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In 1705, the Anglo-Dutch physician and philosopher Bernard Mandeville anonymously published a poem called The Grumbling Hive: Or, Knaves Turned Honest. He described a vast community of bees – a transparent metaphor for contemporary Britain – and the mechanisms of its wealth. In the hive, each bee works for its own personal gain, every profession has its cheat, and everyone exploits the passions of others. But the welfare of the community is not endangered:

Even more scandalously, when the insects did implement moral reform and forced themselves to live according to honesty and virtue, the community fell into a downward spiral.

The British Bee Hive (1867) by George Cruikshank. Courtesy the British Museum

In 1714, and in an enlarged edition in 1723, Mandeville published the prose volume that made him infamous: The Fable of the Bees: Or, Private Vices, Public Benefits. The original poem was reprinted with a series of commentary essays in which Mandeville expanded upon his provocative arguments that human beings are self-interested, governed by their passions rather than their reason, and he offered an explanation of the origin of morality based solely on human sensitivity to praise and fear of shame through a rhapsody of social vignettes. Mandeville confronted his contemporaries with the disturbing fact that passions and habits commonly denounced as vices actually generate the welfare of a society.

The idea that self-interested individuals, driven by their own desires, act independently to realise goods and institutions made The Fable of the Bees one of the chief literary sources of the laissez-faire doctrine. It is central to the economic concept of the market. In 1966, the free-market evangelist Friedrich von Hayek offered an enthusiastic reading of Mandeville that anointed the poet as an early theorist of the harmony of interests in a free market economy, a scheme that Hayek claimed was later expanded on by Adam Smith, reworking Mandeville’s paradox of ‘private vices, public benefits’ into the profoundly influential metaphor of the invisible hand. Today, Mandeville is standardly thought of as an economic thinker.

There is no question that Mandeville ‘discovered’ the division of labour, defended luxurious consumption and, most important of all for economic historians, expressed the view that the pursuit of individual self-interest can be beneficial to society. But the dominance of economic readings of Mandeville has overshadowed the breadth of his interests and writings, the project behind them, and in general his stature as an accomplished philosopher whose influence on the Scottish and European Enlightenment remains to be reconstructed in depth.

Mandeville never made economic issues the focus of his analysis, and his arguments concerning trade, luxury and wealth form only one part of a broader examination: his psychological analysis of self-love and of the social effects of the hidden workings of pride and shame.

Mandeville thought of himself as a reader of disguised human motives, an anatomist of human nature, ready to show people what they are, rather than what they should be. He would accomplish this by keenly analysing human behaviours and institutions in terms of their motivating passions. From thoughtful observation and personal experience of these passions, he attempted to draw general principles about human nature, principles that would stand in analogy to the laws that govern the natural world. For these very reasons, David Hume listed him as one of those who had begun to place that ‘science of man’ on firm ground, along with John Locke, Lord Shaftesbury, Joseph Butler and Francis Hutcheson.

Unknown man, formerly known as Sir James Thornhill but now thought to be a portrait of Bernard Mandeville. Courtesy the National Portrait Gallery, London

Mandeville was well prepared for this task. Born in Rotterdam in 1670, he later graduated in medicine and philosophy from the University of Leiden, and trained as a medical physician, before settling in London. There he practised as a specialist in hypochondria and nervous disorders, meeting his patients for long sessions of therapeutic dialogues in his private quarters (not dissimilar to the later practice of psychoanalysis, in fact). This experience produced his Treatise of the Hypochondriac and Hysteric Passions (1711, 1730).

In Mandeville’s view, human beings are driven by their self-regarding passions. We are always feeding them, even when they act contrary to self-interest – we feed them to the point of deceiving ourselves about our own motivations. Among the passions, the predominant force is pride:

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