Private Vices Research Articles

«Басня о пчелах» Бернарда Мандевиля, или Гимн экономической свободе

Institutions (norms and rules) play an important role in the development of any socio-economic system, and largely determine its direction and speed. Economic freedom is one of the most important ‘products’ generated by the institutional environment. Strictly speaking, there is no unambiguous understanding of this phenomenon, but there is an almost universally accepted opinion that without freedom it’s difficult to achieve success in economic development and thereby ensure the growth of public welfare. The degree of freedom determines the extent and forms in which the interests of economic agents, related to the desire to obtain private benefits, which ultimately benefits the whole society, can manifest themselves. Bernard Mandeville, who can be considered the “petrel of economic freedom” almost the first among scientists and philosophers of Modern times, addressed this issue long before the founders of classical political economy and presented his judgments in allegorical form in “The Fable of the Bees”. Mandeville’s understanding of economic freedom as an opportunity for the manifestation of socially useful ‘private vices’ differs markedly from the interpretations of economic freedom that currently prevail and on the basis of which the relevant international indices are built. Nevertheless, Mandeville’s views, which were frank and devoid of any hypocrisy, served as the ideological foundation of modern views on economic freedom as an extremely useful, but very contradictory phenomenon in people’s lives.

Mandeville’s Moralists: Hume, Smith, and the Framing of Moral Virtue

Bernard Mandeville’s theory of morality – ‘private vices, public benefits’ – provides a frame for comparing Adam Smith and David Hume on utility. Mandeville held that vice, not virtue, is useful for society. For him, the private and public good do not align. What is bad for individuals is often beneficial for society and vice versa. To counter Mandeville’s rhetoric and show the attractiveness of virtue, Hume places the principle of utility at the center of his An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751). This placement directs the reader’s attention away from the lack of alignment between private and public advantage and enables Hume to ‘dress’ moral virtue in utility and pleasure. Smith, by contrast, places the principle of propriety at the center of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). This is because he is closer in spirit to Mandeville than is Hume in acknowledging a gap between the private and public good. By directing the reader’s attention to this gap in Part IV, Smith tries to show, contra Hume, that the principle of propriety, not utility, better explains and defends praiseworthy action and choice in an imperfect world.

Bernard Mandeville e o “Leitor Criterioso”

Ever since the publication of the Fable of the Bees and its formulaic equation of private vices with public benefits, Mandeville has generally been regarded as an author who revelled in paradox; a master of irony and sarcasm. Whether he really meant to give free rein to private vices – the “laissez faire” of unbridled capitalism –, whether he did think that the poor should not be given access to education, or that prostitution should be institutionalised, is still a matter of discussion. If Mandeville’s provocative use of paradoxes has been the object of ample academic scrutiny, the author-reader relationship that results from this paradoxical mode of writing has generally been overlooked. In the present article, I wish to show that Mandeville is less interested in convincing the readers of the validity of his moral – or immoral – stances (whatever they may be) than in guiding them through the uncertain and disconcerting maze of critical thinking and self-knowledge.

The Human-Animal Debate and the Enlightenment Body Politic: Emilie Du Châtelet’s Reading of Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees

This article rereads Bernard Mandeville’s infamous poem The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices Publick Benefits (1714; 1723; 1729) and Emilie du Châtelet’s French translation (1735-1738) in the context of the eighteenth-century debates around the differences between humans and animals. It argues that the considerable alterations to the text undertaken by Châtelet should be understood as a response to Mandeville’s vitalistic theories of physical and political bodies, and their implications for his theory of political economy. Through close readings of the two versions of the Fable, the article shows that Châtelet’s reworking circumvents the idea – central to Mandeville’s text – that all living bodies, whether human or animal, are interconnected systems animated by vital ‘spirits’. I thus use Mandeville’s and Châtelet’s texts as a window for exploring the implications of different positions in the debate on the animal-human hierarchy.

