Mandeville Studies: New Explorations in the Art and Thought of Dr. Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733) (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 231 Mandeville Studies: New Explorations in the Art and Thought of Dr. Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733). Ed. Irwin Primer. International Archives of the History of Ideas, no. 81. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975. Pp. xv + 223. FI. 70) The editor admits that this volume of fourteen essays, which was originally planned to celebrate the 1970 tercentenary of Mandeville's birth, has a rather looser organization than was originally intended. This is partly because these essays "by no means . . . purport to represent a single school of thought or a unified approach to Mandeville" but more fundamentally because the multidimensional character of Mandeville's thought has not so far allowed predominance of any single or unified interpretation. Therefore, the looser organization of the present volume reflects the present situation of Mandeville scholarship. In the introduction we are given a compact and useful view of the diversity of Mandeville evaluation since the emergence of his reputation. According to Primer, and as nobody will deny, modern Mandeville scholarship began with F. B. Kaye, whose history-ofideas approach paved the way for many followers. "Recently, Philip Harth and other critics have deliberately focused on the literary values in Mandeville's writings, on technique as well as content, in order to rectify the one-sidedness or imbalance of the history-of-ideas approach .... In this new state of Mandeville criticism he is celebrated as a worthy rival of Swift and Pope, for he, too, is one of the greatest satirists in a great age of satire.... This latest path in Mandeville studies [leads to] the kind of literary encounter [that] will surely set a pattern for younger scholars in the next decades." While thus hoping that younger scholars will adopt the literary approach, Primer admits that "it is also likely that the study of Mandeville from a history-of-ideas point of view, an approach that is prevalent in most of the essays that follow, will continue to dominate this field." But even among those who take this approach, "Mandeville had and continues to have separate reputations: he will continue to mean one thing to the economists, another to the historians of government and political theory, a third to the philosophers and moralists, a fourth to the historian of religion. Though he was important as a theorist throughout the range of the social sciences, no particular social scientist conveys the full range and worth of his achievement." The most conspicuous discrepancy is found between the historians of economic thought, including F. A. Hayek, and the literary scholars associated with the philosophers and moralists. "On the whole, historians of economic thought have tended to concentrate on Mandeville's ideas in their field, paying little or no regard to his satiristic intentions." "The Literary scholars, on the other hand, tend to regard Mandeville as a satirist from the beginning to the end of his literary career." There is at least one important exception among the historians of economic thought, namely , Jacob Viner, who "emphasized Mandeville's satire, taking the position that Mandeville's ethical rigorism was a mask employed by Mandeville to disguise his libertinism." Although it is much regretted that his death in 1970 made it impossible to include "his intended contribution " in the present volume, some tendencies of the literary study are represented here by three final essays constituting the section on "Style, Satire and Paradox." The eleven foregoing essays using the history-of-ideas approach are divided into four sections: "On Some of Mandeville's Minor Writings," "Religion and Ethics," "Politics and Society," and "Mandeville in Relation to Some Other Writers." The first three essays are on The Virgin Unmask'd (1709), A Treatise of Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions (171l), and A Modest Defence of Publick Stews (1724). They throw interesting sidelights on Mandeville. But if Mandeville's feminism, medical ideas, or proposal on prostitution are discussed in isolation without a wider perspective or attention to his thought as a whole they will become just matters of curiosity. Unfortunately, the first two essays, interesting in themselves, are not without this danger. The subject matter of the third 232 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY essay did not allow the writer, Richard I. Cook, to discuss it...