Bernard Mandeville

LETTER TO DION, Occasion'd by his Book CALL'D

ALCIPHRON, OR The Minute Philosopher . By the Author of the

Transcriber's Note: The Introduction, by Jacob Viner, was first published without a copyright notice and, therefore, is in the public domain.

The Augustan Reprint Society

BERNARD MANDEVILLE

A Letter to Dion

(1732)

With an Introduction by
Jacob Viner

Publication Number 41

Los Angeles
William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
University of California
1953

GENERAL EDITORS

• H. Richard Archer, Clark Memorial Library
• Richard C. Boys, University of Michigan
• Ralph Cohen, University of California, Los Angeles
• Vinton A. Dearing, University of California, Los Angeles

ASSISTANT EDITOR

• W. Earl Britton, University of Michigan

ADVISORY EDITORS

• Emmett L. Avery, State College of Washington
• Benjamin Boyce, Duke University
• Louis Bredvold, University of Michigan
• John Butt, King's College, University of Durham
• James L. Clifford, Columbia University
• Arthur Friedman, University of Chicago
• Edward Niles Hooker, University of California, Los Angeles
• Louis A. Landa, Princeton University
• Samuel H. Monk, University of Minnesota
• Earnest Mossner, University of Texas
• James Sutherland, University College, London
• H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., University of California, Los Angeles

CORRESPONDING SECRETARY

• Edna C. Davis, Clark Memorial Library

INTRODUCTION

The Letter to Dion, Mandeville's last publication, was, in form, a reply to Bishop Berkeley's Alciphron: or, the Minute Philosopher. In Alciphron, a series of dialogues directed against "free thinkers" in general, Dion is the presiding host and Alciphron and Lysicles are the expositors of objectionable doctrines. Mandeville's Fable of the Bees is attacked in the Second Dialogue, where Lysicles expounds some Mandevillian views but is theologically an atheist, politically a revolutionary, and socially a leveller. In the Letter to Dion, however, Mandeville assumes that Berkeley is charging him with all of these views, and accuses Berkeley of unfairness and misrepresentation.

Neither Alciphron nor the Letter to Dion caused much of a stir. The Letter never had a second edition,¹ and is now exceedingly scarce. The significance of the Letter would be minor if it were confined to its role in the exchange between Berkeley and Mandeville.² Berkeley had more sinners in mind than Mandeville, and Mandeville more critics than Berkeley. Berkeley, however, mere than any other critic seems to have gotten under Mandeville's skin, perhaps because Berkeley alone made effective use against him of his own weapons of satire and ridicule.³

Berkeley came to closest grips with The Fable of the Bees when he rejected Mandeville's grim picture of human nature, and when he met Mandeville's eulogy of luxury by the argument that expenditures on luxuries were no better support of employment than equivalent spending on charity to the poor or than the more lasting life which would result from avoidance of luxury.⁴

Of the few contemporary notices of the Letter to Dion, the most important was by John, Lord Hervey. Hervey charged both Berkeley and Mandeville with unfairness, but aimed most of his criticism at Berkeley. He claimed that Alciphron displayed the weaknesses of argument in dialogue form, that it tended either to state the opponent's case so strongly that it became difficult afterwards to refute it or so weakly that it was not worth answering. He found fault with Berkeley for denying that Mandeville had told a great many disagreeable truths—presumably about human nature and its mode of operation in society—and with Mandeville for having told them in public. He held, I believe rightly, that Mandeville, in associating vice with prosperity, deliberately blurred the distinction between vice as an incidental consequence of prosperity and vice as its cause: vice, said Hervey, "is the child of Prosperity, but not the Parent; and ... the Vices which grow upon a flourishing People, are not the Means by which they become so."⁵

