‘Private vices, public virtues’ revisited: The Dutch background of Bernard Mandeville 1

Abstract

During the last half century the English writer of Dutch origin, Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733), has come to be one of the better-known authors of the early eighteenth century. His name is cited in the same breath as Hume, Swift and Defoe, and he is recognised as having influenced both Adam Smith and Voltaire.2 His works are being reprinted and dozens of studies have appeared in recent years.3 This growing popularity is partially due to the reevaluation of the literary genre that Mandeville practised: satire. Mandeville also benefits from the attention being given to less prominent figures in the history of ideas. It is true that his humorous poems, dialogues and essays are not high-minded philosophical treatises, but their contents are nonetheless striking. His slogan ‘private vices, public benefits’ has made him immortal, for it represents a highly original view of the economy. Failings such as greed, lust, vanity, extravagance and even crime, are given a positive value by Mandeville, in contrast to earlier authors, since in his opinion they stimulate the economy. In this way private sins add up unintentionally to strengthen society. This moral of the ‘Fable of the Bees’ makes Mandeville a forerunner of economic liberalism. In religious matters, among others, Mandeville also expressed a very tolerant point of view. His message had important consequences for ethics. He settled accounts with the idea of earlier moralists that personal virtue was a condition for being a good public servant. But the question is whether we should always take Mandeville literally. The recent tendency is toward an increasingly nuanced view of his ideas. It is much too simple to see him as a sarcastic misanthrope with an extremely pessimistic view of human nature. His works contain a double meaning in many places that makes his message compatible with classical opinions on honor and virtue after all. Mandeville may have made use in many places of a stylistic device with a long tradition: inversion. A recent biographer therefore speaks of ‘the two Mandevilles’, describing him on the one hand as ‘a pious Christian, an ascetic, and an unusually austere moralist, who finds corruption even in apparently laudable or at least innocent activities’, and on the other as ‘a cynic, a scoffer of all virtue and religion.. .‘.4 Mandeville remains a puzzle for modern scholars. The titles of studies devoted to him speak volumes: ‘The Ambivalence of Bernard Mandeville’, ‘Mandeville: Cynic or Fool’, and ‘Paradox and Society’.5 Mandeville research still has to fill many gaps, the greatest of which is the relationship between his ideas and his