MANDEVILLE, BERNARD (1670–1733)

MANDEVILLE, BERNARD (1670–1733), satirical writer and medical doctor. A specialist in nervous disorders, Bernard Mandeville was a Dutchman whose family had included physicians for generations. He received a classical education at the Erasmian school in Rotterdam. At the University of Leiden he studied medicine but also wrote a philosophical treatise on the ancient question of whether or not animals had souls. His cosmopolitan background led to a close knowledge of French skeptical literature and particularly the writings of Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), which influenced him considerably. Mandeville emigrated to London around 1691, possibly because of his involvement in local political disturbances, known as the Costerman Tax Riots, in Rotterdam in 1690. He settled down to a successful medical practice and married an Englishwoman, Ruth Elizabeth Laurence. Mandeville counted among his friends the eminent physician Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753).

Mandeville's literary career began with the publication of a Hudibrastic poem entitled The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turned Honest (1705), in which he began a satirical attack on Puritan asceticism that lasted his whole life. With the addition of prose essays, the poem grew into the first part of The Fable of the Bees (1714). A second part appeared in 1729. One of the appended essays dealt with the subject of charity schools, which, Mandeville controversially argued, would create discontent among the poor by overqualifying them for the (menial) tasks that they needed to do to make a living and that society needed them to do for its survival. The polemical subtitle, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, pithily encapsulated what later became known as the Mandevillean paradox, a questioning of the effects of adhering to an ascetic morality in a materialistic society.

The addition of the essay on charity schools to The Fable of the Bees led to a sometimes bitter public controversy engaging clerics and theologians like William Law (1686–1761), Joseph Butler (1692–1752), and Bishop George Berkeley (1685–1753), who all attacked Mandeville's work as morally corrupting. The Grand Jury of Middlesex condemned The Fable of the Bees to be burned by the public hangman, which added to Mandeville's notoriety and reputation as a freethinker. But the Mandevillean paradox became a focal discussion of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. Adam Ferguson (1723–1816), David Hume (1711–1776), and Adam Smith (1723–1790) in Britain and Voltaire (1694–1778) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) on the Continent felt the need to examine Mandeville's assertion that luxury, far from being harmful, was the foundation of a flourishing, commercial society.

Mandeville wrote a number of other works, including one on nervous disorders and several on the subject of religion and its effects upon war. He also wrote pamphlets on important and topical social subjects, such as prostitution (A Modest Defence of Publick Stews; 1724) and hanging (An Enquiry into the Causes of the Frequent Executions at Tyburn; 1725). On these social questions his views, expressed journalistically, could be radical, in the English context, suggesting, for example, that prostitution should be regulated by the state. But his lasting fame and the critical attention he has received is primarily based on the ideas expounded in his Fable of the Bees.

MANDEVILLE, BERNARD (1670–1733)

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