T. E. Jessop, in his introduction to his edition of Alciphron, characterizes Berkeley's account of the argument of The Fable of the Bees as "not unfair," and says: "I can see no reason for whitewashing Mandeville. The content and manner of his writing invite retort rather than argument. Berkeley gives both, in the most sparkling of his dialogues. Mandeville wrote a feeble reply, A Letter to Dion."⁶ F. B. Kaye, on the other hand, says of the exchange between Berkeley and Mandeville that "men like ... Berkeley, who may be termed the religious-minded ... in their anguish, threw logic to the winds, and criticized him [i.e., Mandeville] for the most inconsistent reasons."⁷

Objective appraisal of the outcome of the debate between Berkeley and Mandeville would presumably lead to a verdict somewhere between those rendered, with appropriate loyalty to their authors, by their respective editors. It is mainly for other reasons, however, that the Letter to Dion is still of interest. There is first its literary merit. More important, the Letter presents in more emphatic and sharper form than elsewhere two essential elements of Mandeville's system of thought, the advocacy, real or pretended, of unqualified rigorism in morals, and the stress on the role of the State, of the "skilful Politician," in evoking a flourishing society out of the operations of a community of selfish rogues and sinners. The remainder of this introduction will be confined to comments on these two aspects of Mandeville's doctrine. Since the publication in 1924 of F. B. Kaye's magnificent edition of The Fable of the Bees, no one can deal seriously with Mandeville's thought without heavy reliance on it, even when, as is the case here, there is disagreement with Kaye's interpretation of Mandeville's position.

It was Mandeville's central thesis, expressed by the motto, "Private Vices, Publick Benefits," of The Fable of the Bees, that the attainment of temporal prosperity has both as prerequisite and as inevitable consequence types of human behavior which fail to meet the requirements of Christian morality and therefore are "vices." He confined "the Name of Virtue to every Performance, by which Man, contrary to the impulse of Nature, should endeavour the Benefit of others, or the Conquest of his own Passions out of a Rational Ambition of being good."⁸ If "out of a Rational Ambition of being good" be understood to mean out of "charity" in its theological sense of conscious love of God, this definition of virtue is in strict conformity to Augustinian rigorism as expounded from the sixteenth century on by Calvinists and, in the Catholic Church, by Baius, Jansenius, the Jansenists, and others. Mandeville professes also the extreme rigorist doctrine that whatever is not virtue is vice: in Augustinian terms, aut caritas aut cupiditas. Man must therefore choose between temporal prosperity and virtue, and Mandeville insists, especially in the Letter to Dion, that on his part the choice is always of virtue:

Kaye concedes: that Mandeville's rigorism "was merely verbal and superficial, and that he would much regret it if the world were run according to rigoristic morality;" that "emotionally" and "practically, if not always theoretically," Mandeville chooses the "utilitarian" side of the dilemma between virtue and prosperity; and that "Mandeville's philosophy, indeed, forms a complete whole without the extraneous rigorism."¹⁰ Kaye nevertheless insists that Mandeville's rigorism was sincere, and that it is necessary so to accept it to understand him. It seems to me, on the contrary, that if Mandeville's rigorism were sincere, the whole satirical structure of his argument, its provocative tone, its obvious fun-making gusto, would be incomprehensible, and there would be manifest inconsistency between his satirical purposes and his procedures as a writer.

Kaye argues that rigorism was not so unusual as of itself to justify doubt as to its genuineness in the case of Mandeville; rigorism was "a contemporary point of view both popular and respected, a view-point not yet extinct." To show that rigorism was "the respectable orthodox position for both Catholics and Protestants," Kaya cites as rigorists, in addition to Bayle, St. Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Daniel Dyke (the author of Mystery of Selfe-Deceiving, 1642), Thomas Fuller (1608-1661), William Law, and three Continental moralists, Esprit and Pascal, Jansenists, and J. F. Bernard, a French Calvinist.¹¹

