Grumbling Hive Research Articles

“Uma Grande e Honesta Colmeia”: a Subversão do Apiário Clássico em Mandeville

Bernard Mandeville built his two-volume masterwork, The Fable of the Bees, around a largely ignored poem originally published in 1705, his “Grumbling Hive.” This piece attempts to provide the literary context for Mandeville’s choice of apian metaphor. We examine ancient and early modern examples of social and political theory informed and articulated by reference to the organization and structure of apiaries and their denizens. Considering this context, we argue, demonstrates in a new way the subversive character of “The Grumbling Hive” and its subsequent iterations as The Fable of the Bees. Mandeville turns inside out the time-worn assumptions about the natural harmony of hives, their relation to human society, and the role of speech and reason in their flourishing.

Mandeville and Augustan Ideas: New Essays ed. by Charles W. A. Prior (review)

186 Reviews Misunderstandings often appear when a scholar's quest forsubversive subtexts distracts attention from literal meaning. This happens with the ode, probably by Anne Killigrew, 'Upon a Little Lady under the Discipline of an Excellent Person'. The poetic persona, who loves Eudora, cries out in horror on seeing her smacking a little girl on the legs, or possibly higher; tumult among a flockof watching Cupids suggests that this is an outrage against love, beauty, and rank. Yet the observer's admission that Eudora chastens error and shows virtue vindicates her moral authority. The Cupids exchange their bows for lyres, to which they sing chaste airs. When the smacking is over, the girl's reaction indicates that it was justified: smiling, she joins Eudora in a 'heav'nly' song (p. 123). Andreadis believes the poem's subject is a sexual encounter (p. 123): 'a young woman is dominated and disciplinedby Eudora, an older and more powerful personage' (p. 121). Hearing a 'language of erotic ellipsis' (p. 123), she multiplies the difficulties in identifying the poem's speaking voices (see p. 122). She observes that the Cupids' lyres are 'inevitably associated with Sappho' (p. 208 n. 38), ignoring a reference to Apollo that forges thematically appropriate links with the god of harmony and sweet reason. Apparently working on the assumption that the beating continues, Andreadis finds the concluding change of mood 'opaque, unexplained, yet it is clear that the speaker has not only come to terms with what appears to be a transgressively erotic behaviour but now finds it desirable' (p. 123). Although the poem's harmonics reverberate with same-sex female erotics, it is unwise to ignore the melody. University of Reading Carolyn D. Williams Mandeville and Augustan Ideas: New Essays. Ed. by Charles W. A. Prior. (English Literary Studies Monograph Series, 82) Victoria, BC: University of Victoria Press. 2000. 144 pp. $15.50. ISBN 0-920604-73-0. Charles Prior manages to appear both dangerously equivocal and somewhat illogical in asserting that the collection focuses 'on what Mandeville was writing about and how he was writing it, rather than on what he wrote', claiming that 'This frees us from the impossible, and largely unrewarding, task of unravelling those points at which Mandeville is being serious, ironic, playful, or some permutation of the three' (p. 11). If the intellectual slipperiness of the good Doctor Man-devil seems to have infected his critics in such a fine semantic distinction, the idea that one can focus on 'how he was writing' without confronting the profound problems of irony or the seriousness of his intentions seems simply myopic. The very title of the collection does not help to focus attention on the more troubling question of Mandeville's ideas, their degree of coherence or conviction, and the editor's introduction does little to answer his own question: 'Who zvas Bernard Mandeville?' Scholars from a range of disciplines have discovered as many Mandevilles as one might find industrious/degenerate bees in 'The Grumbling Hive'. We have been offered a pious Dutch Reformed Calvinist, a cynical profligate libertine, a misogynistic capitalist, a proto-feminist, a behavioural psychologist, mercantilist, utilitarian, an emancipator of economics, a reafBrmer of Hobbes, a pre-Kantian integrator of ethical and social thought, a northern Vico, or a shrewd precursor of Adam Smith, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes; the doubt remains, however, that this bee might prove an intruding and disguised wasp-like if not waspish satirist. Sincerity is a notoriously difficultand critically unfashionable notion, but its etymology reminds us ofthe need to discriminate between honey and beeswax. Unravelling represents no easy task, but it is not impossible, and would certainly prove rewarding. Any paperback collection of essays by notable Mandeville scholars is neverthe? less to be welcomed. In the opening essay, '"State Hypochondriacks" Dispraised: MLR, 98.1,2003 187 Mandeville versus the Active Citizen', J. A. W. Gunn maintains that Mandeville's infamous paradox 'private vices, public benefits' depends upon 'a very conventional notion of what constituted a benefit to the public [. . .] conceived in [. . .] holistic, society-wide terms' (p. 16). The 'common good' ofwhich Mandeville writes, however, never seems to extend to anyone below the bourgeois public sphere...

