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On the Fable of the Bees


What follows is the original 1705 text of one of the best and smartest satires ever, written by the Dutch Englishman Bernard Mandeville. In short, his thesis about the true causes of social welfare, social progress, riches and benefits is that these are all based on the human vices: People work out of greed, are polite out of self-interest and hypocrisy, keep the law from cowardice - and so on.
 
You get his basic argument in the form of a - didactic - poem. This may need a moment or two of getting used to, but Mandevile was a great writer, and the poem is quite amusing. Judge for yourself:

As Sharpers, Parasites, Pimps, Players,
Pick-Pockets, Coiners, Quacks, Sooth-Sayers,
And all those, that, in Enmity
With down-right Working, cunningly
Convert to their own Use the Labour
Of their good-natur'd heedless Neighbour:
These were called Knaves; but, bar the Name,
The grave Industrious were the Same.
All Trades and Places knew some Cheat,
No Calling was without Deceit.

Below are:

The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves Turn'd Honest
An essay on Mandeville by E. J. Hundert

Here follows the full poem: I particularly like that section on lawyers.


The Grumbling Hive:or, Knaves Turn'd Honest

By Bernard Mandeville
Note on the text: The text is transcribed from the 1705 edition of The Grumbling Hive.

A SPACIOUS Hive well stock'd with Bees,
That lived in Luxury and Ease;
And yet as fam'd for Laws and Arms,
As yielding large and early Swarms;
Was counted the great Nursery
Of Sciences and Industry.
No Bees had better Government,
More Fickleness, or less Content.
They were not Slaves to Tyranny,
Nor ruled by wild Democracy;
But Kings, that could not wrong, because
Their Power was circumscrib'd by Laws.


These Insects lived like Men, and all
Our Actions they perform'd in small:
They did whatever's done in Town,
And what belongs to Sword, or Gown:
Tho' th'Artful Works, by nible Slight;
Of minute Limbs, 'scaped Human Sight
Yet we've no Engines; Labourers,
Ships, Castles, Arms, Artificers,
Craft, Science, Shop, or Instrument,
But they had an Equivalent:
Which, since their Language is unknown,
Must be call'd, as we do our own.
As grant, that among other Things
They wanted Dice, yet they had Kings;
And those had Guards; from whence we may
Justly conclude, they had some Play;
Unless a Regiment be shewn
Of Soldiers, that make use of none.


Vast Numbers thronged the fruitful Hive;
Yet those vast Numbers made 'em thrive;
Millions endeavouring to supply
Each other's Lust and Vanity;
Whilst other Millions were employ'd,
To see their Handy-works destroy'd;
They furnish'd half the Universe;
Yet had more Work than Labourers.
Some with vast Stocks, and little Pains
Jump'd into Business of great Gains;
And some were damn'd to Sythes and Spades,
And all those hard laborious Trades;
Where willing Wretches daily sweat,
And wear out Strength and Limbs to eat:
Whilst others follow'd Mysteries, ]
To which few Folks bind Prentices;
That want no Stock, but that of Brass,
And may set up without a Cross;
As Sharpers, Parasites, Pimps, Players,
Pick-Pockets, Coiners, Quacks, Sooth-Sayers,
And all those, that, in Enmity
With down-right Working, cunningly
Convert to their own Use the Labour
Of their good-natur'd heedless Neighbour:
These were called Knaves; but, bar the Name,
The grave Industrious were the Same.
All Trades and Places knew some Cheat,
No Calling was without Deceit.


The Lawyers, of whose Art the Basis
Was raising Feuds and splitting Cases,
Opposed all Registers, that Cheats
Might make more Work with dipt Estates;
As were't unlawful, that one's own,
Without a Law-Suit, should be known.
They kept off Hearings wilfully,
To finger the retaining Fee;
And to defend a wicked Cause,
Examin'd and survey'd the Laws;
As Burglars Shops and Houses do;
To find out where they'd best break through.