Are Private Vices Public Finance Virtues? An Empirical Investigation

ABSTRACTThe article investigates the impact of widely accepted private vices (smoking and alcohol and gasoline consumption) on public finance. Introducing the concept of “vice-related deficit,” which aggregates the positive effects on public finance on the revenue side (cash inflows) and the negative effects on the expenditures side (cash outflows), the article looks upon cigarette, alcohol, and gasoline consumption as determinants of vice-related deficit for a number of 68 countries for year 2012. We found that smoking had a negative effect on vice-related budget balance, while alcohol and gasoline consumption had a positive effect. As control variables, we used life expectancy and size of the economy, both having been found with negative effects. The results prove robust to different sample adjustments. We also found that the negative effect of private vices on public finance is stronger for Christian countries than for non-Christian countries. Policy recommendations were made accordingly.

When elites and outlaws do philanthropy: on the limits of private vices for public benefit

In the last decade, elitist philanthropy exploded in certain parts of the West and so did philanthropy of outlaw motorcycle clubs. The question is, under what conditions does philanthropy become an effective strategy of legitimization of one’s power in society? Neoliberalism did not only result in extreme inequality, weakening of the state, and emergence of increasingly disillusioned population, but also enabled philanthropy to become an effective strategy of legitimization of the informal power of both billionaires and criminal organizations alike. Philanthropy became instrumental both to image management in face of crises of reputation and to the insertion of these transnational non-state actors into governance. The destructive effects of neoliberalism allowed both groups to grow, and to reproduce and accelerate the very conditions in which they thrive, thus further weakening the state and fuelling inequality. The argument counters popular narratives about how private vices and greed can serve public benefit.

The Political Theology of Laissez-Faire: From Philia to Self-Love in Commercial Society

This essay examines the neglected theological origins of early economic discourse. Against accounts emphasizing the secular and scientific foundations of classical political economy, I examine the origins of economic thought in religious debates concerning the nature of human love and divine grace. Specifically, the theorization of what was called “commercial society” in the eighteenth-century depended upon two general theoretical innovations, each of which began in the post-Hobbesian social contract tradition. The first was a conception of the oeconomy understood as a domain of non-political “society,” based on pre-political property relations and sub-political voluntary associations of a primarily commercial variety, reflecting divinely ordained social progress. The second was the transformation of the ancient concept of philia to stress the self-love underlying all human relationships and the necessary role of divine grace in generating social integration. The idea that an “invisible” mechanism – the market functioning according to God's providential design – makes private vices conduce to public benefit promised an account of social order generated through essentially non-political processes based on a specific political theology. Tracing these ideas from their origins in theological debates through to their appropriation as core features in the analysis of commercial society takes us from a late seventeenth-century theological argument to the late eighteenth-century formalization of a secular model of sociability in classical political economy. In conclusion, I consider how aspects of this early political theology may remain implicit in the modern conception of economic rationality.

Private Vices, Public Virtues and the Emergence of the Liberal Personality in Britain 1785-1914

The modern self is said to live a life of performance. This raises the question of how the differences and contradictions in the lives people lived were managed in former times. I focus on the distinction between public and private roles. Textual evidence suggests that widespread disagreement and uncertainty about how private and public lives should be related persisted in Britain until about 1840. The debate on the question implied an ideal which I call the Liberal personality; a contrasting Tory personality is sketched. The strategies pursued by Tories in liberal times are identified and the support to them given, paradoxically, by the Liberal insistence on privacy is highlighted.

A RESEARCH REGARDING THE IMPORTANCE OF BERNARD MANDEVILLE’S ARTICLE: THE FABLE OF BEES

Bernard Mandeville is a Dutch thinker, known especially for his own works on ethics and economics. His magnum opus is ‘The Fable of the Bees or Private Vices, Publick Benefits”. In this work, Mandeville argues that all people actually are selfish and this selfishness is both natural and virtuous. In accordance with Mandeville, qualities like kindness and honesty, instead of contributing the improvement of the society, it regrets the progress. Vices appeared even in the smallest part of a society, allow almost all to live in the paradise. The most obvious indicator of this is the prosperty and happiness of the societies in which all people are selfish. Because of everyone from lawyers to doctors and from barbers to clerics are thinking themselves in a selfish manner, an unbelievable prosperity is being appeared in the society. Accordingly, behaving that are benevolent to give rise to a society in which life is impossible. The most obvious reason for that is the pursuing of selfish purposes of oneself creates a sponteneous order. With this concept of spontaneous order Mandeville has influenced Adam Smith and given him a ground for his ‘homo economicus’.

