Private Vices, Public Benefits. Bernard Mandeville's Social and Political Thought (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 153 tion. In a sense, the rise of Natural Religion could be seen as the gradual replacement of a crumbling "elite culture" by a new culture. Locke's philosophy in his Essay, his version of Natural Religion in The Reasonableness of Christianity, and his political philosophy in the two Treatiseson Government are indeed separate books but they cannot be understood independently of one another. A reinterpretation of the Bible in the light of the achievements of the new physics was indispensable for enabling Locke and other eighteenth-century thinkers to usher in the new way of thinking. And the popularization of science was needed for the same purpose. Locke applied therefore the new methods of natural philosophy to all three domains of the new culture--to religion, ethics and politics. This is Locke's philosophy. The attempt to save the Essay from repeated accusations of confusion and inconsistencies is thus partially accompanied in Alexander's book by an artificial confinement of the Essay to the realm of the popularization of science in the modern sense of the term. Similarly, an abstraction of Berkeley's philosophy from its historical, religious, and political context makes historians of ideas say that he was mainly concerned with Locke's theories of perception and abstraction--the so-called domain of philosophy. But Berkeley was really concerned with the fact that contemporary natural theologians , following in Locke's footsteps, tried to apply the new philosophy of nature to the interpretation of Revelation. No matter how deep our logical analysis of Locke's New Way of Ideas may be, we must realize that our interpretation will be distorted unless we place the New Way of Ideas in the broadest historical context of the new way of life evolving at that time. From the standpoint of epistemology, of analytical philosophy, or of the popularization of science Locke's Essay will always remain full of inconsistencies. But when the Essay is not severed from Locke's other books on politics, religion, and education, the Essaywill appear as it really was--part of a new "elite culture." In the context of an "elite culture," logical inconsistencies do not have the same importance as in a philosophical treatise conceived within the narrow constraints of epistemology or logical analysis. This is corroborated by the failure of Berkeley's deep analysis of Locke's New Way of Ideas. Hume will sum up the verdict of Berkeley's contemporaries: He was a sceptic with no influence whatsoever on the way of life. Logic may be part of our life but only a part. It is high time for both philosophers and historians of philosophy to challenge Russell's dogma that logic is the essence of philosophy. EZRA TALMOR University of Haifa M. M. Goldsmith. Private Vices, Public Benefits. Bernard Mandeville's Social and Political Thought. Ideas in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Pp x + 183. $29.95. To write convincingly about Bernard Mandeville is no easy task. That "projectoring" Dutchman, turned English man of letters, dabbled in science, in religion, in social 154 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 26:1 JANUARY 1988 theory and in morality, in economics and in politics. But above all, he aimed to portray human nature in "all its vileness"; never to shirk the moraliste's task of exposing man's vanity and his hypocrisy, if necessary by use of paradox. Of the latter "private vices, public benefits," the tide of Professor Goldsmith's book, was only the most notorious. Mandeville was a writer who adopted many poses and some, like playing the game of ~pater le bourgeois, lent a strong flavor to his work and influenced his style throughout a writing career that lasted almost fifty years. But the direction of his interest, the value he ascribed to various ideas, changed. If the young fabulist, who wrote "The Grumbling Hive" (17o5) as a brilliantjeu d'esprit in his newly acquired tongue, was more than a little adolescent, there is some goodly middle-aged gravita~ about the author of the second part of The Fable of the Bees (1729). Nor should we be surprised at these changes if we understand how very eclectic was Mandeville's...