Physicians valued Fame and Wealth
Above the drooping Patient's Health,
Or their own Skill: The greatest Part
Study'd, instead of Rules of Art,
Grave pensive Looks, and dull Behaviour;
To gain th'Apothecary's Favour,
The Praise of Mid wives, Priests and all,
That served at Birth, or Funeral;
To bear with th'ever-talking Tribe,
And hear my Lady's Aunt prescribe;
With formal Smile, and kind How d'ye,
To fawn on all the Family;
And, which of all the greatest Curse is,
T'endure th'Impertinence of Nurses.


Among the many Priests of Jove,
Hir'd to draw Blessings from Above,
Some few were learn'd and eloquent,
But Thousands hot and ignorant:
Yet all past Muster, that could hide
Their Sloth, Lust, Avarice and Pride;
For which, they were as famed, as Taylors
For Cabbage; or for Brandy, Sailors:
Some meagre look'd, and meanly clad
Would mystically pray for Bread,
Meaning by that an ample Store,
Yet lit'rally receiv'd no more;
And, whilst these holy Drudges starv'd,
Some lazy Ones, for which they serv'd,
Indulg'd their Ease, with all the Graces
Of Health and Plenty in their Faces.


The Soldiers, that were forced to fight,
If they survived, got Honour by't;
Tho' some, that shunn'd the bloody Fray,
Had Limbs shot off, that ran away:
Some valiant Gen'rals fought the Foe;
Others took Bribes to let them go:
Some ventur'd always, where 'twas warm;
Lost now a Leg, and then an Arm;
Till quite disabled, and put by,
They lived on half their Salary;
Whilst others never came in Play,
And staid at Home for Double Pay.


Their Kings were serv'd; but Knavishly
Cheated by their own Ministry;
Many, that for their Welfare slaved,
Robbing the very Crown they saved:
Pensions were small, and they lived high,
Yet boasted of their Honesty.
Calling, whene'er they strain'd their Right,
The slipp'ry Trick a Perquisite;
And, when Folks understood their Cant,
They chang'd that for Emolument;
Unwilling to be short, or plain,
In any thing concerning Gain:
For there was not a Bee, but would
Get more, I won't say, than he should;
But than he dared to let them know,
That pay'd for't; as your Gamesters do,
That, tho' at fair Play, ne'er will own
Before the Losers what they've won.


But who can all their Frauds repeat!
The very Stuff, which in the Street
They sold for Dirt t'enrich the Ground,
Was often by the Buyers sound
Sophisticated with a Quarter
Of Good-for-nothing, Stones and Mortar;
Tho' Flail had little Cause to mutter,
Who sold the other Salt for Butter.
Justice her self, famed for fair Dealing,
By Blindness had not lost her Feeling;
Her Left Hand, which the Scales should hold,
Had often dropt 'em, bribed with Gold;
And, tho' she seem'd impartial,
Where Punishment was corporal,
Pretended to a reg'lar Course,
In Murther, and all Crimes of Force;
Tho' some, first Pillory'd for Cheating,
Were hang'd in Hemp of their own beating;
Yet, it was thought, the Sword the bore
Check'd but the Desp'rate and the Poor;
That, urg'd by mere Necessity,
Were tied up to the wretched Tree
For Crimes, which not deserv'd that Fate,
But to secure the Rich, and Great.


Thus every Part was full of Vice,
Yet the whole Mass a Paradice;
Flatter'd in Peace, and fear'd in Wars
They were th'Esteem of Foreigners,
And lavish of their Wealth and Lives,
The Ballance of all other Hives.
Such were the Blessings of that State;
Their Crimes conspired to make 'em Great;
And Vertue, who from Politicks
Had learn'd a Thousand cunning Tricks,
Was, by their happy Influence,
Made Friends with Vice: And ever since
The worst of all the Multitude
Did something for the common Good.


This was the State's Craft, that maintain'd
The Whole, of which each Part complain'd: ]
This, as in Musick Harmony,
Made Jarrings in the Main agree;
Parties directly opposite
Assist each oth'r, as 'twere for Spight;
And Temp'rance with Sobriety
Serve Drunkenness and Gluttonny.


