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Mandeville’s Fable - Pride, Hypocrisy, and Sociability (Paperback)
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Mandeville’s Fable - Pride, Hypocrisy, and Sociability (Paperback)
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Why we should take Bernard Mandeville seriously as a philosopher
Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees outraged its
eighteenth-century audience by proclaiming that private vices lead
to public prosperity. Today the work is best known as an early
iteration of laissez-faire capitalism. In this book, Robin Douglass
looks beyond the notoriety of Mandeville’s great work to reclaim
its status as one of the most incisive philosophical studies of
human nature and the origin of society in the Enlightenment era.
Focusing on Mandeville’s moral, social, and political ideas,
Douglass offers a revelatory account of why we should take
Mandeville seriously as a philosopher. Douglass expertly
reconstructs Mandeville’s theory of how self-centred individuals,
who care for their reputation and social standing above all else,
could live peacefully together in large societies. Pride and shame
are the principal motives of human behaviour, on this account, with
a large dose of hypocrisy and self-deception lying behind our moral
practices. In his analysis, Douglass attends closely to the changes
between different editions of the Fable; considers Mandeville’s
arguments in light of objections and rival accounts from other
eighteenth-century philosophers, including Shaftesbury, Hume, and
Smith; and draws on more recent findings from social psychology.
With this detailed and original reassessment of Mandeville’s
philosophy, Douglass shows how The Fable of the Bees—by shining a
light on the dark side of human nature—has the power to unsettle
readers even today.
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