Mandeville and Hume: Anatomists of Civil Society by Mikko Tolonen (review)

For centuries, Mandeville’s villainous reputation—his Fable of the Bees (1714), with its notorious subtitle, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, was indicted by Britain’s Grand Jury every time it was published—has preceded, or precluded, interpretation of his other works. Mr. Tolonen’s subject is the 1729 volume that appeared almost 15 years after the Fable titled The Fable of the Bees. Part II. “By the Author of the First.”

He advances two related claims. First, that Part II reworks the simplistic provocations of the Fable into something far more palatable and must, therefore, be considered a separate work. Second, that its theories played a major role in Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1738), particularly in his thoughts on the evolution of natural passions within civil society.

Mr. Tolonen faults Mandeville’s revered twentieth-century editor, F. B. Kaye, for his “influential decision” to publish the two parts of the Fable “as a uniform work of two volumes” and tracks the complicated publishing history of Mandeville’s works. He examines original editions, finding sheaves of different quality papers, obscured and “cancelled” title pages, and, at the center of it all, a deliberately elusive publisher. The younger Jacob Tonson had plans for a 1734 two-volume edition of the Fable, an edition that seems never to have appeared. From this, and the fact that Mandeville, contra Kaye, probably sold him the copyright to his works, Mr. Tolonen deduces that the Fable “never should have been published as a work of two volumes.” The point of all this is to show that the young Hume “encountered a new line of thought in 1729,” presumably reading Part II as separate from the Fable:

Adam Smith is the supposed author of a famous letter to the authors of the Edinburgh review [sic] in 1755, quite fittingly pointing out that “the second volume of the Fable of the Bees has given occasion to the system of Mr. Rousseau.” What I find fitting is not only that the author of the letter had his finger on the right book, but also the fact that he wrote this in 1755, which was the first time there was such a thing as a printed “second volume of the Fable.” The first Edinburgh edition came out that year and it was the first time in Britain that the two parts of the Fable had been issued together. The young Hume’s intellectual development took place in a world in which The Fable of the Bees and Part II were two different works.

Whether Hume thought Part II separate from the Fable or not, Mandeville’s name alone would have signaled, then as now, the author of The Fable of the Bees. Mr. Tolonen’s extended exercise in book history amounts in the end to little more than what Mandeville himself would have called a wild goose chase. This study is much more convincing when it shows how in Part II Mandeville offers an original theory of the development of civil society.

Mandeville’s contribution to the “state of nature” trope here, for example, constitutes a crucial departure from the Hobbism that marks the Fable. He now acknowledges the existence of natural virtue, most obvious in the love of parents for children, who are the first socialized beings, the first parents having no reason to curb their runaway desire for dominion—the “instinct of sovereignty”—over their children and everything else. Children, however, possess a crucial compound of love, fear, and esteem for the father, producing reverence. Reverence, crucially, permits submission, even servitude.

Mandeville in effect inverts Hobbes’s conception of the importance of the sovereign in directing men’s actions as he comes to understand the power and significance of our capacity for government within. Mr. Tolonen points out that the table of contents to the first edition of the Fable states “Man without government is of all creatures the most unfit for society,” a phrase dropped in subsequent printings. Because...