The Philosophy Club: Mandeville

Bernard Mandeville's 1705 poem "The Fable of the Bees" opens with a beehive that is "flourishing when it's full of vice"—everyone is addicted to fraud, luxury, and self-interest, yet "the whole mass of paradise." Then the bees get rid of vice, and the entire hive dies. The lesson, in Mandeville's own words: "Only fools strive to make great an honest hive." This was a scandalous idea in early 18th-century England, a mercantilist society still dominated by Christian teachings about divine virtue and sin. Mandeville spent the rest of his life defending what felt to many like a troll post.

The argument: private vices, public benefits

Mandeville was born in Rotterdam in 1670, trained as a doctor specializing in hypochondriac and hysteric passions, and learned English after marrying an English woman. He began translating fables for supplementary income, then wrote his own. The core of his argument appears in a chapter titled "An Inquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue." His view is that humans, like all animals, pursue self-interest—we are "naturally inclined to please ourselves." Mandeville asks: "What else but an excess of stupid vanity could have prevailed upon our reason to fancy that ornamental beyond all other animals that are readily clothed by nature herself?" We are the wanting creature, and without vanity, no one would buy clothes or