The Root of evil Avarice,
That damn'd ill-natur'd baneful Vice,
Was Slave to Prodigality,
That Noble Sin; whilst Luxury.
Employ'd a Million of the Poor,
And odious Pride a Million more
Envy it self, and Vanity
Were Ministers of Industry;
Their darling Folly, Fickleness
In Diet, Furniture, and Dress,
That strange, ridic'lous Vice, was made
The very Wheel, that turn'd the Trade.
Their Laws and Cloaths were equally
Objects of Mutability;
For, what was well done for a Time,
In half a Year became a Crime;
Yet whilst they alter'd thus their Laws,
Still finding and correcting Flaws,
They mended by Inconstancy
Faults, which no Prudence could foresee.


Thus Vice nursed Ingenuity,
Which join'd with Time; and Industry
Had carry'd Life's Conveniencies,
It's real Pleasures, Comforts, Ease,
To such a Height, the very Poor
Lived better than the Rich before;
And nothing could be added more:
How vain is Mortals Happiness!
Had they but known the Bounds of Bliss;
And, that Perfection here below
Is more, than Gods can well bestow,
The grumbling Brutes had been content
With Ministers and Government.
But they, at every ill Success,
Like Creatures lost without Redress,
Cursed Politicians, Armies, Fleets;
Whilst every one cry'd, Damn the Cheats,
And would, tho' Conscious of his own,
In Others barb'rously bear none.


One, that had got a Princely Store,
By cheating Master, King, and Poor,
Dared cry aloud; The Land must sink
For all its Fraud; And whom d'ye think
The Sermonizing Rascal chid?
A Glover that sold Lamb for Kid.
The last Thing was not done amiss,
Or cross'd the Publick Business;
But all the Rogues cry'd brazenly,
Good Gods, had we but Honesty!
Merc'ry smiled at th'Impudence;
And Others call'd it want of Sence,
Always to rail at what they loved:
But Jove, with Indignation moved,
At last in Anger swore, he'd rid
The bawling Hive of Fraud, and did.
The very Moment it departs,
And Honsty fills all their Hearts;
There shews 'em, like the Instructive Tree,
Those Crimes, which they're ashamed to see?
Which now in Silence they confess,
By Blushing at their Uglyness;
Like Children, that would hide their Faults,
And by their Colour own their Thoughts;
Imag'ning, when they're look'd upon,
That others see, what they have done.


But, Oh ye Gods! What Consternation,
[illeg.] vast and sudden was the Alteration!
In half an Hour, the Nation round,
Meat fell a Penny in the Pound.
The Mask Hypocrisie's [illeg.] down,
From the great [illeg.]
And some, in [illeg.] known,
Appear'd like Strangers in their own.
The Bar was silent from that Day;
For now the willing Debtors pay,
Even what's by Creditors forgot;
Who quitted them, who had it not.
Those, that were in the Wrong, stood mute,
And dropt the patch'd vexatious Suit.
On which, since nothing less can thrive,
Than Lawyers in an honest Hive,
All, except those, that got enough,
With Ink-horns by their Sides trooped off.


Justice hang'd some, set others free; ]
And, after Goal-delivery,
Her Presence be'ng no more requier'd,
With all her Train, and Pomp retir'd.
First marched 'some Smiths, with Locks and Grates,
Fetters, and Doors with Iron-Plates;
Next Goalers, Turnkeys, and Assistants:
Before the Goddess, at some distance,
Her cheif and faithful Minister
Squire Catch, the Laws great Finisher,
Bore not th'imaginary Sword,
But his own Tools, an Ax and Cord;
Then on a Cloud the Hood-wink'd fair
Justice her self was push'd by Air:
About her Chariot, and behind,
Were Sergeants, 'Bums of every kind,
Tip-Staffs, and all those Officers,
That squeese a Living out of Tears.