Hives and horseshoes, Mintzberg or MacIntyre: what future for corporate social responsibility?

A horseshoe is regarded as a lucky, perhaps even romantic, symbol of our industrial heritage. Why is it, then, that much of English literature, from Mandeville's ‘Grumbling Hive’ on, portrays business in a murky light? The paper begins with an analysis of this phenomenon and concludes that it is the institutionalisation and legitimisation of avarice and its consequential effects that gives rise to such a portrayal. A horseshoe has also been used as a convenient means of conceptualising an answer to the questions this conclusion raises: ‘Who should control the corporation and for what ends?’ (Mintzberg 1985) and discussing recent developments in corporate social responsibility. Drawing on research evidence the paper demonstrates how corporations are simultaneously under pressure from society and responding to its concerns. The paper concludes that these current developments can at best ameliorate the situation, and that what is necessary is to rediscover the notion of corporate virtue, instead of putting virtue at the service of vice.

Stilling the Grumbling Hive: The Response to Social and Economic Problems, 1689-1750.

Stilling the Grumbling Hive: The Response to Social and Economic Problems, 1689-1750.

REVIEWS

Book reviewed in this article: Predestination, Policy and Polemic: Conflict and Consensus in the English Church from the Reformation to the Civil War. By Peter White The Diary of Sir Richard Hutton 1614–1639. Edited by W. R. Prest Stilling the Grumbling Hive. The Response to Social and Economic Problems in England 1689–1750. Edited by Lee Davison, Tim Hitchcock, Tim Keirn and Robert B. Shoemaker Tea Party to Independence: The Third Phase of the American Revolution 1773–1776. By P. D. G. Thomas The Letter‐Journal of George Canning 1793–1795. Edited by Peter Jupp The Protestant Crusade in Great Britain 1829–1860. By John WolffeThe Town Plans of the 1832 Reform Act. The Parliamentary Diaries of Sir John Trelawny, 1858–1865. Edited by T. A. Jenkins Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform. Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860–1880. By Eugenio F. Biagini A Moralist In and Out of Parliament … John Stuart Mill at Westminster, 1865–1868. By Bruce L. Kinzer, Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson The Age of Disraeli 1868–1881: The Rise of Tory Demorcacy. By Richard Shannon Strategie del Conservatorismo Britannico nella Crisi del Liberalismo. ‘National Party of Common Sense’ (1885–1892). By Fulvio Cammarano The Contentious Alliance: Trade Unions and the Labour Party. By Lewis Minkin

Lee Davison, Tim Hitchcock, Tim Keirn, and Robert B. Shoemaker, editors. Stilling the Grumbling Hive: The Response to Social and Economic Problems in England, 1689–1750. New York: St. Martin's Press. 1992. Pp. liv, 170. $45.00.

