Welcome to my Mandeville pages!
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This part of my site is given to one of the few
philosophers that stem from Holland of which I am proud: Bernard Mandeville, who was born in Rotterdam, studied in Leiden, and lived most of his life as a
doctor of medicine in London.
He lived in the 18th Century, and wrote a beautifully
clear and satiric English. He got famous - indeed so infamous that his
contemporaries restyled is name as "Man-devil" - with the
Fable of the Bees, which gives a plausible if satirical explanation for social
life, social welfare, and social progress: Most of it is - in real fact -
firmly based on what have been called vices
from times immemorial, in all books of religion.
The
Fable
of the Bees was first published as a poem, and
was later, in several editions adorned with a very satirical explanation and
comments by Mandeville.
Mandeville himself was "answered" by most of
his famous contemporaries, but not very well, except for the amazing Bishop
Butler.
I believe that Mandeville saw deep into the real causes
of social wealth and welfare, and into the real hearts and desires of most
men and women - for which reason he - and others like him, such as Juvenal,
Lucian, Swift and Orwell - has not at all been popular with ordinary people.
The edition at present on this site is that of Jack
Lynch, who is an Associate Professor of English who also has interesting
things to say
on style and writing. At present all I
have available is the poem "The Fable of the Bees", and not
Mandeville's accompanying text.
It may interest some that John Maynard Keynes quotes Mandeville with
considerable approval in his "The General Theory of Employment and Money"
as one of his own precursors, and spends some 4 pages of text and quotation on
him (in chapter 23, pages 359-362 in my edition). Here is the start of Keynes'
discussion:
But it was by Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees that Barbon's
opinion [Covetousness is a Vice, prejudicial both to Man and Trade] was mainly
popularised, a book convicted as a nuisance by the grand jury of Middlesex in
1723, which stands out in the history of the moral sciences for its scandalous
reputation. Only one man is recorded as having spoken a good word for it,
namely Dr. Johnson, who declared that it did not puzzle him, but "opened his
eyes into real life very much"" (p. 359)
I wish you pleasurable and instructive reading and
computing!
last update:
Nov 16 2003