Christian rigorism by Mandeville's time had had a long history. From and including St. Augustine on, it had undergone many types of doctrinal dilution and moderation even on the part of some of its most ardent exponents. In Mandeville, and in Kaye, it is presented only in its barest and starkest form. Kaye, however, required by his thesis to show that Mandeville's doctrine was "in accord with a great body of contemporary theory,"¹² while accepting it as "the code of rigorism" treats it as if it were identical with any moral system calling for any measure of self-discipline or associated with any type of religious-mindedness.¹³ He also identifies it with rationalism in ethics as such, as if any rationalistic ethics, merely because it calls for some measure of discipline of the passions by "reason," is ipso facto "rigorist."¹⁴

Mandeville was presumably directing his satire primarily at contemporary Englishmen, not at men who had been dead for generations nor at participants in Continental theological controversies without real counterpart in England, at least since the Restoration. If this is accepted, then of the men cited by Kaye to show the orthodoxy and the contemporaneity of rigorism only William Law has any relevance. But Law was an avowed "enthusiast," and in the England of Mandeville's time this was almost as heretical as to be an avowed sceptic. Calvinism in its origins had been unquestionably—though not unqualifiedly—rigoristic. By Mandeville's time, however, avowed Calvinism was almost extinct in England; even in Geneva, in Scotland, in Holland, its rigorism had been much softened by the spread of Arminianism and by a variety of procedures of theological accommodation or mediation between the life of grace and the life of this sinful world. On the Continent, Jansenists were still expounding a severe rigorism. But Jansenist rigorism was not "orthodox." Though not as extreme as Mandeville's rigorism, it had repeatedly been condemned by Catholic authorities as "rigorisme outrÉ."¹⁵

To take seriously Mandeville's rigorism, the narrowness with which he defines "virtue," the broadness with which he defines "vice," his failure to recognize any intermediate ground between "virtue" and outright "vice," or any shades or degrees of either, the positiveness with which he assigns to eternal damnation all who depart in any degree from "virtue" as he defines it, is therefore to accept Mandeville as a genuine exponent of a rigorism too austere and too grim not only for the ordinary run of orthodox Anglicans or Catholics of his time but even for St. Augustine (at times), for the Calvinists, and for the Jansenists.

Kaye justifiably puts great stress on the extent of Mandeville's indebtedness to Pierre Bayle. There is not the space here to elaborate, but it could be shown, I believe, that Mandeville was also indebted greatly, both indirectly through Bayle and directly, to the Jansenist, Pierre Nicole, and that Mandeville's rigorism was a gross distortion of, while Bayle's was essentially faithful to, Nicole's system.¹⁶ Nicole insisted that "true virtue" in the rigorist sense was necessary for salvation, but at the same time expounded the usefulness for society of behavior which theologically was "sinful." But it was the "sinful" behavior of honnÊtes hommes, of citizens conforming to the prevalent moral standards of their class, not of rogues and rascals, which Nicole conceded to be socially useful.¹⁷ Mandeville, on the other hand, not only lumped the respectable citizens with the rogues and rascals, but it was the usefulness for society of the vices of the rogues and rascals more than—and rather than—those of honest and respectable citizens which he emphasized. In the flourishing hive, prior to its reform, there were:

The moral reform which brought disaster to the "Grumbling Hive" consisted merely in abandonment of roguery and adoption of the standards of the honnÊte homme.¹⁹

The contrast between his general argument and that of Nicole or Bayle throws light on the role which Mandeville's professed rigorism played in the execution of his satirical purposes. It not only supports the view of all his contemporaries that Mandeville's rigorism was a sham, but also the view that he was not averse to having its insincerity be generally detected, provided only that it should not be subject to clear and unambiguous demonstration. By lumping together the "vices" of the knave and the honest man, Mandeville could without serious risk of civil or ecclesiastical penalties make rigorism of any degree seem ridiculous and thus provide abundant amusement for himself and for like-minded readers; he could then proceed to undermine all the really important systems of morality of his time by applying more exacting standards than they could meet. Against a naturalistic and sentimental system, like Shaftesbury's, he could argue that it rested on an appraisal of human nature too optimistic to be realistic. Against current Anglican systems of morality, if they retained elements of older rigoristic doctrine he could level the charge of hypocrisy, and if they were latitudinarian in their tendencies he could object that they were expounding an "easy Christianity" inconsistent with Holy Writ and with tradition.

