — vanity, luxury, ambition — are precisely the unintended causes of the trade, employment, and refinement of a flourishing commercial society, and that no purely virtuous community could long sustain itself. His paradoxical thesis haunted Hume, Smith, Rousseau, and Marx and is now recognized as a starting point of modern social and economic thought. He died at Hackney in January 1733.