Tho' Physick liv'd, whilst Folks were ill,
None would prescribe, but Bees of Skill;
Which, through the Hive dispers'd so wide,
That none of 'em had need to ride,
Waved vain Disputes; and strove to free
The Patients of their Misery;
Left Drugs in cheating Countries grown,
And used the Product of their own,
Knowing the Gods sent no Disease
To Nations without remedies.
Their Clergy rouz'd from Laziness,
Laid not their Charge on Journey-Bees;
But serv'd themselves, exempt from Vice,
The Gods with Pray'r and Sacrifice;
All those, that were unfit, or knew,
Their Service might be spared, withdrew;
Nor was their Business for so many,
(If th'Honest stand in need of any.)
Few only with the High-Priest staid,
To whom the rest Obedience paid:
Himself, employ'd in holy Cares;
Resign'd to others State Affairs:
He chased no Starv'ling from his Door,
Nor pinch'd the Wages of the Poor:
But at his House the Hungry's fed,
The Hireling finds unmeasur'd Bread,
The needy Trav'ler Board and Bed.


Among the King's great Ministers,
And all th'inferiour Officers
The Change was great; for frugally
They now lived on their Salary.
That a poor Bee should Ten times [illeg.]
To ask his Due, a [illeg.] Sun,
And by some well [illeg.]
To give a Crown, or ne'er be [illeg.]
Would now be called a down-right [illeg.]
Tho' formerly a Perquisite.
All Places; managed first by Three,
Who watch'd each other's Knavery,
And often for a Fellow-feeling,
Promoted, one anothers Stealing,
Are happily supply'd by one;
By which some Thousands more are gone.


No Honour now could be content,
To live, and owe for what was spent.
Liveries in Brokers Shops are hung,
They part with Coaches for a Song;
Sell Stately Horses by whole Sets;
And Country Houses to pay Debts.


Vain Cost is shunn'd as much as Fraud;
They have no forces kept Abroad;
Laugh at the Esteem of Foreigners,
And empty Glory got by Wars;
They fight but for their Country's Sake,
When Right or Liberty's at Stake.


Now mind the glorious Hive, and see,
How Honesty and Trade agree:
The Shew is gone, it thins apace;
And looks with quite another Face,
For 'twas not only that they went,
By whom vast Sums were Yearly spent;
But Multitudes, that lived on them,
Were daily forc'd to do the same. [340]
In vain to other Trades they'd fly;
All were o're-stocked accordingly.


The Price of Land, and Houses falls
Mirac'lous Palaces, whose Walls,
Like those of Thebes, were raised by Play, [345]
Are to be let; whilst the once gay,
Well-seated Houshould Gods would be
More pleased t'expire in Flames, than see;
The mean Inscription on the Door
Smile at the lofty Ones they bore. [350]
The Building Trace is quite destroy'd,
Artificers are not employ'd;
No Limner for his Art is famed;
Stone-cutters, Garvers are not named.


Those, that remain'd, grown temp'rate, strive, [355]
So how to spend; but how to live;
And, when they paid the Tavern Score,
Resolv'd to enter it no more:
No Vintners Jilt in all the Hive
Could wear now Cloth of Gold and thrive; [360]
Nor [illeg.]; such vast sums advance,
For Burgundy and [illeg.];
The Courtier's gone, that with his Miss
Supp'd at his House on Christmass Peas;
Spending as much in two Hours stay, [365]
As keeps a Troop of Horse a Day.


The Haughty Chloe; to live Great,
Had made her Husband rob the State:
But now she sells her Furniture,
Which the Indies had been ransack'd for; [370]
Contracts the expensive Bill of Fare,
And wears her strong Suit a whole Year:
The slight and fickle Age is past;
And Cloaths, as wel as Fashions last.
Weavers that ioyn'd rich Silk with [illeg.], [375]
And all the Trades subordinate,
Are gone. Still Peace and Plenty reign,
And every thing is cheap, tho' plain;
Kind Nature, free from Gard'ners Force,
Allows all Fruits in her own Course; [380]
But Rarities cannot be had,
Where Pains to get 'em are not paid.