Mandeville clearly did not like clergymen, especially hypocritical ones, and there still existed sufficient pulpit rigorism to provide him with an adequate target for satire and a substantial number of readers who would detect and approve the satire. As Fielding's Squire Western said to Parson Supple when the latter reproved him for some misdeed: "At'nt in pulpit now? when art a got up there I never mind what dost say; but I won't be priest-ridden, nor taught how to behave myself by thee." Only if it is read as a satire on rigorist sermons can there be full appreciation of the cleverness of the "parable of small beer" which Mandeville, with obvious contentment with his craftsmanship, reproduces in the Letter to Dion (pp. 25-29) from The Fable of the Bees. Here the standard rigorist proposition that there is sin both in the lust and in the act of satisfying it is applied to drink, where the thirst and its quenching are both treated as vicious.²⁰

Mandeville, as Kaye interprets him, resembles the "JansÉnistes du Salon" who prided themselves on the fashionable rigor of their doctrine but insisted on the practical impossibility of living up to it in the absence of efficacious grace. In my interpretation, Mandeville was both intellectually and temperamentally a "libertine" patently putting on the mask of rigorism in order to be able at the same time to attack the exponents of austere theological morality from their rear while making a frontal attack on less exacting and more humanistic systems of morality. The phenomenon was not a common one, but it was not unique. Bourdaloue, the great seventeenth-century Jesuit preacher, not very long before had called attention to libertines in France who masqueraded in rigorist clothes in order to deepen the cleavages among the members of the Church: "D'Òu il arrive assez souvent, par l'assemblage le plus bizarre et le plus monstrueux, qu'un homme qui ne croit pas en Dieu, se porte pour dÉfenseur du pouvoir invincible de la grÂce, et devient À toute outrance le panÉgyriste de la plus Étroite morale."²¹

The Letter to Dion has bearing also on another phase of Mandeville's doctrine which is almost universally misinterpreted. Many scholars, including economists who should know better, regard Mandeville as a pioneer expounder of laissez-faire individualism in the economic field and as such as an anticipator of Adam Smith. Kaye accepts this interpretation without argument.

The evidence provided by The Fable of the Bees in support of such an interpretation is confined to these facts: Mandeville stressed the importance of self-interest, of individual desires and ambitions, as the driving force of socially useful economic activity; he held that a better allocation of labor among different occupations would result, at least in England, if left to individual determination than if regulated or guided; he rejected some types of sumptuary legislation.

All of this, however, though required for laissez-faire doctrine, was also consistent with mercantilism, at least of the English type. The later exponents of laissez-faire did not invent the "economic man" who pursued only his own interest, but inherited him from the mercantilists and from the doctrine of original sin. English analysis of social process had in this sense always been "individualistic," and in this sense both mercantilism and the widely-prevalent theological utilitarianism were at least as individualistic as later laissez-faire economics. Englishmen, moreover, had long been jealous of governmental power, and at the height of English mercantilism they insisted upon limits to appropriate governmental intervention. It is not safe, therefore, to label anyone before Adam Smith as an exponent of laissez-faire merely on the ground that he would exempt a few specified types of economic activity from interference by government. It would be misleading also to apply to eighteenth-century writers modern ideas as to the dividing line between "interventionists" and exponents of "liberalism" or of "laissez faire." As compared to modern totalitarianism, or even to modern "central economic planning," or to "Keynesianism," the English mercantilism of the late seventeenth and the eighteenth century was essentially libertarian. It is only as compared to Adam Smith, or to English classical and the Continental "liberal" schools of economics of the nineteenth century, that it was interventionist.

