The Fable of the Bees, Parts I and II

Contents

1. The Preface 14 min 10

   Mandeville opens with an anatomist’s image: what makes man sociable is not his good nature but his vilest qualities, as the small hidden parts of a body matter more than its skin. He explains that the poem, first published in 1705, was meant not to encourage vice but to show that wealth, power and refinement are impossible without it, and to shame those who enjoy prosperity while railing at its causes. London’s dirty streets illustrate the point. A postscript to the 1723 edition reports the Grand Jury’s presentment and the outcry against the book.

2. The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves Turn’d Honest 20 min 10

   The verse fable behind the whole book. A rich, powerful hive governed by a limited monarchy thrives although every trade and office is full of fraud: lawyers, physicians, priests, soldiers, ministers and judges all cheat, while luxury, pride, envy and fickle fashion employ millions of the poor. When the bees pray for honesty, Jove grants it. Lawyers, gaolers and luxury trades vanish, spending collapses, the population dwindles and the survivors retreat to a hollow tree. The Moral: a great and honest hive is a utopian dream, and vice, pruned by justice, is as necessary to the state as hunger is to eating.

3. The Introduction 1 min 1

   A short bridge to the prose part. Most writers tell men what they should be; Mandeville will show what they are, a compound of passions that govern by turns. The Remarks will explain the poem’s paradoxes, after an enquiry into how man learned to tell virtue from vice, man being taken in the state of nature.

4. An Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue 26 min 7

   Mandeville’s theory of the origin of morality. Man is a selfish, headstrong animal that force alone cannot tame. Lawgivers and moralists therefore used flattery: they praised human reason, taught honour and shame, and divided mankind into a noble class that conquers its appetites and a base class that indulges them. Pride made people strive for, or pretend to, the higher rank. Virtue is any act against natural impulse for the good of others, and moral virtues are “the Political Offspring which Flattery begot upon Pride”. Pity and even silent good deeds are traced back to passion or pride.

5. Remarks (A.)–(C.) 44 min 8

   Remark A explains how failed apprentices and déclassés become actors, parasites, pimps, sharpers and quacks. Remark B shows that ordinary traders are knaves too, through the tale of two sugar merchants, Decio and Alcander, each trying to outwit the other on secret news. Remark C turns to honour and shame: honour is the good opinion of others, shame a real passion with bodily signs. Education cultivates shame to produce modesty and good manners, which conceal rather than conquer the appetites; the same shame drives poor servant-girls to infanticide.

6. Remarks (D.)–(I.) 42 min 10

   Remarks D and E explain why traders hide their profits and gamesters their winnings. Remark F shows honest merchants living off others’ vices, Remark G how thieves, highwaymen and the gin trade put money into circulation, with an ironic defence of distillers who become reforming magistrates. Remark H argues that rival parties improve each other: Protestants reformed the Catholic clergy, and tolerated prostitution, as in Amsterdam’s music-houses, protects respectable women. Remark I says avarice is hated because everyone suffers by it, yet it serves prodigality, as the spendthrift Florio and the usurer Cornaro show.

7. Remarks (K.)–(M.) 55 min 11

   Remark K praises prodigality as a noble sin that returns hoarded wealth to circulation and calls frugality a starving virtue fit only for small, poor societies. Remark L argues that luxury is either everything or nothing, that a nation cannot be impoverished by foreign luxury if exports match imports, as in the Turkey trade, and that luxury does not enervate armies, since the poor do the fighting. Remark M defines pride, shows how emulation in dress runs from labourers’ wives up to the court, and concludes that trade depends on pride, not public spirit.

8. Remarks (N.)–(O.) 1 h 6 min 13

   Remark (N.) dissects envy as a compound of grief and anger, strongest between near rivals, and shows it spurring schoolboys, painters and husbands to effort; it then analyses jealousy, hope and love, treating love as sexual appetite disguised by education and the politician’s art. Remark (O.) asks what “real Pleasures” are. Against the Stoics and the moralists, Mandeville judges people by their lives: clergy, courtiers and princes all pursue worldly comfort and display while praising contempt of the world. Self-denial is the only test of virtue, and he finds it almost nowhere. Following Bayle, he concludes that men commonly act against their professed principles.