As Pride and Luxury decrease,
So by degrees they leave the Seas,
Not Merchants now; but Companies [385]
Remove whole Manufacturies.
All Arts and Crafts neglected lie;
Content the Bane of Industry,
Makes 'em admire their homely Store,
And neither seek, nor covet more. [390]


So few in the vast Hive remain;
The Hundredth part they can't maintain
Against th'Insults of numerous Foes;
Whom yet they valiantly oppose;
Till some well-fenced Retreat is found; [395]
And here they die, or stand their Ground,
No Hireling in their Armies known;
But bravely fighting for their own;
Their Courage and Integrity
At last were crown'd with Victory. [400]
They triumph'd not without their Cost,
For many Thousand Bees were lost.
Hard'ned with Toils, and Exercise
They counted Ease it self a Vice;
Which so improv'd their Temperance, [405]
That to avoid Extravagance,
They flew into a hollow tree,
Blest with content and Honesty.


The MORAL.

THEN leave Complaints: Fools only strive
To make a Great an honest Hive. [410]
T'enjoy the World's Conveniencies,
Be famed in War, yet live in Ease
Without great Vices, is a vain
Eutopia seated in the Brain.
Fraud, Luxury, and Pride must live; [415]
We [illeg.] we the Benefits receive.
Hunger's a dreadful Plague no doubt,
Yet who digests or thrives without?
Do we not owe the Growth of Wine
To the dry, crooked, shabby Vine? [420]
Which, whist its [illeg.] neglected flood,
Choak'd other Plants, and ran to Wood;
But blest us with his Noble Fruit;
As soon as it was tied, and cut:
So Vice is beneficial found, [425]
When it's by Justice [illeg.], and bound;
Nay, where the People would be great,
As necessary to the State,
At Hunger is to make 'em eat.
Bare Vertue can't make Nations live [430]
In Splendour; they, that would revive
A Golden Age, must be as free,
For Acorns, as for Honesty.
 
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An essay on Mandeville by E. J. Hundert


Bernard Mandeville's importance rests upon the arguments he developed in The Fable of the Bees (1714, 1723 and 1728), in which he amplified the meaning of the motto appearing on the book's title page: “Private vices, Public benefits”. In his Preface Mandeville declared himself to be a naturalist performing an “anatomy” of man and society which seeks to lay bare the underlying mechanisms that condition human desires. He claimed that longings for power, esteem and sensual pleasure were innate and indelible, motivating everyone to compete for scarce satisfactions. Contemporary moral standards could not coherently be accounted for in terms of the received platitudes of orthodox ethical reasoning, but rather by inspecting the social history of man conceived of as a necessitous being, one whose superabundant desires paradoxically made him fit for society. The commonly-held belief in personal rectitude as the source of public good, Mandeville claimed, derived from a longstanding and highly articulated ideological project in which elites laid claim to private virtue in order to disguise their own self-seeking, thereby ensuring the respect of subordinates. He sought to reduce to absurdity the idea that polities could have been established from any realistically conceivable process of communal deliberation. Instead, only the “dextrous management of skilful politicians” served to stabilize the clash of escalating individual desires.


Mandeville also rejected as contrary to all experience the notion of a moral hierarchy of goods naturally suited to human needs. There was no summum bonum. Men were driven by their commonly-shared passions, whose intensities were shaped by their inborn temperaments, and whose communal expressions were derivative functions of given social opportunities. The sociological importance of this psychological truth was thrown into bold relief in modern conditions of affluence, which Mandeville viewed with unambiguous delight. Well-governed commercial states in modern Europe, he claimed, were required to confront recently-altered economic conditions that encouraged and rewarded both aggressive individual enterprise and social mobility. Rather than striving to curb the supposed moral corruption encouraged by widening economic opportunities (which was in reality nothing more than the normal expression of universal human traits), politicians, so Mandeville argued, had now to attend to the manipulation of egoism into communally useful purposes. Ruling orders were obliged to govern subjects whose massively enlarged opportunities for personal gain were at the same time prerequisites of national prosperity. Mandeville dismissed as romantic nostalgia the widely-held opinion that the intense scrambles for wealth and power which characterizsed modern polities provided evidence of the growing corruption of public life. Instead, The Fable of the Bees offered a psychologically compelling account of the positive social function of greed.