Adam Smith is regarded as an exponent of laissez-faire because he laid it down as a general principle (subject in practice to numerous and fairly important specific exceptions) that the activities of government should be limited to the enforcement of justice, to defense, and to public works of a kind inherently unsuitable for private enterprise. He based this doctrine partly on natural rights grounds, partly on the belief that there was a pervasive natural and self-operating harmony, providentially established, between individual interest and the interest of the community, partly on the empirical ground that government was generally inefficient, improvident, and unintelligent.

There is nothing of such doctrine in Mandeville; there is abundant evidence in his writings that Mandeville was a convinced adherent of the prevailing mercantilism of his time. Most English mercantilists disapproved of some or all kinds of sumptuary regulations on the same grounds as Mandeville disapproved of some of them, namely, the existence of more suitable ways of accomplishing their objectives or the mistaken character of their objectives. Mandeville's objection to charity schools on the ground that they would alter for the worse the supplies of labor for different occupations was based on his belief that England, unlike some other countries, already had more tradesmen and skilled artisans than it needed. Mandeville, in contrast to Adam Smith, put great and repeated stress on the importance of the rÔle of government in producing a strong and prosperous society, through detailed and systematic regulation of economic activity.

It is a common misinterpretation of Mandeville in this respect to read his motto, "Private Vices, Publick Benefits," as a laissez-faire motto, postulating the natural or spontaneous harmony between individual interests and the public good. The motto as it appeared on title pages of The Fable of the Bees was elliptical. In his text, Mandeville repeatedly stated that it was by "the skilful Management of the clever Politician" that private vices could be made to serve the public good, thus ridding the formula of any implication of laissez-faire.

This is made clear beyond reasonable doubt by the Letter to Dion. Berkeley, in Alciphron, had made Lysicles say: "Leave nature at full freedom to work her own way, find all will be well." Mandeville, taking this as directed against himself, disavows it vigorously, and cites the stress he had put on "laws and governments" in The Fable of the Bees. (pp. 3-4; see also 55). He repeats from The Fable of the Bees his explanation that when he used as a subtitle the "Private Vices, Publick Benefits" motto, "I understood by it, that Private Vices, by the dexterous Management of a skilful Politician, might be turned into Publick Benefits." (pp. 36-37). Later he refers to the role of the "skilful Management" of the "Legislator" (p. 42), and to "the Wisdom of the Politician, by whose skilful Management the Private Vices of the Worst of Men are made to turn to a Publick Benefit." (p. 45). "They are silly People," he says, "who imagine, that the Good of the Whole is consistent with the Good of every Individual." (p. 49).

A recent work²² provides indirectly unintentional support to my denial that Mandeville was an exponent of laissez-faire. In this work we are told that "The most famous exponent of what HalÉvy calls the natural identity of interests is Bernard Mandeville" and that "What Mandeville did for the principle of the natural identity of interests HelvÉtius did for that of their artificial identity," that is, "that the chief utility of governments consists in their ability to force men to act in their own best interests when they feel disinclined to do so." It so happens, however, that HelvÉtius as an apostle of state intervention was not only not departing from Mandeville but was echoing him even as to language. HelvÉtius said that motives of personal temporal interest sufficed for the formation of a good society, provided they were "maniÉs avec adresse par un lÉgislateur habile."²³

Here also there is a close link between Mandeville, Bayle, and the Jansenists, especially Nicole and Domat. All of them adopted a Hobbesian view of human nature. All of them followed Hobbes in believing that the discipline imposed by positive law and enforced by government was essential if a prosperous and flourishing society was to be derived from communities of individuals vigorously pursuing their self-regarding interests. Mandeville's originality was in pretending that in the interest of true morality he preferred that the individual pursuit of prosperity be abandoned even at the cost of social disaster.

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