Leanne Stokoe’s introduction to our Portraits of Integrity meeting is now available.

Readings

click to download…

• Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees or Private Vices, Publick Benefits, 3^rd edn. (1723), ed. by F. B. Kaye, 2 vols (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1988).
  • ‘The Grumbling Hive, or Knaves Turn’d Honest’ (pp. 66-74), ‘The Introduction’ (p. 76) ‘An Enquiry into the Nature of Moral Virtue’ (pp. 77-83) and ‘Remarks’ A, B, and C (pp. 84-95).
• Adam Smith,
  • ‘On Sympathy’ in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), vol. 1 of The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. by D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie, in (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976-87).
  • ‘Of Systems of Political Economy’, in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), vol. 2 of The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. by R. L. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976-87).

Transcript (Handout)

During the age of Enlightenment, integrity was seen as synonymous with the inherently rational and benevolent propensities of human beings. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), John Locke declares that the individual is a ‘conscious thinking thing […] which is sensible of pleasure and pain, and so is concerned for itself, as far as that consciousness extends’.¹ This view of the self as a composite of its sensory experiences and its ‘consciousness’ of others is developed by Locke’s successors. For instance, David Hume’s Treatise on the Principle of Human Nature (1739-40) describes the mind as comprising ‘vivid and intense chimeras’, which recombine sense impressions in a way that resists ‘conclusions concerning matter of fact’.² Yet this session explores how two figures from either end of the eighteenth century not only challenge the idea that acting with integrity depends upon a rational subordination of the self, but also analyse its relationship to socio-economic progress. Opening by reading Bernard Mandeville’s most famous work, The Fable of the Bees (1714), the paper investigates its controversial paradox that ‘private vice’ is the catalyst to ‘public benefit’. Examining Mandeville’s belief that to align social improvement with reason disregards humanity’s essential nature, it considers whether he rejects integrity entirely or re-orientates it in an alternative direction. The second part of the session explores the ways in which Mandevillean notions of integrity are transformed during the Scottish Enlightenment. Donald Winch notes how Adam Smith’s admiration for what he calls the ‘kernel of truth’ in Mandeville’s doctrines underpins his reinterpretation of self-interest in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and The Wealth of Nations (1776).³ By tracing parallels between Smith’s moral outlook and his seminal text on political economy, the session will explore the extent to which Mandeville’s foundations shape his ideas about sympathy and national prosperity. We will conclude by considering the legacy of Mandevillean and Smithian definitions of integrity in the early nineteenth century, particularly their impact upon Romantic-era thought. By exploring such diverse attitudes towards human nature, the session considers to what extent ‘integrity’ can be seen as a shifting concept during this period, as well as its influence upon the economic, legislative and even aesthetic spheres.

Mandeville’s Fable comprises two separate works united in a single volume. He first published it as a poem, The Grumbling Hive, or Knaves Turn’d Honest in 1705, a text that presents contemporary England as an allegory of worker bees in a corrupt, yet prosperous hive. Ruled over by ‘kings’ rather than being oppressed by ‘tyranny’ or liberated by ‘wild Democracy’, the bees are happy with their luxurious lifestyle but troubled by their lack of restraint (Fable, ll. 9-10).⁴ One day, a higher power grants their desire to be virtuous, resulting in an ‘honest’, yet unprosperous society. The poem itself attracted little attention. Many readers overlooked the fact that Mandeville’s rhyming couplets and employment of fable concealed sophisticated arguments about morality and economics. Yet when this was amalgamated with extensive prose expansions in 1714, it was denounced by the leading philosophers of the day. I will return to why these two ‘versions’ of Mandeville’s ideas were interpreted so differently. Yet the main reason that Mandeville’s Fable met with such hostility was that it depicted human nature as undermining Enlightenment ideals.⁵ From the outset, Mandeville insists upon the ‘necessity of vice’, arguing that society encourages human beings to cultivate their natural propensity for selfishness and ambition (Fable, p. 77). He describes ‘the vileness of the ingredients, that altogether compose the wholesome mixture of a well-ordered society’ (Fable, p. 62). Mandeville argues that it is only through embracing these ‘vile’ qualities that society can advance towards a ‘wholesome’ commercial economy. Unsurprisingly, the Fable was inspired by contemporary debates about whether spending or saving was more beneficial to national prosperity. Going against the general belief that saving money could revive the economy in times of recession, Mandeville argues that spending on luxuries is not only vital to financial expansion, but also grows out of the human tendency towards self-aggrandisement. Whilst John Maynard Keynes admires Mandeville for identifying this ‘paradox of thrift’, the latter’s skill in linking financial questions with ideas about human nature has been relatively overlooked by present-day economists.⁶

