From the state of nature to the unnatural state: Man and history in Bernard Mandeville's 'Fable of the Bees'

This work examines the political philosophy of Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733) as found in the two parts of his Fable of the Bees. Mandeville has consistently been misunderstood from his earliest notoriety to the present day, a misunderstanding that has prevented scholars from according him his proper place in the development of modern political thought. By concentrating on the controversy surrounding Mandeville's work, and consequently on his most inflammatory passages in the first part of the Fable, scholars have overlooked his more subtle lessons on the nature of man and society found in the dialogue of the second part. However, it is only in the second part of the Fable that Mandeville's full teaching is revealed; accordingly, I argue that the second part is the more important work for understanding Mandeville. I first examine the incomplete state of nature teaching of part one, a teaching Mandeville turns against the optimistic philosophy of the third Earl of Shaftesbury. While Mandeville correctly identifies Shaftesbury's as an opposed, and so alternative, understanding of man and society, he fails in this earlier part to adequately show his own teaching as superior. This failure is rectified in part two. A close reading of this part reveals Mandeville as concerned primarily with understanding the movement of man, a naturally asocial, self-sufficient animal without language or reason, into society, comprised of needy, dependent beings with complex language and reasoning skills. To understand man is to understand not only his nature, but his history; man must be understood as an historical being. Mandeville is the first thinker to attempt to think through the meaning of this historical being. Doing so leads him to replace the idea of the soul with that of the self, to elevate in importance the (unintentional) creative powers of man, and to recast as providential the hitherto accidental and blind development of society and sociable man, now justified in the self-awareness of the historical thinker. Reading Mandeville back into the tradition shows him as both completing the state of nature theorizing of Hobbes and Locke and anticipating the break in the tradition effected by Rousseau.