Selfishness Celebrated

Such a heretic was Bernard Mandeville, who published a book in 1705 entitled The Grumbling Hive. Reissued in 1714 with additional prose com­mentary and a new title, The Fable of the Bees, it was widely interpreted as an inversion of Shaftesbury’s argument, preaching that private vices led to private pleasure and to public benefits.

The Fable describes a prosperous bee hive whose members embrace true virtue and renounce their desire for gain. As a result, their productive efforts largely come to a halt. Religious doctrine is inverted: the apple of the Tree of Virtue leads to expulsion from economic paradise. Mandeville holds Avarice and love of Luxury forth as powerful engines of prosperity. Once tendered the respect they deserve, they bring redemption in the form of an improved standard of living:

Thus Vice nurs’d Ingenuity

Which join’d with Time and Industry, Had carry’d Life’s Conveniences, It’s real Pleasures, Comforts, Ease To such a Height, the very Poor Liv’d better than the Rich before And nothing could be added more.¹¹

Mandeville believed that men pretended to altruism, but were actually motivated by a desire for praise or approval. Their opinions always reflect their own interests: ‘‘Self-Love pleads to all human Creatures for the different Views, still furnishing every individual with the Arguments to justify their Inclinations.”¹² One could hardly ask for a better definition of ideology.

Greed could be conceptualized as a productive vice because it represented the expression of rational self-interest. The Fable imaginatively reiterated the various ways that petty intentions might lead to noble results.

Economists often celebrate his wit while ignoring his less endearing qualities. Mandeville’s views of women and the family were casually mis­ogynist. In his tract The Virgin Unmasked, a querulous spinster named Lucinda preaches the dangers of sex and marriage to her innocent niece, echoing Mary Astell: ‘‘Is not every Woman that is Married a Slave to her Husband?’’¹³ A caricature of nervous frigidity, Lucinda deplores the dan­gerous size and beauty of her niece’s breasts. At times, she seems to speak for Mandeville himself, explaining that women have little capacity for reason. 1⁴

Like most of his contemporaries, Mandeville liked to visualize reproduc­tion as a purely natural process. He compared the conception of a child with the brewing of beer, accomplished by the ‘‘senseless Engine, that raises Water into the Copper, and the passive Mash-tub’’.1⁵ One passage in the Fable referred approvingly to Jonathan Swift’s imaginary land of Lilliputtia where children owed their parents nothing for their begetting, because conception was an unwitting by-product of concupiscence.¹⁶ This makes perfect sense: no senseless engine could negotiate a social contract with a passive mash-tub.

Mandeville’s appreciation of greed was complemented by his appreciation of male lust. He argued that men should be encouraged to satisfy their sexual needs outside the bounds of family life.

Lust could not be checked, but it could, in Augustinian language, be channeled. A market for sex offered an efficient substitute for costly court­ships and seductions. Prostitution could include regulations designed to reduce venereal disease. Only women who had already lost their virtue would be hired; in the event of shortage, more could be imported from abroad. 1⁹ Having sown their wild oats, men would happily settle down to the cultivation of their wives.

Mandeville did not buy the argument that promiscuous women were unlikely to conceive. Rather, he claimed that prostitution could reduce infant mortality. Most children born out of wedlock were neglected or abandoned. Publicly supported and regulated brothels would require pros­titutes to care for their bastard offspring. A legal market for sex would, he argued, encourage exchange, promoting population growth, and increasing national wealth. A twentieth-century advocate for legalizing prostitution, Milton Friedman, would later make a simpler case based on the principle that adults should be free to choose (See Chapter 19).

Mandeville also anticipated a claim that Malthus would later make in more detail: population growth would spur productive effort. Self-interest might not operate properly if life became too easy; the constant press of numbers provided a necessary stimulus. Perhaps he was poking fun at the existing class system as well as hypocritical reformers when he thanked God for the limitless children of the poor, ‘‘the willing hands for drudgery who make a civilized state possible.’’²⁰

His warnings against public assistance did not include a hint of irony.

His confidence in both lust and greed was too exuberant for polite society. As one critic puts it, he ‘‘inherited the office of Lord High Bogy-Man, which Hobbes had held in the preceding century.”²¹ But even Mandeville stopped short of suggesting that women, as well as men, should relinquish virtue. And, in retrospect, the protagonists of his fable were poorly chosen. Bees of a hive, like many other social insects, are biologically related. One queen is mother to virtually all the worker drones. Not incidentally, they are altru­istic creatures. Of the piquant fact that they are also matriarchal, Mandeville was comfortably unaware.