Mandeville’s Paradox

Abstract

Perhaps the real paradox of The Fable of the Bees is that Mandeville’s values were orthodox and unexceptionable, and yet as far as his contemporaries were concerned, he wrote like a heretic. Mandeville flaunted an excess of honesty: he dared to say that the emperor was naked, that society prospered by means of the very qualities that Swift and his fellow satirists were condemning. In his hubris, he assumed too literally that special mode of the Augustans which was to look at things as they are, not as they pretend to be, and for his pains was treated as the Machiavelli of his age. Swift also looked at things as they were. But he was not content with showing the truth as he saw it, he imposed a judgement. With all his genius he revealed the iniquity of what he saw, and to that extent deflects our attention towards the judgement itself and the values behind it. But Mandeville seems to make no judgement, except sporadically, even though the picture he shows is not very different from Swift’s. What Swift presents as horrifying, Mandeville shows as the foundation of a strong and prosperous society. He does not say that this is good or evil, he simply demonstrates that the worldly qualities that Swift condemns, the corruptions inherent in society, provide the fuel that makes society thrive.