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

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. …

Deception and Enlightenment: The Politics of Machiavelli's The Mandragola

The Mandragola is a microcosm of Machiavelli's thought. As a comedy, every detail is under Machiavelli's control, and there are no losers: private vices yield public benefits. All Machiavelli's characters are not equal in either the choice worthiness of their goals or abilities. Who is the hero of this comedy? Machiavelli's clues prompts exploring his allusions to classical and patristic sources but, most importantly, to Livy. Parallels in The Mandragola and Livy connect Nicia with the Roman founder, Brutus. In his ambitious goal, freedom from conventional shame, and consequent triumph over misfortune, Nicia emerges as exemplifying Machiavellian virtue.

Bitter Honey: Recuperating the Medical and Scientific Context of Bernard Mandeville by Phillip Hilton

Reviewed by: Bitter Honey: Recuperating the Medical and Scientific Context of Bernard Mandeville by Phillip Hilton Anita Guerrini Phillip Hilton. Bitter Honey: Recuperating the Medical and Scientific Context of Bernard Mandeville. Bern: Peter Lang, 2010. Pp. xvi + 232. $71.95 (paper). Mandeville (?1670–1733), was born and educated in the Netherlands, and migrated to England in the 1690s, where he practiced medicine in London. Like many practitioners, he never bothered to obtain the license of the London College of Physicians and therefore endured occasional [End Page 60] prosecution from that body. His medical specialty, which he practiced throughout his career, was nervous diseases. His Fable of the Bees, or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, first published in 1714, became one of the most famous and influential works of moral and political philosophy of the century. In Mandeville’s view, vice and success were necessarily joined, and the passions rather than reason governed human nature. But Mandeville also wrote about medicine. Mr. Hilton’s Bitter Honey, based on his 1999 Ph.D. dissertation at the University of New South Wales, seeks to place Mandeville in his scientific and medical context rather than the more usual political and literary one. He looks in particular at Mandeville’s 1711 Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions, later revised as A Treatise of Hypochondriack and Hysterick Diseases (1730). Mr. Hilton has two goals: one is to find Mandeville’s scientific and medical influences, and the other is to detail Mandeville’s particular therapeutic ideas, which include the uses of satire to treat depression. Mr. Hilton knows the secondary literature on Mandeville but less so the history of science and medicine. Unfortunately he did not update his bibliography; there are no references later than 1999, meaning that he misses relevant works on medicine and nervous disorders, including my own work on George Cheyne. Mr. Hilton focuses on Mandeville’s four main medical influences: Thomas Willis, Locke, Thomas Sydenham, and Georgio Baglivi. He presents Willis as a mechanist and particularly an atomist, following Pierre Gassendi, and explains the ideas that led to Willis’s account of mental illness in his Two Discourses Concerning the Soul of Brutes. I would like to have seen something on the influence of the French physician Marin Cureau de la Chambre here, who wrote largely on questions of mind, body, and soul from the 1640s to the 1660s. Mr. Hilton interestingly connects Mandeville with the work of physician and early economist Nicholas Barbon (not, as we might think, a Frenchman but son of the parliamentarian Praisegod Barbon or Barebone). Both Barbon and Willis employed the Epicurean philosophy elaborated by Gassendi to argue for the primacy of appetites in human behavior. A physician trained under Willis, Locke followed his teacher’s psychology. The neo-Hippocratic physician Sydenham does not fit into this Epicurean lineage; he was, instead, a Baconian empiricist whose influence lay in his emphasis on exact description and his skepticism about hypotheses. The Italian physician Giorgio Baglivi (1668–1707) put together these diverse influences in his popular textbook De praxi medica (translated into English as The Practice of Physick, 1704). Baglivi believed that observation was the critical function of a successful physician and indeed of a successful individual. But, following Willis’s mechanical model of the body, excessive external stimuli could lead the body to the disordered state of mental illness. Baglivi, says Mr. Hilton, believed that the physician might use any number of rhetorical and artistic skills to manipulate the patient’s imagination and therefore effect a cure. Mr. Hilton uses the revised 1730 edition of Mandeville’s Treatise. The reader is immediately plunged into this work without much background other than that it consists of three dialogues among a physician, a husband, and a wife. With some reason, Mr. Hilton closely identifies the physician, Philopirio, with Mandeville, noting similarities in biography. Much of his discussion then focuses on what the Treatise [End Page 61] reveals about Mandeville himself; we do not get back to Willis et al. for many pages. Rather we get interesting glimpses of Mandeville as a cynic, a Manichaean, and a Gnostic, but I began to lose track of where the book was going...