9. Remarks (P.)–(Q.) 54 min 14

   Remark (P.) argues that yesterday’s luxuries, linen, soap, beer, feather beds and good housing, are today’s necessities even for paupers, then digresses into a plea against cruelty to animals, including the fable of a lion who lectures a shipwrecked merchant. Remark (Q.) attacks the idea that national frugality enriches a country. Frugality follows necessity, as Dutch history shows; general saving would leave the working poor idle. The poor must be kept from starving but receive nothing worth saving, since only want makes them work. Spain was ruined by American treasure; real wealth is employment, the fruits of the earth and the labour of the people.

10. Remark (R.) 48 min 11

    Remark (R.) treats honour as an invention of moralists and politicians. Mandeville derives natural courage from anger, which is roused by thwarted hunger or lust, and argues that natural man is timid. Governments keep internal peace by working on fear, but for war they need an artificial courage, made by flattering pride until fear of shame outweighs fear of death. He describes military vanity and the cheap finery of common soldiers, defends duelling as a useful check on manners, traces how honour lost most of its virtues, and ends by setting honour, founded on pride, against religion, founded on humility.

11. Remarks (S.)–(Y.) 55 min 17

    The last Remarks complete the defence of luxury. Remark (S.) shows the building and luxury trades a virtuous hive would ruin. Remark (T.) argues that the extravagance of wives sustains trade, then answers critics: Mandeville commends virtue but denies that a great, rich nation can exist without vice, offers an ironic recipe for a poor and pious kingdom, and tells the parable of a country that condemns thirst while praying for the brewing trade. Remark (V.) separates laziness, content and industry. Remark (X.) dismisses Spartan greatness as empty. Remark (Y.) states his provisos: the poor kept at work, ignorance, and a favourable balance of trade.

12. An Essay on Charity, and Charity-Schools 2 h 15 min 22

    Mandeville defines charity so strictly that pity, pride and vanity, which drive most giving, do not count, and he treats Radcliffe’s bequest to Oxford as a purchase of fame. He then attacks the charity schools. They do not prevent crime, which arises from opportunity, lenient justice and the city. They are promoted by parish busybodies seeking status, and they unfit poor children for labour. A nation’s wealth lies in a “Multitude of laborious Poor”, who must be kept ignorant as well as poor to stay content and cheap. Cheap labour wins export markets; spare hands should dig canals and drain land.

13. A Search into the Nature of Society 1 h 33 min 15

    Against Shaftesbury’s view that humans are naturally benevolent and that beauty and virtue are fixed standards, Mandeville argues that taste and morals vary with custom, that the love of company is self-love, and that society springs from human wants and the hostility of nature after the Fall. Vice and misfortune create employment: luxury, fashion, shipwrecks and fires keep the labouring poor at work, while virtue and fair weather would leave them idle. He ends by restating the paradox: private vices, skilfully managed by politicians, become public benefits.

14. A Vindication of the Book 52 min 9

    Mandeville prints the Middlesex Grand Jury’s presentment of July 1723 and the abusive letter of “Theophilus Philo-Britannus”, which links the Fable to Cato’s Letters, Jacobitism and the attack on charity schools. His reply, from the London Journal of 10 August 1723, explains that by “Evil” he meant want, from which all trades arise; denies praising brothels; points to the book’s price and learned audience; and names the Essay on Charity as the true cause of the outcry. He offers to burn the book himself if any blasphemy is found.

15. II.Pref Part II: The Preface 49 min 13

    Mandeville explains why he answers his critics with a second volume rather than a direct reply, defends admitting his own vanity, and justifies writing in dialogue despite its reputation for unfairness. He sketches the fashionable world his speakers belong to, where politeness, ease and a thin conformity pass for virtue and religion, and introduces Horatio, a Shaftesburian man of honour; Cleomenes, a reformed gentleman who speaks for the author; and Fulvia. He asks to be judged only by what Cleomenes says, and ends by exposing a false newspaper report, planted to advertise Alexander Innes's book, that the author had publicly burned the Fable.

