2025/07/16 by Jacob Donald Chatterjee · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Historical Philosophy and Science #Historical and Literary Studies #Reformation and Early Modern Christianity
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/17496977.2025.2525695
openalex publication_date 2025/07/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The Fable of the Bees (1714) by Bernard Mandeville, a Dutch émigré physician and an acerbic satirist, was one of the most controversial works of the eighteenth century. Numerous contemporaries condemned Mandeville for ostensibly arguing that vice is the driving force of modern commercial societies, virtue is an arbitrary invention, and happiness consists in worldly pleasures. This article challenges the historiographical consensus that Mandeville’s account of commercial society depended on his encounters with Epicurean moral and political thought. Instead, it contends that Mandeville deployed a distinctive blend of Augustinian and Hobbist ideas to argue against what he regarded as Epicurus’s unrealistic valorisation of virtue as the way to secure the delights of mental tranquillity. This critique of Epicurus supported a wider polemic against the “easie Divines” of the Church of England, who had appealed to Epicurean maxims to declaim on the pleasures of virtue. To defend this vision of egoistic human nature, Mandeville proposed conjectural histories of the origin of moral virtue, which inverted Lucretius’s depiction of contented primitive humanity in his Epicurean poem De Rerum Natura. The upshot of this reinterpretation is to highlight the creative tensions within the diverse intellectual traditions that constituted the wider neo-Epicurean Enlightenment.