Mandeville’s belief that civilised man is a ‘taught animal’ distinguishes between ‘society’ and ‘civilisation’ (Fable, p. 152). He regards society as beneficial, due the way that it nurtures the tendency to employ ‘avarice’ and ‘ambition’ in the cause of economic progress. In contrast, he perceives ‘civilisation’ as negative in relation to the artificial code of morality it ‘teaches’ to human beings. An interesting example of this is his assessment of meat-eating, which he sees as arising from the advance of a rational civilisation. Mandeville remarks ‘we are born with a repugnancy to killing, and consequently the eating of animals, for it is impossible that a natural appetite should ever prompt us to do what we have an aversion to’ (Fable, p. 138). This reveals his distinctive support for natural diet, which derives from the idea that an ‘aversion’ to meat-eating is the product of human selfishness. As he explains: ‘Nature taught your stomach to crave nothing but vegetables, but your fondness for change perverted your appetites’ (Fable, p. 140). By connecting the ‘perversion’ of self-interest with a ‘fondness’ for living in civilised communities, Mandeville anticipates the arguments of revolutionary writers like Rousseau later in the century. Both condemn the distortion of the natural state by custom; they only differ in their definitions of what human nature encompasses.

Mandeville believes that ‘without great vices, is a vain UTOPIA seated in the brain’ (Fable, p. 74). Yet there is an instance in the Fable where he contemplates whether humanity can develop beyond its inherent vice. Again criticising the hypocrisy of a ‘civilised’ society, he comments: ‘Our English law allows [butchers] not to be of any jury upon life and death, as their practice itself is sufficient to extinguish in them tenderness’ (Fable, p. 138). Mandeville argues that if society excludes butchers from jury service, as a result of their desensitisation to ‘death’, it cannot allow meat to be consumed when its raw state causes aversion in self-interested beings. However, the notion that a butcher’s profession extinguishes his natural ‘tenderness’ marks a transition in Mandeville’s argument. He appears to develop his belief in humanity’s attraction to vice, into the view that self-interestedness allows the individual to identify with other sentient beings. This aspect of Mandeville’s thought remains underdeveloped, and he considers the way that humans relate to animals, rather than each other. Nevertheless, it is clear why later economists identify a certain moral progressiveness in Mandeville’s theories, and seek to refine his nascent ideas about human sympathy.

Having suggested that Mandeville rejects the idea of a rational humanity, it is important to investigate why he combines such moral inquiry with experiments in poetry and prose. F. B. Kaye comments that ‘the Fable of the Bees is concerned with so wide a range of thought that it is of import, not only to specialists in the history of economics and philosophy, but also those whose interest is primarily literary’.⁷ That Mandeville was equally as interested in ‘literary’ expression as in ‘economics’ becomes evident in his concept of readership, which reveals much about his authorial intentions. Mandeville’s depiction of humans as ‘animals’ attests to his literary skill. By expressing these views in a fable, his allegory of worker bees contains a more subversive agenda than simply attracting readers to its unusual morality tale. By identifying the bees with different social classes, Mandeville presents an underlying economic argument that complicates his separation of poetry and prose. Whilst he mobilises poetry as social commentary, he experiments with different kinds of rhetoric in his prose annotations that compel a wide readership to re-examine their respective outlooks. Such a technique not only draws attention to the ways in which poetry and prose relate to each other, but also illuminates how political economy as a discipline emerged from moral and aesthetic questions that are alien to present-day ‘economics’.

Mandeville’s intelligent use of paradox can be observed in the poem when he offers the reader a choice between a virtuous, primitive existence and a corrupt yet prosperous society. He divides rhyming couplets by contemplating each scenario, such as in his description of the hive: ‘Every part was full of vice/Yet the whole mass a paradise’ (Fable, p. 69). Mandeville’s skill in questioning whether the bees should sacrifice their commercial ‘paradise’ for a virtuous society is expanded in his prose expansion. He comments:

The first desirable blessings for any society are a fertile soil and happy climate, a mild government and more land than people. These things will render man honest and sincere [ …] but they shalt have no arts or sciences; they must be wholly destitute of what we call the comforts of life […] Man never exerts himself but when he is rouz’d by his desires. (Fable, p. 142)

These observations not only emphasise that humanity is regulated by self-serving ‘desires’, but also anticipate the innovations of later political economists. Mandeville’s remarks about a ‘fertile soil’ that can sustain small communities foreshadow the Malthusian argument that society can only be ‘happy’ when its subsistence outstrips population. He presents such a society as an unobtainable ideal and asserts that human vice will always resurface, creating the positive side-effects of commercial ‘comforts’, ‘arts’ and ‘sciences’. Thus Mandeville presents a contradiction between what is desirable and human ‘desires’ themselves.