Mandeville's arguments concerning the sources of virtue and justice, rather than the criticism of any particular persons, groups or local institutions, inspired the hostile reactions of his critics. His unvarying subject was the moral and intersubjective demands made upon individuals propelled into the novel political and social conditions of commercial societies. Naturally unsocial men had to be tamed in order to make life comfortable in civil society. Mandeville understood this demand not so much as a necessary condition of justice, or as a local feature of contemporary political struggle, but as a requirement of the prosperity which commercial citizens were coming to expect. This essentially political project required the prosperous, and those who sought prosperity, falsely to proclaim their virtuous intentions, all the while encouraging docility and ignorance amongst the lower orders, whose hard ill-paid work and continued deference were required to sustain their opulent living.


Mandeville employed the beehive as a socially relevant symbol of morally unbridled economic activity. In this he followed the poet La Fontaine, whose fables he had previously translated, as well as the then contentious position of the French philosopher Pierre Gassendi on the absolute continuity of human and animal drives, famously articulated in Gassendi's “Objections” to Descartes's Meditations, published together in 1641. He sought to demolish the view that the the self-regarding passions, particularly greed, envy and pride, needed to be repressed for the common good, and to ridicule the then influential claim that a genuinely civil life could only be led under a republican government – a type of regime he associated with the impoverished rudimentary societies of the antique Mediterranean. Moreover, he challenged as absurd the supposition of all contemporary theories of contract that the ignorant beings living in the rude conditions preceding the imposition of laws could have been in any position to make the pre-political calculations necessary for them to agree upon any sort of government for their common benefit. In Mandeville's view, the first unsocial and cognitively primitive men were “brutes” who could never have entered into morally informed political agreements. Instead, societies requiring even the most elementary forms of co-ordination and consent, he argued, had to have been formed by the artful manipulation of the passions of these unreflective primitives.


Mandeville remodelled the stark contrast between divine injunctions and sinful everyday behavior which he encountered in the work of French moralists like Pierre Bayle and Pierre Nicole. He set out to compare the fantasy of the other-worldly city of the true believer with the motivations of thoroughly egoistic actors. Mandeville stressed the role of the demands made by the social environment in shaping the emotions of all persons into expressive conjunctions of judgement and passion whose local embodiments could only be realized and understood within the established conventions and beliefs of a commercial public sphere. If the demands of pride and the need for esteem were constant and universal features of the human constitution, desires themselves were nevertheless realized or thwarted only in socially-structured, rule-governed interactions with others. Mandeville could at once mock orthodox Christians, civic humanists and the defenders aristocratic ideals of human excellence, because of the truth he claimed to have discovered: that the conditions of commercial modernity had made the Christian saint, the classical citizen and the noble warrior anachronistic mental deposits of long vanished or quickly eroding social formations.


The Fable of the Bees consolidated a revolution in the understanding of the relationship between motives and acts largely begun in France by setting this relationship in a new problem space, that of viewing commerce and sociability as reciprocal features of the modern dynamics of self-regard. Persons in the recently-constituted commercial polities on which The Fable concentrated were obliged to respond to a revised structure of priorities if they were to satisfy their impulses. They were not merely driven by the universal appetites for authority and esteem, as were all others. In the centers of European commercial societies outward displays of wealth alone were now widely accepted as a direct index of social power, rendering absurd, Mandeville argued in Remark L, the conventional condemnation of luxury as immoral. As he argued in The Fable's Remark M, in great commercial cities,  people, where they are not known, are generally honoured according to their clothes and other accoutrements they have about them. From the richness of them we judge of their wealth, and by their ordering of them we guess at their understanding. It is this which encourages everybody who is conscious of his little merit, if he is anyways able, to wear clothes above his rank, especially in large and populous cities, where obscure men may hourly meet with fifty strangers to one acquaintance, and consequently have the pleasure of being esteemed by a vast majority, not as what they are, but what they appear to be....


