The enlightenment's fable : Bernard Mandeville and the discovery of society / E.J. Hundert.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 250-275) and index.

Print version record.

1. The foundations of a project. Egoism, politics and society. Dutch republicans and French devots. Medicine and morals. Toward a science of socialized man -- 2. Self-love and the civilizing process. The history of pride. Hutcheson's polemic and Hume's critique. Rhetoric and the emergence of civility. The French connection. Rousseau in Mandeville's shadow -- 3. Performance principles of the public sphere. Manners, morals and the Earl of Shaftesbury. Bishop Butler and the pursuit of happiness. Theatrum mundi. Henry Fielding at the Mandevillian masquerade. The discourse of the passions at its limits -- 4. A world of goods. From hypocrisy to emulation. Labor and luxury. Homo economica and her double -- 5. Imposing closure -- Adam Smith's problem -- Epilogue: The Fable's modern fate.

The apprehension of society as an aggregation of self-interested individuals, connected only by bonds of envy, competition, and exploitation, is a dominant modern concern, but one first systematically articulated during the European Enlightenment. The Enlightenment's 'Fable' approaches this problem from the perspective of the challenge offered to inherited traditions of morality and social understanding by the Anglo-Dutch physician, satirist and philosopher, Bernard Mandeville. Mandeville's infamous paradoxical maxim 'private vices, public benefits' profoundly disturbed his contemporaries, while his Fable of the Bees had a decisive influence on David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant. Professor Hundert examines the sources and strategies of Mandeville's science of human nature and the role of his ideas in shaping eighteenth century economic, social and moral theories.

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