Passion, State, and Progress: Spinoza and Mandeville on the Nature of Human Association

Passion, State, and Progress: Spinoza and Mandeville on the Nature of Human Association DOUGLAS J. DEN UYL The ruling passion, be it what it will, The ruling passion conquers reason still. Alexander Pope, Moral Essays Historically Spinoza and Mandeville have at least one thing in common: their writings caused such a furor of controversy that one would have thought the whole moral fabric of Western civilization was jeopardized by their works. Not only did their writings elicit official disfavor, but also, on occasion, certain treatises were completely banned from circulation. History amply testifies, however, that official pronouncements do not necessarily reflect public interest: the more controversial works of both thinkers were widely circulated, and had public authorities appreciated the teachings of Baruch Spinoza (163o-1677) and Bernard Mandeville (:67o-:733), they would have been able to infer that nothing arouses curiosity more than a public denouncement.' One reason for studying these two men together might be that Spinoza I wish to thank Edwin Curley, Philip P. Weiner, David Levy, Lee C. Rice,Charles Griswold, and an anonymous reviewer for this journal for their written commentaries on earlier versions of this paper. I also wish to thank the participants of a conference on Bernard Mandeville (Huntington Library, Oct. x98o) for their remarks on the original draft of this paper. ' The main texts we will be using in examining these two thinkers willbe: Bernard Mandeville , The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, edited by F. B. Kaye, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 19a4; this work will be referred to as either Kaye 1 or Kaye 2, depending on the volume used) and Spinoza, The Political Works, translated and edited by A. G. Wernham (Oxford: Clarendon Press, t958). Henceforth the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus willbe referred to as the "TTP" with the Tractatus Politicus referred to as the "TP." The citations from these works given below will proceed as follows: treatise, chapter, paragraph (if applicable), and page number to the Wernham text in parentheses, again if applicable. [369] 37 ~ JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY ~5:3 JULY 1987 had a significant influence upon Mandeville's own thought. Yet only an indirect case can be made for this influence on the basis of readily available sources. 2 Although Mandeville is likely to have been familiar with Spinoza's work, 3 it would be hard to separate Spinoza's influence from other writers of the period. 4 And even if Spinoza did have an influence, few, if any, thinkers of the period were willing to admit it! But these words by F. A. Hayek are instructive at this point: There are many.., reasons why a thorough study of this period of Dutch thought, which probably had great influence on English intellectual development at the end of that [the seventeenth] and the beginning of the next century, has long seemed to me one of the great desiderata of intellectual history.5 * See F. B. Kaye's introduction to the Fable of the Bees (Kaye, I: lxxx ff.). Kaye mentions Spinoza several times as part of Mandeville's intellectual background and draws a number of parallels to Spinoza in his footnotes to Mandeville's text. We do know, however, that Mandeville was heavily influenced by French thinkers of that period. Consider the following two passages from commentators on Spinoza's influence: "During the years of ideological ferment which preceded the revolutionary era in France, Spinoza's ideas had provided the greatest single stimulus to articulate discontent. The French police were assiduous in arresting the copyists of Spinoza manuscripts which, nevertheless, circulated briskly throughout France in the first part of the eighteenth century" (LewisFeuer, Spinoza and the Rise of Liberalism [Boston: Beacon Press, 1964], 177-78.). "The greatest single influence exerted upon the writers of the period is that of Spinoza. So great is his influence, in fact, that one is tempted to see in the whole movement a gigantic manifestation of spinozism triumphant over other forms of thought" (Ira Wade, The Clandestine Organization and Diffusion of Philosophic Ideas in France [Princeton: 1938], ~69-7o; quoted in Feuer, 293.). 3 Both Mandeville and Spinoza were born in the Netherlands and had overlapping chronologies . Spinoza died...