A voice from the beehive: post-white paper sociology?

Then leave Complaints: Fools only strive To make a Great and honest Hive. Bernard Mandeville (1714) Fable of the Bees: Or, Private Vices Publick BenefitsI am now, and always have been, a ‘teaching ...

Turning Private Vices into Collective Virtues: A Simple Model and an Experiment on the Sourceforge Development Community

This paper deals with the allocation of effort across the different software projects that collectively make up the Open Source Software ’ecology’. Free/Libre Open Source Software projects share many features with pure public goods; nonetheless, projects often compete for ’success’ inside the FOSS community at large. The central research question of this paper is then, how do developers choose where to direct their efforts amongst the thousands of existing software projects? How come developers choose to launch new projects when established alternatives are available? Why is the vast majority of Open Source projects a failure? The paper proposes a simple dynamic stochastic model that addresses these issues. Following methodological insight from Duffy (2006), we combine agent based simulations with human subjects lab experiments. As a benchmark, the model is simulated using a simple agent-based code assuming optimizing behaviour and risk neutrality at all times on the part of identical agents. The assumptions on optimal behaviour are then tested in the lab with human subjects, showing persistent and systematic biases in human behaviour: human players tend to be risk propense and to attach value to a label of ’project leadership’. These systematic biases are then built into a new round of simulations, showing a drastically better fit with the real picture, as implied by data from the SourceForge.net dataset, and an enhancement of the evolutionary characteristics of the model (higher project quality in time). Results hints to the fact that in Open Source communities high risk propensity and excessive attachment to one’s own project can be collectively beneficial. FOSS communities appear able to harness the efforts of thousands of developers, turning their risk propension and overconfidence into a collective gain.

The Beehive

The Beehive Marion Thain (bio) The bees are dying, apparently, and no one knows why. Speculation as to the cause of this disaster has preoccupied the media recently: perhaps a mysterious virus, perhaps a fungus, perhaps climate change, perhaps a reaction to pollution. Yet I wonder whether this sad state of affairs isn't more closely connected with another very topical event—the recent economic recession—than we may yet realize. Bees have functioned for so long as an analogy for the state of society, and the economic and political function specifically, that it wouldn't surprise me if reality and metaphor have collided, producing a potent [End Page 23] omen for our "credit-crunched" times. If one traces the use of the beehive as a metaphor for the organizational and productive endeavours of human society, one can certainly see the historical pressure the poor creatures are currently under to live, and die, in parallel with the fortunes of our economic climate. The ecosystem of the beehive provided Bernard Mandeville, in the early eighteenth century, with an image of a society that is organized and regulated, but ultimately governed by amoral structures—giving rise to the dictum in his work's title that "private vices" could yield "publick benefits" (passim). Marx took up this image of the worker as worker-bee in Capital (originally published in three volumes between 1867 and 1894), but he argues for the dignity and purpose of human labour in opposition to the unreflective work of the bee (198). In line with this tradition of bee imagery as social and political commentary is an image more familiar to most Victorianists: George Cruikshank's microcosm of British society presented in pictorial form within the chambers of a beehive in his 1867 engraving (originally designed in 1840 but altered before later publication). The hive was a useful analogy for those with vested interests in the economic and organizational operations of society because it represented a system in which roles were tightly adhered to and clearly defined, co-operation was non-negotiable, and productive enterprise was focused and efficient. In Cruikshank's vision, it is essential to the structure and functioning of society that everyone know their position, from the ruling elite at the top, making the highest-order decisions as to the future of the society, to the armed forces at the bottom, ensuring basic security and order. Unsurprisingly, scholars have found in the image a conservative upholding of the status quo at a time when the Second Reform Bill prompted vigorous debate about the extension of the franchise (Fowles xv). Can the brutality and amorality of Mandeville's bee society be wholly absent as a point of reference here? What does it do to our reading of an image that seems, at first sight, such a structured and benign vision of society? Do the hive's latent political significances express fear of a new matriarchy, and a barely suppressed critique of the Queen's order, beneath its apparently benign surface? What of the lazy, well-fed drone bees, who exist only to mate with the queen and then be killed by the workers? Are these present within Cruikshank's social hierarchy? One can hardly dismiss such questions when Charles Dickens's Bleak House (serialized between 1852 and 1853) had so memorably and so recently characterized the ineffectual Mr. Skimpole through his rejection of the worker bee in favour of the indolent drone: "He must say he thought a Drone the embodiment of a pleasanter and wiser idea. The drone said unaffectedly, '[. . .] I find myself in a world in which there is so much to see and so short a time to see it in that I must take the liberty of looking about me and begging to be provided for by somebody who doesn't want to look about him'" (140). Yet, in the beehive, the drones are killed by the worker bees that originally supported them. Perhaps Cruikshank's "British Bee Hive" contains revolutionary anxiety about the possibility of an uprising of the workers even as it seems to uphold [End Page 24] the "naturalness" of a division of class and labour. We should not forget...