16. II.1 Part II: The First Dialogue between Horatio, Cleomenes, and Fulvia 1 h 5 min 12

    Cleomenes lures the reluctant Horatio into conversation by pretending to have converted to Shaftesbury's "Social System". With his cousin Fulvia he praises grand-manner painting and Italian opera, which Horatio defends as schools of virtue. He then applies the system's charitable judgments to a poor woman who apprentices her son to a chimney-sweep, to lawyers, physicians, pluralist clergy and a shopkeeping toyman, until Horatio himself restores the selfish motives. Cleomenes argues that politeness is not virtue and that vices follow opportunity rather than rank. Horatio, who will not hear honour mocked, agrees to continue the talk at dinner.

17. II.2 Part II: The Second Dialogue between Horatio and Cleomenes 1 h 21 min 15

    Over dinner Cleomenes draws a portrait of a perfect fine gentleman, magnificent, generous, temperate, pious and modest, in order to show that such a character could be built entirely on pride, the love of others' good opinion. Education, he argues, teaches children to hide pride, not conquer it, and long habit can hide the motive from the man himself. The test is the duel: Horatio admits he fought one against religion and law, though he feared death at sea and from smallpox. Cleomenes shows that only fear of shame, rooted in pride, could overpower that fear. Convinced, Horatio accepts the Fable.

18. II.3 Part II: The Third Dialogue between Horatio and Cleomenes 1 h 38 min 23

    Horatio has read the Fable. Cleomenes defends it as satire written from a strict Christian standard, using the parallel of a book on castrati, and argues that virtue always requires self-denial, with portraits of an active and an indolent man and of a miser’s hospital. He traces pride’s degrees to education, explains honour’s different demands on men and women, and introduces “self-liking”, the instinct to overvalue oneself. Good manners, he argues, arose from it without design, as people slowly learned by experience to hide their pride, just as sailors and craftsmen master arts whose theory they never know.

19. II.4 Part II: The Fourth Dialogue between Horatio and Cleomenes 1 h 36 min 15

    A week later the conversation turns to the history of compliments, which Cleomenes derives from submission to conquerors, and to applause in churches, theatres and the Ottoman court. A long digression on laughter, tears, the brain and the soul stresses reasoning from observed facts rather than first causes, and includes a claim that women are as capable of thought as men. Cleomenes then rejects Shaftesbury’s natural love of the species: man is sociable because he can be governed and made to work for others, and sociableness, like wine, is produced by mutual dealings. A reading from Sir William Temple prepares the next dialogue.

20. II.5 Part II: The Fifth Dialogue between Horatio and Cleomenes 2 h 27 min 38

    Over a home-grown pineapple, Horatio asks how savages could exist if all men descend from Noah, and how society began. Cleomenes argues that untaught man claims everything for himself and cannot govern even his family, though fear and benefits breed reverence in children. Religion begins in fear of invisible causes; true religion came only by revelation through Moses. Moral notions are acquired, and parents earn no merit for begetting. The first step to society is common danger from wild beasts, which Providence moderated. Horatio’s wish for natural affection among men is rejected: war, death and the male birth surplus belong to the scheme of the world.

21. II.6a Part II: The Sixth Dialogue between Horatio and Cleomenes (first half) 1 h 50 min 20

    Cleomenes completes his history of society: after danger from beasts comes danger from other men, then the invention of letters, without which laws cannot last. He reads the Ten Commandments as remedies for an “Instinct of Sovereignty” in human nature, then argues that once written law secures property, people divide their labour. A long account of language follows: it grew slowly from gestures, and its first purpose was to persuade. The friends discuss politeness, French and English, Corneille, and how civilised people hide what is natural. Horatio’s challenge over Paradise and the Golden Age leads to a defence of Moses against atheism, superstition and deism.

22. II.6b Part II: The Sixth Dialogue between Horatio and Cleomenes (second half) 1 h 22 min 19

    Asked how nations rise, Cleomenes answers that good government is the joint labour of ages, like a knitting-frame or musical clock that ordinary men can run. Offices divided and checked need no genius; even a prime minister needs only a courtier’s arts, while party rivalry guards the treasury. After an epitaph on Marlborough, he argues that learning thrives on vanity, money and reward, that money is the bond of a society built on wants, and that educating the poor out of labour would upset a natural proportion of ranks. Horatio declares himself a convert, and Cleomenes judges Shaftesbury noble but romantic about human nature.