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Economic Liberty Turns Vice Into Virtue


Nov. 15 is the birthday of Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733), one of the most influential 18th-century British writers. Nowadays read by intellectual historians and few others, the Dutch-born physician had a lasting message: Economic growth promotes virtue by reducing idleness.

Little is known about Mandeville, whom Benjamin Franklin called “a most facetious, entertaining companion.” His main work is “The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits,” published in 1714. Though scandalous because it seemingly praised “vice,” it eventually earned plaudits—albeit with reservations—from leading thinkers of the age, including David Hume, Samuel Johnson, Voltaire and Kant. In the 20th century Friedrich Hayek called Mandeville a “mastermind.”

“The Fable,” which is an annotated version of his earlier doggerel poem called “The Grumbling Hive,” became well-known only in 1723 with the publication of an expanded edition. This version was twice presented for censorship before the Grand Jury of Middlesex as a public nuisance. The court took no action, but the attempted suppression made Mandeville famous.

Economic Liberty Turns Vice Into Virtue



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The author of “The Fable,” said Hume, “began to put the science of man on a new footing.” While the Catholic Church labeled envy, pride and avarice cardinal sins, for Mandeville these vices had public benefits. They often promoted economic growth and political stability.

Though Mandeville admits envy can be base, he argues that some people transform envious feelings into emulation, which promotes industriousness. Emulative envy, Mandeville contends, cannot flourish in traditional societies, since there are few opportunities for the poor to emulate the rich. But in commercial societies like Britain, writes Mandeville scholar E.J. Hundert, envy would be “directed into politically harmless and socially beneficial channels.”

In his entry for “Envy” in the Philosophical Dictionary, Voltaire calls Mandeville “the first writer who has wanted to prove that envy is a very good thing, a very useful passion.” Voltaire understood that envy has benign as well as malign aspects.

Envy and emulation are closely connected to pride, which is “the desire to be thought well of.” Mandeville observes that many have chased praise on their way to profound achievements and enterprises: “We are possessed of no other quality so beneficial to society, and so necessary to render it wealthy and flourishing as this, yet it is that which is most generally detested.”

Avarice is the third “private vice” Mandeville inverts. He argues that the desire to make a lot of money drives the avaricious to take financial risks, promoting growth.

Mandeville took his argument to a satirist’s extremes, claiming that robbery, alcoholism and prostitution also produced public benefits. Johnson, who told Boswell that Mandeville “opened my views into real life very much,” said that “it may happen that good is produced by vice; but not as vice.” He criticized Mandeville for not clearly defining his terms.

Mandeville is not always lucid, but by “vice” he mainly means self-interested conduct, which he argued would promote virtue in the end. “Envy and emulation have kept more men in bounds, and reformed more ill husbands from sloth, from drinking and other evil courses, than all the sermons that have been preached since the time of the Apostles.”

One hundred years after “The Fable” was published, Karl Marx praised Mandeville as “infinitely more intrepid and honest than the philistine apologists of bourgeois society” for recognizing the evil basis of commerce. Unlike Marx, however, Mandeville was praising what we now call capitalism, not attacking it. Mandeville would have endorsed Adam Smith’s remark that “no society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.”

Mr. Miller is writing a book titled “The Three Faces of Envy: The Good, the Sad and the Ugly.”



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