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Punishment of Children Under English Law – Public and Private Vices?

The punishment of children in the domestic sphere and in the public domain is an issue of concern for those with care of children or whose interests lie in the protection of children’s human rights. How children are treated when they are judged to have broken rules reveals fundamental approaches to the welfare of those who have yet to reach adulthood. The effect of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in respect of how children are punished, whether in the home or as transgressors of criminal law, may be examined through two distinct but linked spheres: the private and home life context of domestic or personal punishment, and the public domain of state punishment of children in terms of criminal responsibility under English Law. Both spheres reveal attitudes towards the rights of children which suggest how human rights are accorded to particular groups in applying international obligations to a state’s domestic provision. This article seeks to explore some issues of compliance with Article 19 (the physical chastisement of children), Article 37 (the imprisonment of children being a ‚last resort’) and Article 40 (the minimum age of criminal responsibility) of the United Nations Convention on the␣Rights of the Child. The application of the rights of children and the operation of the ‚best interests’ of the child in applying Articles 19, 37 and 40 suggests that there are issues in relation to non-compliance which indicate a diminution of the separate rights of children under English Law in particular and in the operation of the best interests of the child.

Contingency, Necessity, Teleology, and Progress: Reply to Mazlish

30 Historically Speaking May/June 2006 Contingency, Necessity, Teleology, and Progress: Reply to Mazlish Aviezer Tucker Bruce Mazlish notes correctly that there is enormous conceptual confusion over contingency, necessity, teleology, and progress in history. I hope to clarify some of these confusions. The related concepts of contingency and necessity are independent of teleology, and teleology and progress are independent of each other as well. Teleology and Contingency Mazlish seems to assume that historical teleology is inconsistent with historical contingency . Since historical teleology implies that history or some historical processes have an end or a purpose, historical contingency , the possibility that things could have turned out otherwise, precludes a predestined end. Historical necessity seems to be a necessary condition for a predestined telos, but it ain't necessarily so. In book two of his Physics Aristotle distinguished four types ofcauses: material, formal, moving, and teleological. The moving cause is the primary source of change or coming to rest, as the sculpture is to a statue. The teleological cause is the end for the sake ofwhich an event happens, such as the finished statue for its making. In his Timaeus and Philebus Plato suggested that necessity, the moving cause (ananke in Greek or causa efficiens in Latin), may be in conflict with telos, the final cause that permeates the universe. Plato considered the moving cause to be a blind, brute, necessary force that the etiologic "Mind"— "Divine Mind," "Divine Intelligence," "Reason," "Wisdom," or plain "Zeus"—needs to "get the better of or to "persuade" to move in the correct meaningful direction, "perfection ." With the exception of the Atomists, Greek philosophers felt that the necessary, moving cause was insufficient for explaining the order of the universe and the place of humanity in it. Plato and Aristotle added teleology for this purpose. Teleology is distinct from necessity, and the two may affect events in contradictory directions. Plato's idea that teleology can use necessity as a tool was developed later in the theistic philosophies of history of Vico and Hegel, where cunning divine reason uses human motivations in the service of a historical plan designed to lead to the end of history. It also appears in less metaphysically presumptuous philosophies that uphold the heterogenesis of ends—the "private vices, public virtues" social theories that Malebranche and Vico shared with Adam Smith. Likewise, Marx One may write about the history of chess or electrical engineering and notice steady progress . ... Yet that does not imply that