Man-​Devil and the Liberal Tradition

The core of Mandeville’s outlook for Callanan can be captured with this statement: “we are not who we like to think we are.”² We are animals controlled by waves of animal passions, including, paradoxically, the desperate passion to see and present ourselves as rational, dispassionate beings. Callanan presents Mandeville’s works—including his early Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysteric Passions, his infamous Fable of the Bees, and his Modest Defence of Public Stews—as a broadly unified effort to articulate this paradox and develop its implications for our interpretations of society.

Mandeville’s outlook flows from his corporeal or materialist understanding of human nature. That understanding took shape in his teenage years as he participated in a debate, during his graduate studies in the Netherlands, concerning the nature of animal minds. The debate was much more important than it might seem to us today. Debating the nature of animal minds required philosophers to take a stand on the nature of human distinctiveness (or lack thereof) in relation to animals. To enter the debate required one to wade into deep and controversial anthropological, philosophical, and theological waters.

One of the great strengths of Callanan’s book is its attention to the formative influences on Mandeville’s thought. That attention is on display in chapter 2. In his reflections on animal minds, the young Mandeville followed in the steps of Michel de Montaigne and Pierre Gassendi. He maintained that animal minds differ from human minds not in kind but by degrees. Like humans, animals clearly exhibit an awareness of patterns of cause and effect, and they moderate their behavior accordingly. Mandeville was then especially influenced by his teacher Pierre Bayle and Bayle’s critical engagement with René Descartes. Descartes had argued that animals are automatons. Animals for Descartes are mechanical creatures that respond predictably to external stimuli. They provide no indication that they possess mental states. In his Dictionnaire Historique et Critique, Bayle pointed out that Descartes might well be correct; but if he is, there is little to keep the same argument from being applied to human beings. We humans too respond predictably to external stimuli. We too display nothing externally that would logically require an observer to conclude that we are more than automatons.

Bayle’s argument resonates with Mandeville’s thought as it developed in the early eighteenth century. For Mandeville, human nature and animal nature alike are to be understood in corporeal, mechanistic terms. What we call human nature can be understood as a combination of material components such as organs, tissues, fibers, fluids, and atoms. The complex interaction of these components promotes our self-​preservation by communicating to us feelings of pleasure and pain to which we instinctively respond. From these preliminary observations, Mandeville builds a remarkable, evolutionary social theory that finds definite echoes in the writings of Hume, Darwin, and Hayek.

Callanan presents an insightful reconstruction of Mandeville’s evolutionary theory in chapter 9 of the book. His reconstruction follows from a treatment of the polemical work for which Mandeville is best known: The Fable of Bees, which is an extension of a poem first published in 1705 called The Grumbling Hive: Or, Knaves Turn’d Honest.

In chapter 7, Callanan elaborates The Grumbling Hive and then the 1714 edition of The Fable of Bees as political propaganda in support of Whig commercial interests. The early eighteenth century saw an increase in complaints, especially from Tory commentors such as Charles Gildon, of the corrupting influence of commercial life on English society and the consequent decay of English greatness. The complainers harkened for the return of a properly Christian society ruled by divinely appointed, virtuous monarchs who might purge the polity of degenerate self-​interest and inculcate civic virtue.

Mandeville took issue with this harkening on at least three scores. First, he denied that English society was decaying. As Callanan puts the point, “If the question is ‘what would make Great Britain great again?’ then the answer [for Mandeville] is ‘the things that are making it great now.’”³ England, Mandeville observed, enjoyed a thriving commerce, domestic tranquility, a large degree of religious freedom, and growing power on the international stage. The Grumbling Hive opens with these lines, clearly referring to the prosperity of the English state:

David Hume, a close reader of Mandeville, would make the exact same point decades later against those who would disrupt the Protestant succession of English monarchs. Since the Act of Settlement in 1701, Hume wrote, “trade and manufactures, and agriculture, have encreased: The arts, and sciences, and philosophy, have been cultivated….So long and so glorious a period no nation almost can boast of.”⁵ The romanticizing of the past, for Mandeville and Hume, overlooks the distinctive benefits of the established present.

Second, Mandeville argued that behaviors commonly decried as vices were in fact the lifeblood of a flourishing civilization:

Avarice, fraud, luxury, pride—without these, a society might be honest, but not rich, powerful, and influential. Habits of conspicuous consumption promote spending, which spurs industry. Frugality leads to economic stagnation and decay. Saving might benefit private families, but it impoverishes the nation. “As this prudent Oeconomy, which some people call Saving, is in private Families the most certain Method to increase an Estate, so some imagine that…the same Method…will have the same Effect upon a whole Nation…This, I think, is an Error.”⁷ John Maynard Keynes later appreciated Mandeville to have worked out a preliminary version of his own “paradox of thrift.”

