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Ethics And Politics In Mandeville

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

J. C. Maxwell
J. C. Maxwell
Affiliation:
University of Oxford.
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Extract

Ever since they were first published, the works of Bernard Mandeville have met with a few careful readers as well as with a larger number of stupid or unscrupulous assailants. Both classes are faithfully recorded at the end of F. B. Kaye's splendid edition of The Fable of the Bees (Oxford, 1924), which has helped to revive interest in Mandeville, and which has moulded the current estimate of his ideas: the treatment of Mandeville in such a work as Basil Willey's Eighteenth Century Background (London, 1940) is confessedly based almost entirely on Kaye. My purpose in this paper is to suggest some modifications of the account given by Kaye, and to make claims for Mandeville's importance in one particular field, the relation of ethics to politics.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 26 , Issue 98 , July 1951 , pp. 242 - 252
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1951

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References

page 242 note 1 The first spate of attacks came before the publication of the second volume (1729). Berkeley's Alciphron, though not published till 1732, betrays no knowledge of anything by Mandeville except the first volume of the Fable; in fact Mandeville in the Letter to Dion (London, 1732) is well within his rights in questioning whether Berkeley has. read even the first volume. Berkeley never wrote anything that is less to his credit than his attack on Mandeville, and Mandeville's reply is admirably cool and good-tempered.

page 243 note 1 Kaye (I, xlviii) treats rigorism as a “blend of asceticism and rationalism.” I do not think that this is a good analysis of what Kaye himself means by the various terms. In practice his description of the relation of rigorism to asceticism, where he makes a clear distinction between them, is much the same as mine.

page 243 note 2 I, 369 (= 428); 411—2 (= 476). All references to the Fable are to Kaye's edition. I give in brackets Kaye's marginal references, which refer to the pagination of the 1723, 1724, 1725, 1728 and 1732 editions of the first volume and to the 1729 and 1733 editions of the second volume.

page 245 note 1 Neither in this nor the other passage quoted from this Preface does Mandeville mention Law, but there can be no doubt that he is answering him.

page 245 note 2 Deckelmann, W. in Untersuchungen zur Bienenfabel (Hamburg, 1933), p. 128; an excellent monograph, the only substantial study since Kaye.Google Scholar

page 248 note 1 See Kaye, , Journal of English and Germanic Philology 20 (1921), 451–6;Google Scholar and Crane, R. S., Philological Quarterly 13 (1934), 122–3.Google Scholar

page 250 note 1 I These pages provide the most helpful guide to the intellectual context in which I am claiming an important place for Mandeville. I do not, however, accept the view that Hobbes “denied the independent existence of ethics” (p. 84). On this, Taylor, A. E.'s two papers, in Philosophy for 1938,Google Scholar and in Seventeenth Century Studies Presented to Sir Herbert Grierson (Oxford, 1938), should be consulted. The place of toleration in the development is important: no one can read the Free Thoughts without seeing that, wherever else he may be flippant or disingenuous, this was a topic on which Mandeville, like Bayle, really felt deeply.Google Scholar