there is a telos of chessplaying or engineering. combined necessity with teleology in arguing that inevitable economic processes would lead to a classless society, thereby eliminating the class antagonisms he saw as the necessary engine of world history. Individual voluntary action can "lengthen the birth pangs" of the end ofhistory but not prevent it. Conversely, historical contingency can be consistent with historical teleology. If we interpret contingency probabilistically, we may suggest that at given junctures in history (social or natural) there was a certain distribution of probabilities across several options. The fact that one of these low-probability, contingent potentials actualized whereas the others did not may be consistent with either a teleological or purposeless interpretations of history. For example, in a fair lottery, there is an equal distribution ofvery low probabilities for each ticket to be the winning ticket. It is necessary that some ticket should win, but it is contingent that this ticket will. When one ticket —say, yours—wins, it is consistent with a teleological interpretation that you were meant or destined to win. Since both historical contingency and necessity are equally consistent with both a teleological and non-teleological interpretation of history, the concepts of teleology and contingency/necessity are independent ofeach other. Teleology and Progress Obviously, not all teleological interpretations ofhistory are progressive, since the end ofhistory may be a return to barbarism or even the annihilation of the human race in universal entropy. Progressive interpretations of history may be a subset of teleological interpretations. However, progressive interpretations are not necessarily teleological. It may be argued that, from our value-laden perspective, history progressed for a while toward a greater fulfillment of our values, without assuming that there is any grander final cause or design...

Any Friend of the Movement: Networking for Birth Control, 1920–1940

Historians of the birth control movement have a solid foundation of scholarship upon which to build their contributions. The 1970s gave us David Kennedy's Birth Control in America (1970), Linda Gordon's Woman's Body, Woman's Right (1976), and James Reed's From Private Vice to Public Virtue (1978). More recently Ellen Chesler's Woman of Valor (1992) and Esther Katz's The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger (2003) have provided comprehensive portraits and insightful analyses of the undisputed leader of the birth control movement, Margaret Sanger. Jimmy Elaine Wilkinson Meyer's Any Friend of the Movement tells the story of the birth control movement in Cleveland, Ohio, thus marking a shift away from the focus on Sanger and the national arena. This work makes an important contribution to a growing body of scholarship that seeks to uncover the great variability in the struggle for both the legalization of birth control and the provision of contraception to American women. Local circumstances underscore the creativity of birth control reformers and enrich our understanding of the obstacles they faced, the opportunities they had, and the decisions they made.

Medicalizing the Romantic Libido: Sexual Pleasure, Luxury, and the Public Sphere

I take as my point of departure Jurgen Habermas’s notion that the public sphere in the Eighteenth Century translated private vices into public virtues: from the intimate spaces of the conjugal fami...

Medicalizing the Romantic Libido: Sexual Pleasure, Luxury, and the Public Sphere

Habermas argues that in the eighteenth century, private vices were translated into public virtues; from the intimate spaces of the conjugal family came the public virtues of companionate love, voluntary association, and self-cultivation; from private commerce came acquisitiveness, competition, and rational calculation. This essay uses Habermas to reexamine Foucaultian histories of sexuality, arguing that the enormous medical literature on pleasure--luxury, sexual pleasure, masturbation, nerves--polices this transition from private vice to public virtue, but in sometimes surprising ways. The key was to explain why certain pleasurable experiences (acquisitiveness for its own sake and sexual intimacy outside the normative middle-class family) were not legitimately or even empirically pleasurable, despite potential somatic evidence to the contrary.