The Ambivalence of Bernard Mandeville (review)

368 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY The Ambivalence of Bernard Mandeville. By H. Monro. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Pp. 283. s 10.50) "Private vices, public benefits," the subtitle to Mandeville's magnum opus, the Fable o/ the Bees (1714-1728), was inserted by the author to "raise attention." It did a good deal more for him than that, for by the 1723 edition, Mandeville's name had become notorious and was henceforth linked in the minds of many men with that of their other great bogey-man, Hobbes. Most eighteenth-century readers took Mandeville 's paradox to be a literal prescription for vicious behaviour. More sophisticated modern interpreters, following F. B. Kaye, in his hallowed 1924 edition of the Fable, have read the paradoxical subtitle as a reductio ad absurdum of asceticism and a subversive plea for utilititarian ethics. Whatever their particular interest in Mandeville may be, almost all writers, ancient and modern, have been concerned to examine Mandeville's sincerity or lack thereof in advocating asceticism while showing that paradox results from doing so in the conditions of modern (eighteenth-century), society . Unravelling the paradox has claimed the attention of a good deal of Mandeville scholarship. It is against this background that Professor Monro has written his book, stating at the beginning that his intention is to search out whether the "true" MandeviUe is the Christian ascetic and austere moralist or the cynic and worldly scoffer of all morals and religion. By doing this, Monro at once sets the limits to his work, for the traditional argument about whether Mandeville was ascetic or utilitarian has tended to obscure what is more interesting about MandeviUe's social and ethical writing--namely that he attempts a thoroughly naturalistic account of moral behavior in the context of an evolutionary theory of social growth. This makes Mandeville a writer of considerably more importance than would be the case if he were only another of the large band of able theological controversialists of the early eighteenth century. It is not that Monro is unaware of the wider considerations which a reading of Mandeville's work gives rise to; at times he seems to want to break away from the narrower constrictions of the traditional debate about Mandeville's intentions. But he does not develop the interconnections of MandeviUe's account of the growth of society and the beginnings of morality vigorously enough. Thus we are drawn back to the polemics of paradox instead of probing the psychological basis of Mandeville's theory in greater depth. Aware that the paradox arose from a fun-making instinct, Monro warns us that contemporaries of Mandeville forgot the satirical intention of his paradox--private vices, public benefits--which was to highlight the hypocrisy and inconsistency of holding to two moral standards at the same time. Then he himself seems to forget this and considers whether Mandeville thought it advisable for us to lead our lives according to an ascetic or utilitarian code of morality. Nevertheless, Monro's book is an interesting contribution to Mandeville studies and he does at least consider all the aspects of Mandeville's thought even if he does not develop their relationship fully enough. The chapters of the book describe Mandeville in various roles--as wit, medical man, reformer, psychologist, moralist and theologian . The first chapters offer a summary of Mandeville's earlier writing, consider his literary style and discuss what is known of his medical career. The literary criticism is not an area in which Professor Monro is as logically consistent as he is in his later analysis of morality. Thus, for example, he says that there are no grounds for judging badly of MandeviUe's own fables as against those of La Fontaine because if we look at them all, as translated by Mandeville, we see little difference in their quality. This is surely comparing like with like, for Mandeville's translations of La Fontaine are "loose" and vernacularised. Any meaningful comparison must be between MandeviUe 's originals and La Fontaine's originals. In his treatment of those works of Mandeville which deal with reforming the law regarding prostitution and stealing, Monro at one point is wrongly drawn into an apologia for...