Third and most controversially, Mandeville implied that the real moral degenerates of his age were not London’s prostitutes, gamblers, distillers, merchants, and stock jobbers. They were the self-​styled friends of virtue.

Virtue, on Mandeville’s account, requires rigorous self-​denial. Such self-​denial exists primarily among “Dedications, Addresses, Epitaphs, Funeral Sermons and Inscriptions.”⁸ It is not much to be found among the living members of humankind. What passes for virtue in the public eye is conformity to a complex of social artifices that enable us to more successfully indulge our animal desires for pleasure—especially our desire to be seen, flattered, and respected. The self-​styled virtuous and those they deem vicious ultimately pursue the same ends (animal pleasures); they differ only in the degree to which they dissemble—and even deceive themselves—their true motives. People thus, Mandeville argued, ought to “be more asham’d of always railing at what they are more or less guilty of themselves.”⁹

Callanan’s placement of Mandeville’s Fable in its political and literary context is among the high points of the book. A curious point not much explored, however, is that many of Mandeville’s main literary antagonists—Lord Shaftesbury, Joseph Butler, and Francis Hutcheson, for example—were Whigs. The polemics surrounding the Fable were thus a largely intramural affair. Mandeville and his adversaries shared broad agreements about the desirability of British commercial expansion and modernization. Where they differed was in their ethical assessments of the customs and conventions of commercial life. Is it possible to praise commercial modernity not simply as a bustling hive of self-​absorbed drones but an arena that allows for virtuous cooperation and the serving of one’s family, community, and country? Francis Hutcheson and Adam Smith at least believed this to be the case. Smith, in fact, targeted Mandeville in the opening line of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, implicitly casting Mandeville’s ethical vision in doubt: “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”¹⁰ Like his teacher Hutcheson, Smith maintained a more humanistic picture of the potentials commercial society.

Classical liberals and economists will take a special interest in Callanan’s exposition of Mandeville’s ideas of spontaneous order. These ideas existed in nascent form even in The Grumbing Hive. Mandeville recognized there that within a set of well-​defined rules, individuals independently pursuing their selfish desires might inadvertently contribute to the common good of society, hence the subtitle of the poem, Knaves Turn’d Honest, and Mandeville’s concluding message: “So Vice is beneficial found, When it’s by Justice lopt and bound.”¹¹ By 1705, such insights had a long history. Mandeville surely drew them in part from the French Jansenist intellectual tradition. His writings on the beneficial, seemingly charitable effects of self-​love, for example, are strongly reminiscent of Pierre Nicole.¹²

Mandeville’s real developments, however, came as he considered the source of social rules and conventions themselves. It is here that one can appreciate his most novel contributions to social philosophy, contributions that provided a framework for much subsequent liberal theory. As Hayek wrote, “perhaps in no case did [Mandeville] precisely show how an order formed itself without design, but he made it abundantly clear that it did, and thereby raised the questions to which theoretical analysis in the social sciences and later in biology, could address itself.”¹³

If virtue is an artifice, as Mandeville claimed, where does it come from and how do we become aware of its content? In the 1714 and 1723 editions of the Fable, Mandeville included an essay called an “Enquiry Concerning the Origin of Moral Virtue” that attempted to answer these questions. He argued unconvincingly that the idea of virtue was originally created by cunning political actors seeking to create a semblance of social order through which they might manipulate and take advantage of others. Critics flagged this part of Mandeville’s account as unrealistic and incompatible with his claim to be offering an anatomical account of society. Instead of concluding that humans are manipulated into the practice of virtue by savvy political superiors, it would seem much more straightforward to conclude that humans have an intuitive idea of appropriate conduct around which they coordinate their shared perceptions and discussions of virtue.

Mandeville responded to this point, which was advanced partly by Bishop Joseph Butler and then at greater length by the theologian William Law, in The Fable of the Bees Part II, a dialogue published in 1729. It is here that Mandeville elaborated what Callanan identifies as the true hinge of his social philosophy: the distinction between self-​love or interest and “self-​liking.” It is largely in his efforts to elaborate this distinction that Mandeville formulated a wider theory of the spontaneous origins of our ideas of virtue and the rules undergirding social order.