Mandeville showed that the aggressive pursuit of wealth had now to be understood not as an activity properly confined to marginalized minorities, but as central to the self-definition of urban and commercial populations. The enlarged mechanisms of and opportunities for consumption emerged in The Fable as the distinguishing mark of commercial sociability, and thus a necessarily central concern of public policy rather than the exclusive domain of moralists and divines. Most strikingly, Mandeville claimed that his work for the first time systematically comprehended from the perspective of society itself the consequences of the behaviour of persons for whom monied wealth encouraged those forms of self-display that were in effect the vehicles through which they established their moral and social identities. Highly polished civilized social actors had thoroughly internalized the codes of law and morality which systematically suppressed the instinctual and unsocial sources of communal life, thereby erasing them from consciousness, and permitting these rational egoists to pursue their desires with relatively little social regulation.


Mandeville's denial of any innate human propensity for sociability – seen by him as a political achievement – followed directly from his rejection of the Cartesian contrast between the springs of animal behavior and the workings of human passions. Mandeville claimed, against Descartes, that animals, just as men, do feel, that men and animals have nearly identical passions, even including envy, and that animals, like men, have calculating minds. Animal intelligence does not differ from ours in kind; such differences as exist are solely a function of the varying degrees of physiological complexity in human and other animals.


This materialist physiological premise became the scientific foundation of Mandeville's wider enterprise. His account of social formation in “An Inquiry Into the Origins of Moral Virtue” began with an examination of the cognitively immature brutes who populated the “wild state of nature”, and then sought to explain how “Savage Man”, an undomesticated, self-regarding animal, became the tame, sociable creature celebrated by philosophers. Mandeville argued that it was precisely the animal impulses naturally disposing men to seek their own satisfactions that made them fit subjects for manipulation by “skillful politicians”, the lawgivers and who civilized the race by appealing to the universal appetite of pride. Flattery was the “bewitching Engine”of an ideological project through which individuals were disciplined by encouraging amongst them the belief that persons demonstrated their moral superiority through acts of self-denial. In the first ages of the race, the strong and cunning induced the weak to believe “that it was more beneficial for every Body to conquer than indulge his appetites, and much better to mind the public than what seemed his private interest”.


The origins of morality, and thus of the social discipline required by the rule of elites, followed from the discovery by these elites of what Mandeville called the “imaginary” rewards of praise to which complex animal organisms responded. Flattery was employed to tame men by generating within these prideful creatures a conception of self constituted in part by the opinions of others. Only creatures instructed in the rhetoric of honor and the theology of shame could then internalize politically-fabricated ideals of virtuous conduct. In other words, Mandeville sought to explain the domestication of the savage mind. He accounted for the false but socially necessary belief that virtue was the distinguishing feature of the human race by subsuming socialized men under the larger category of domesticated animals.


Mandeville thus attempted to derive an explanation of moral motivation from the few psychological facts about human nature which were strongly supported, both by the claims of experience and scientific enquiry. His conjectural history of social origins was a foundational hypothesis meant to sustain and further encourage a thoroughgoing empirical discussion of the microprocesses of social interaction. Moral behavior could suitably be understood to arise from the reactions of an egoistic and necessitous creature to the opinions of others because these opinions have important consequences for one's well-being. Men come to have an interest in keeping their promises, for example, precisely because of their realization that others have an interest in their doing so. By virtue of their approval and disapproval of the actions of others, men mete out rewards and punishments. If human beings quite understandably seek the approval of their fellows, and thus unwittingly acquire an interest in the continuation of normal intercourse, “politicians” could then seek to promote this balance by playing the passions of individuals against one another once society becomes firmly established.


It was this explicitly naturalist attempt at constructing the foundations of a science of socialized man that would later serve as a primary source of inspiration for Enlightenment social understanding. Mandeville proposed that styles of individual behavior in any historical epoch, and the collective fashions in which they participated, should be regarded as biological phenomena or symptoms of hidden natural causes, those elemental drives men shared with the higher animals. All passions and instincts, he argued, tend to the preservation and happiness either of individuals or the species. Mandeville endorsed the foundational claim that men and animals shared similar cognitive capacities, and that their differences could only be discovered by abandoning the fanciful hypotheses of philosophers, relying instead upon strict empirical observation. The diverse functions of human cognitive capacities could sufficiently be explained only in bio-physiological rather than moral or metaphysical terms. Men differ from bees not because the hive is composed of lower animals, but because the intellectual powers of men could be, and in fact were, “artfully managed” so as to suppress and redirect their primary drives, a civilizing project, he said in the Sixth Dialogue of The Fable's second volume, which is “the joint labour of several ages”. Even the social function of wealth, Mandeville argued in the concluding discussion of The Fable's second volume, had properly to be explained in terms of the way money “mechanically” works on the passions as an attractive force in polished conditions.


