Science, politics, and the economy: the unintended consequences of a diabolic paradox (editorial)

Abstract

The year 2014 marked the 300th anniversary of the publication of Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the bees, or private vices, publick benefits. To celebrate this occasion, as well as its own centennial, the Erasmus University Rotterdam organized an international conference on the work of Mandeville, its historical and intellectual context, and its present relevance, on June 6, 2014. The conference was organized around three keynote lectures,1 which discussed a different field Mandeville worked on or influenced: science and medicine, moral and political philosophy, and political economy. Papers presented at the conference ranged thematically from the co-evolution of commerce, medicine and moral philosophy in the Dutch Republic, via Mandeville's attitudes to religion to the social and intellectual context of his analysis of the passions.This special issue on Mandeville presents a selection of the twenty-two papers presented at the conference. The papers have been selected both for their quality and for their thematic diversity. They thus indicate the range of conference themes as well as the multifaceted nature of current Mandeville scholarship. All papers went through the normal process of blind review before being accepted for publication by this journal.Mandeville was born to a family of city physicians in Rotterdam in 1670, in an age when science, politics and commerce were rapidly changing in their methods and substance. These revolutions forced men of science and letters to reflect anew on the nature of economy, state and society. Mandeville was undoubtedly one of the most radical of these thinkers, proposing controversial new ideas about human motivation, the relationship between individual behavior and the common good, and the role of the state in society. Politically, the Mandeville family were affiliated with the States Party, which favoured economic, political, and religious liberty, as opposed to the Orangists and the allied conservative Calvinists. In the aftermath of the so-called Costerman riots in October 1690, the family was banned from Rotterdam. Bernard Mandeville, who had been educated in medicine at Leiden, ended up in England where he started publishing pasquils and pamphlets, while practicing as a physician.The famous Fable of the bees elaborated one of these pasquils, the poem The grumbling hive, or knaves turn'd honest (1705). Published in 1714 (shortly after Lord Shaftesbury's Characteristics of man, manners, and morals [1711]), the Fable could not have been more at odds with Shaftesbury's claim that mankind's virtues automatically align with the common good. Mandeville promised to unveil man's true nature by observing the trifling films and little pipes of the human frame (Mandeville 1988, vol. I, 3). He claimed, provocatively, that it was human wickedness from which social benefits were to be expected. Luxury, though a private vice, contributes to a nation's prosperity; frugality leads to public ruin. Mandeville published several other increasingly philosophical works, the most important being the second volume of the Fable (1729), which substantially altered its earlier message, and An enquiry into the origin of honour, and the usefulness of Christianity in war (1732).After the Fable was condemned in 1724 by the Grand Jury of Middlesex for its diabolic attempts against religion, Mandeville's notoriety increased sharply. His shocking paradox that mankind's vices contributed to the common good haunted moral philosophers, social scientists and economists ever since. In a famous lecture on the Dutch philosopher, Friedrich Hayek wrote that Mandeville, in his efforts to understand modern commercial society, was asking the right questions (1967, 127). But as Hayek's political antagonist the Cambridge economist Joan Robinson noted, the main question has never been properly answered (1962, 19). The papers in this collection reveal that Mandeville's lasting importance cannot be reduced to what Hayek considered his most important insight: that the unintended consequences of self-interested human actions can be mutually beneficial. …