Mandeville attempted to ground his account in biology. He observed that all animals instinctively overestimate their worth. Instinctive overestimation promotes self-​preservation because it convinces each that a resource or mate ought to be his rather than another’s. Overestimation manifests in outward signs of pride: “In most Birds it is evident, especially in those that have extraordinary Finery to display: In a Horse it is more conspicuous than in any other irrational Creature.”¹⁴ The human animal is unique in that it alone appears to be painfully aware or at least afraid that it habitually over-​values itself. “It is this [awareness] that makes us so fond of the Approbation, Liking, and Assent of others.”¹⁵ We go to lengths to secure outward signs of approval from others, both to gain the resources that come with such approval and to convince ourselves that we really merit special treatment and regard. The desire to be the object of approval leads to conformity with what we take to be the expectations of others, even in circumstances when conformity doesn’t seem rational.¹⁶ It is not at all uncommon, Mandeville maintains, for men to die to preserve a façade of a virtuous reputation.

Effective rules and standards of virtue that serve social interests are selected for, in a social-​evolutionary sense. Generations of experience unearth modes of conduct that, when followed, yield successful social groups that dominate others. Such modes of conduct, when they are discovered and normalized by a critical mass of a community, are quickly transmitted thanks to the natural concern each has for how he appears to others. The passion of self-​liking is, as Adam Smith would elaborate in terms of “sympathy”, the key to a spontaneous social discovery process, the mechanism by which not only our actions but sentiments can be coordinated. Smith, of course, took issue with Mandeville’s ethical rigorism and his presentation of self-​liking as vice. But Smith’s own perspective, one might argue, can be regarded a kind of moralized Mandevillian approach. Smith himself arguably points in this direction.¹⁷ F. B. Kaye, the editor and commentator of the 1924 Oxford edition of the Fable, even argued that Smith and others “attacked [Mandeville] because they did not realize that, under his superficial [ethical] difference, he was really at one with them.”¹⁸

“We often ascribe to the Excellency of Man’s Genius, and the Depth of his Penetration, what is in Reality owing to length of Time, and the Experience of many Generations, all of them very little differing from one another in natural Parts and Sagacity,” Mandeville wrote.¹⁹ Elsewhere he remarked “It is with complete Felicity in this World, as it is with the Philosopher’s Stone: Both have been sought after many different Ways…But in searching after either, diligent Enquirers have often stumbled by Chance on useful Discoveries of Things they did not look for, and which human Sagacity labouring with Design a priori never would have detected.”²⁰ Compare these quotations to Adam Ferguson’s oft-​cited statement: “Nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.”²¹ Mandeville appreciated the insight first, and Callanan is not wrong to label his efforts as “nothing less than a theory of the evolution of human society.”²²

Callanan does not much deal with the relation between Mandeville and subsequent theories of spontaneous order. The omission is understandable, as his focus is on the intellectual formation and immediate reception of Mandeville. But he could readily have pointed out parallels between Mandeville’s approach and Hayek’s. Hayek’s lecture on Mandeville is mentioned in passing in the opening lines of chapter 8. A few brief connections with Hayek’s own theory of spontaneous order would, however, have been welcome, especially given Hayek’s acknowledgement of the importance of Mandeville and also of the Scottish social theorists. A useful starting point here would be the chapter “Between Instinct and Reason” in The Fatal Conceit in which Hayek articulates a view of cultural evolution amenable to Mandeville’s approach: “What are chiefly responsible for having generated this extraordinary order [modern civilization], and the existence of mankind in its present size and structure, are the rules of human conduct that gradually evolved. … These rules are handed on by tradition, teaching, and imitation rather than by instinct.”²³

How consistent are Mandeville’s ideas with classical liberalism? This has for some time been a lurking question. It was reemphasized with Mandeville’s favorable reception and promotion by Hayek. The question is not directly treated in Callanan’s book, which is principally a work of intellectual history. But it is worth taking the opportunity to briefly reflect on the matter.

Mandeville himself held certain convictions that can be described as classically liberal, in the sense of Adam Smith’s “obvious and simply system of natural liberty” in which “every man, so long as he does not violate the rules of justice, is left free to pursue his interest his own way.”²⁴ Mandeville was committed to the principles of religious toleration and freedom of the press. His efforts to shore up the Whig establishment in the first decades of the eighteenth century can be construed partly as an effort to preserve these principles—partly out of concern for his professional interests as a free thinker and writer, no doubt. The tenor of his polemics often seems to affirm the rough equality of human beings, who he took to be shaped more by circumstance than nature. He certainly took pleasure in bringing down the pretense of elite superiority, perhaps most notoriously in his provocative 1723 “Essay on Charity and Charity Schools.” He relished in drawing attention to the hypocrisy and double standards of the well-​to-​do. He has notable egalitarian moments throughout his corpus, notwithstanding his apparent adherence to the utility of poverty doctrine. (Whether he in fact truly believed that it was good for society that poor people stay poor is in fact unclear, as Callanan discusses, given the rhetorical complexity of his argumentation.)²⁵