Lee Davison, Tim Hitchcock, Tim Keirn, and Robert B. Shoemaker, editors. Stilling the Grumbling Hive: The Response to Social and Economic Problems in England, 1689–1750. New York: St. Martin's Press. 1992. Pp. liv, 170. $45.00. - Volume 25 Issue 3

Mandeville on the Sources of Wealth

Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733), a Dutch physician who moved to England as a young man, has earned enduring fame by his The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits-a book once characterized as the wickedest and cleverest in the English language. The core of this seminal contribution to economic thought and social psychology was an allegorical poem The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves turn'd Honest, first published anonymously in 1705. In effect a pamphlet set in verse, it describes a hive whose Numbers made 'em thrive; Millions endeavoring to supply Each other's Lust and Vanity.' But when the vicious bees turn virtuousgrown temp'rate, strive, Not how to spend, but how to live'-the hive becomes impoverished and its population dwindles until So few in the vast Hive remain, The hundredth part they can't maintain against th' Insults of numerous Foes. In 1714 the poem appeared under Mandeville's name, supplemented by lengthy commentary in prose. Later editions further extended the scope and ambition of the work, eventually filling two hefty volumes. The Fable of the Bees elaborates the paradoxical thesis that private have unintended consequences that are beneficial: self-seeking individual behavior unwittingly works to promote the public interest. Thus Mandeville anticipates Adam Smith 's concept of the invisible hand-more soberly described as driven by interest and advantage, rather than vice''-which leads each individual to promote 'an end which was no part of his intention. Indeed, in the discussion, set in the form of a dialogue, that occupies Volume II of the Fable, Mandevillle adumbrates a general theory of spontaneous self-organizing systems that goes far beyond the narrow economic focus of the paradox of private vices and public benefits. The existence and possible malfunctioning of such a system in the domain of demographic behavior is, of course, the central, if often unrecognized, issue underlying contemporary debates about population policy. The selections below are from Volume I of the Fable, drawing on the 1924 critical edition by F. B. Kaye (Oxford: The Clarendon Press), which is based on the originals published between 1714 and 1733. (A reprint of this two-volume edition is available through Liberty Press.) The subtitles are not part of the original.

The Role of Mandeville's Bee Analogy in "The Grumbling Hive"

The Role of Mandeville's Bee Analogy in "The Grumbling Hive"

Bernard Mandeville and the Middlesex Grand Jury

ONE OF THE MANY PUZZLES about Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees is why it had wait until its third edition before attracting attention, and then immediately acquired notoriety. The initial version, his poem The Grumbling Hive, seems have sunk without trace of criticism, favorable or hostile, when it appeared in 1705. The first expansion, in the form of the Fable, went through two editions in 1714, so presumably attracted readers, but again does not appear have excited much comment. But in 1723 the third edition was presented by the Grand Jury of Middlesex, and subjected a barrage of invective from pulpit and press, a chorus of complaint which accompanied its publishing history throughout the rest of the eighteenth century. What sparked off the controversy was the presentment of the Fable by the Grand Jury. If we could establish why the jurors were so incensed by the book as recommend the prosecution of its publisher the Court of King's Bench, we would be nearer understanding why its third edition offended people, while earlier editions were not greeted with a similar reception. Mandeville himself was convinced that the Essay on Charity and Charity Schools, which he added the Fable in 1723, provoked their wrath. As we shall see, he was partly right. But the actual presentment only alludes his indictment of charity schools, and then links it another attack made upon them by John Trenchard in the British Journal. It specifically criticizes the Fable because the Grand Jury held that it was designed to run down Religion and Virtue as prejudicial Society, and detrimental the State; and recommend Luxury, Avarice, Pride, and all kind of Vices, as being

XLVIII. Bernard Mandeville on Gin

Dr. Bernard Mandeville in reissuing in 1714 the doggerel verses which he had first published in 1705 under the title, The Grumbling Hive: Or, Knaves Turn'd Honest, added extensive prose remarks and a provocative title, The Fable of the Bees: Or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, but he failed to stir a ripple of protest in English complacency, or even to attract attention by his bold thinking. In 1723, publishing his materials once more with extensive additions, by which he had industriously doubled the bulk of his book, Mandeville at last received his reward in the storm of abuse which burst about his head. He was recognized as the disturber of every acceptable idea which good men then took for granted. The Fable of the Bees became notorious. It was read widely in English and translated into French and German. Throughout the century it was thought to merit discussion, and if possible, vigorous refutation by the men in Europe distinguished for either piety or intelligence. By many readers Mandeville was held to be a monster of impiety, a low rogue too vile to be counted human.