Mandeville's reconceptualization of egoism along these naturalistic lines entailed a sketch of the workings of this “instinct” in order to comprehend the pervasive force of pride in the shaping of human affairs. “Self-liking”, as he termed it in The Fable's second volume (where he abandoned his satiric tone), was the innate mechanism by virtue of which one could explain the decisive power of flattery in first domesticating the species, and then account for those alterations in the presentation of the self as an object of approbation which characterised successive historical epochs in the history of sociability. Mandeville distinguished three decisive causes in the slow progression to civility: the banding together of savages for their mutual defence against animals; the stimulation of man's innate pride and courage through threats and attacks of other men; and the invention of language and letters, by means of which laws would remain stable and trustworthy instead of being subject to the efforts and insecurites necessarily associated with societies governed by oral traditions. Each stage in the civilizing process was accompanied by an invention or further refinement of morality, conceived by Mandeville as the norms of conduct formally enacted or tacitly designed by the ruling elites that governed every polity in order to stabilize forms of intercourse amongst beings whose radical egoism and constitutional unsociability remained an ever-present threat to social stability. Commercial societies, the most recent and, for Mandeville, the most pertinent of these social forms, were shaped, as were all others, by the domestication of violent passions. But commercial societies were historically unique in one crucial respect: material affluence and political security enable their members to satisfy self-regarding impulses in ways that largely transcend the conflict between the individual's pursuit of his own pleasure and the repressive demands of social discipline that characterised every previous social order. As never before, men could now indulge themselves in the world of commerce because in it they were free to compete in non-violent ways for the most valued tokens of public approbation. The civility and politeness which had come to characterise the social habits of modern elites were in fact regulatory devices governing an unprecedented, but in Mandeville's view, already dominant, process of conspicuous consumption of symbols for the promotion of self – a relentless accumulation of emblems that could be acquired by wealth in a commercial market of marks of esteem.


Modern manners thus comprised the last stage in the history of pride, and the most efficient way to manage it. The habituation to politeness had effectively, albeit unconsciously, domesticated the violence of an expanding elite within recent history, while redirecting its energies to the productively liberating (because economically expansive) end of luxury consumption. Once men were able to distinguish themselves by mannered social pretense underwritten by the marks of wealth, the stern and self-denying morality of virtue which first made communal life possible was effectively reduced to a nostalgic remnant of the politically defeated and downwardly mobile. The decorous intercourse of contemporary elites, then, was at once the initial target of Mandeville's satiric voice as he exposed the hypocrisy of its supposedly other-regarding pronouncements, and the terminus of his enquiry into the history of pride, which concluded with the achievement of polished sociability – commercial society's successful surrogate for self-denial.


Mandeville's physiological model of the passions licensed the foundational presumptions of this hypothetical history: men everywhere and at all times had identical psychological structures; these structures were expressed in basic impulses which predisposed individuals to be strictly self seeking agents who desired only their own satisfactions. Consequently, the social development of the race must be understood to have resulted from the largely unplanned, though, because physically derived, not random consequences of persons pursuing the a-moral and diverse ends which answered the pull of their passions at any given moment in their life histories. The narrative constructed from these premises described a stadial history of the race's progress, from instinct to morality and then to law. It charted the course of the most immediate needs of body and mind, needs which were at first both paramount and psychologically transparent, because unmediated by social symbolism. Beginning in conditions of bare subsistence and primitive survival, this narrative culminated in the commercial societies of contemporary Europe. While the fundamental passionate repertoire of the human frame remained undiminished, these passions were now effectively harnessed, redirected from violent ends to seek tokens of public esteem, and then made largely unconscious to the social actors themselves during the course of the civilizing process.
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