In addition to his ideas about spontaneous order, he articulated understandings that have become staples of classically liberal social theory. He theorized the foundation of society in terms of “the reciprocal Services which all Men pay to one another.”²⁶ He appreciated the pervasiveness of unintended outcomes. Evil motives confer benefits in addition to costs, and good motives confer costs in addition to benefits.²⁷ He grasped inherent knowledge problems involved in social and political theory. Our understanding of social phenomena is limited by the fact that we cannot separate the processes by which we understand and the social phenomena we scrutinize. It is not a stretch to find in Mandeville the same line of thought motivating Hayek’s observation that “our reason is as much the result of an evolutionary selection process as our morality.”²⁸ Mandeville was also keenly aware of the importance of incentive alignment, and the role that social rules and regulations play in harmonizing individual actions with the social good. Vice serves the public good for Mandeville not automatically, but within the boundaries of the law: “The Meum and Tuum must be secur’d, Crimes punish’d, and all other Laws concerning the Administration of Justice wisely contriv’d, and strictly executed.”²⁹

For all that, the overall drift of Mandeville’s approach is somewhat at odds with the classical liberal tradition.

Mandeville is out of step with one of the most central liberal positions: free trade. He obviously understood the complex nature of supply chains and the mutual benefits of exchange. (It seems distinctly possible that Adam Smith had Mandeville’s discussion of the “Scarlet Cloth” in mind when he waxed on about the “woolen coat” in the first chapter of The Wealth of Nations.)³⁰ But Mandeville nonetheless fell squarely in the mercantilist camp, in the sense that he promoted actively-​managed trade balances in service of military power and expansion. Repeatedly throughout the Fable he insists that luxury consumption is not to be feared, so long as the legislature takes care to manage the balance of trade to preserve domestic industry. In the 1723 edition of the book he reminds his readers of his position: “But what I have insisted on the most, and repeated more than once, is the great Regard that is to be had to the Balance of Trade, and the Care the Legislature ought to take that the Yearly Imports never exceed the Exports.”³¹ In the eighteenth century, attention to the balance of trade meant, essentially, what it means today: taxes on imports, subsidies and tax breaks for domestic producers, and exclusive trade agreements.

Mandeville’s discussions of the importance of the balance of trade often flow into wider comments on the important role of political intervention. He sometimes has recourse to physical analogies.³² Regulation is to the body politic what medicine is to the physical body. The dexterous politician is akin to the adept physician. He manipulates the vices of the population towards the public good: “Private Vices by the dexterous Management of a skilful Politician may be turned into Publick Benefits.”³³

Nathan Rosenberg argued many decades ago that we must be careful in extrapolating a political theory from this statement. He pointed out that Mandeville’s interventionism was of a principled type.³⁴ Given his mechanical understanding of human nature, Mandeville promoted the imposition of certain fixed rules to shape incentives in productive directions, not ad hoc regulations. One could perhaps square this position with the liberal emphasis on the importance of an impartial rule of law. But Mandeville does not appear to elaborate many limiting principles on the kinds of impartial laws that the state may rightfully impose. Rather, his position, as Rosenberg puts it, seems to be that “the function of government is to establish an environment of such a nature that the individual’s attempt to gratify his passions will result in actions which are meritorious from the point of view of the goals of the state.”³⁵ a liberal point of view.

It should be added that Mandeville, surprisingly, says little about the incentives of political actors themselves. He surely would not be surprised at the content of contemporary public choice theory. It is very strange to imagine Mandeville as having held what James Buchanan described as a “romantic” view of politics. But across the Fable, at least, Mandeville appears to help himself to the assumption that dexterous politicians have appropriate knowledge and incentives to fine-​tune the machine of society towards productive ends. He can, I think, be read in a “scientistic” fashion: as our understanding of the human machine improves, dexterous politicians’ ability to manipulate incentives towards productive ends improves. A Mandevillean approach to politics, on such an interpretation, could even be seen in line with the “nudge” programs that have come out of research programs in behavioral psychology and economics.

To be fair to Mandeville, he never pretended to offer a systematic political or economic theory. His sentences are, in addition, difficult to interpret given his polemical purposes and complex rhetoric. But the glimmers of his own political economic approach that can be discerned sit somewhat uneasily with the arc of the liberal tradition. That being said, the core of Mandeville’s social philosophy is by no means incompatible with classical liberalism. When combined with subsequent efforts in public choice theory, Mandeville’s perspectives on spontaneous order and the mutually beneficial potentials of economic life provide us with strong grounds for the liberal position.