In order to appreciate fully the impact of Mandeville’s paradoxes upon this new discipline of political economy, it is important to explore the process through which his belief in ‘the necessity of vice’ becomes transformed during the Scottish Enlightenment. Whilst Mandeville distrusts rational enquiry for what he sees as its suppression of human selfishness, he maintains that these propensities remain ‘vile’, notwithstanding their beneficial side-effects. In the hands of a writer like Adam Smith, however, Mandevillean notions of integrity become the catalyst for a mode of socio-economic progress based upon sympathy, co-dependence and imagination. Although Smith admits that the Fable‘borders upon the truth’, his work re-aligns Mandeville’s concept of ‘vice’ with a virtuous definition of self-interest.⁸ Emma Rothschild, Iain McLean and Philip Connell have compared the modern-day interpretation of Smith as a significant Enlightenment thinker with the contemporary tendency to align his free market principles with anti-Jacobin politics.⁹ Yet the impact of Mandeville’s Fable upon these innovations must begin, not with The Wealth of Nations, but with The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
Published in 1759, this work is distinctive for the ways in which it aligns Mandeville’s views about human selfishness with an ethical system that centres upon the imaginative faculty. Both Hume and Dugald Stewart identify the role of imagination in shaping individual ‘impressions’ of the external world. Yet Smith highlights its moral agency when he comments that, ‘it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception’ of the sensations of others. This is because ‘only’ by imagining oneself in another’s place can the selfish individual sympathise with society at large (Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 9). Smith’s view of human nature as intrinsically self-interested and, as a consequence, intrinsically sympathetic, is often regarded as compatible with aesthetic ideas. For instance, James Chandler acknowledges that ‘the reconstitution of the case that we find in Smith’s moral philosophy is reiterated through much of what we think of as mainline Romanticism’. Yet such readings reflect a tendency amongst literary critics to admire Smith’s progressive “philosophy” at the expense of analysing his economic innovations. The relevance of The Theory of Moral Sentiments to Smith’s ‘labour theory of value’, or the notion that value is defined by the labour required for its production, is particularly understated. Smith conceived that a self-interested humanity was the catalyst, not only to the individual’s capacity to sympathize with others, but also to socio-economic expansion. This informs his conviction that a ‘harmony of interests’ amongst different classes who all pursue personal gain, could develop an economic model that benefits the manufacturer, landlord and labourer.

Smith’s progressive view of self-interest culminates in his seminal economic metaphor: the ‘invisible hand’, or the idea that we are often ‘led to promote an end’ which is no part of our ‘intentions’.¹⁰ He anticipates this image in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which explains his acceptance of class divisions in The Wealth of Nations: ‘The rich consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own conveniency … they divide with [them] the produce of all their improvements’ (184). Smith’s belief in the unintentional advantages that are gained by pursuing personal ‘conveniency’ emphasizes that self-interest contains a beneficial quality that can be applied to economic practice. Nevertheless, it is the imaginative process through which Smith constructs this metaphor that is most interesting, in terms of the way that it not only fuses moral philosophy with a system of economic exchange, but also aligns this process with potentially aesthetic concerns. In this respect, he can be seen as developing Mandeville’s early experiments with literary form into a mode of political economy that recognises how its imaginative propensities are unrestricted to the moral sphere.

Smith’s re-imagining of political economy can be observed when he presents this progressive view of self-interest as an incentive to commercial growth. Like Mandeville, he is suspicious of the physiocratic belief that land is the only source of wealth, remarking that ‘good roads, navigable rivers put the remote parts of the country more nearly upon a level with those in the town’ (Wealth of Nations, i, 163). This alliance between ‘country’ and ‘town’ illuminates his belief that the interests of different classes can produce a dynamic form of mutual co-operation, even if this cannot ‘level’ out social inequality. Nevertheless, his hatred of trade monopolies as limiting the capacity of every man to pursue their own economic interests casts the free market system in a semi-egalitarian light. Smith’s core belief rests upon ‘the uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition’. That he connects this ‘uninterrupted’ progress to ‘national, as well as private opulence’ reflects his belief that moral and economic development are interrelated (Wealth of Nations, i, 343). Although he died in 1790, it is significant that Smith’s ideas were embraced by revolutionary figures. Radical millenarian Richard Price supports the egalitarian undertones of his labour theory of value, whilst Thomas Jefferson describes The Wealth of Nations as ‘the best book to be read on the subjects of money and commerce’.¹¹ Iain McLean remarks that ‘in Smith’s hands, economics becomes a radically egalitarian discipline’, and this reading may be supported by a brief caveat on his legacy in the early nineteenth century.¹²

Following the failure of 1790s ideals, these self-interested definitions of integrity were viewed with increasing scepticism. Whilst Benthamite utilitarianism incorporates Scottish Enlightenment ethics to facilitate ‘the greatest happiness for the greatest number’, Romantic-era writers like William Godwin and William Hazlitt question whether such a humanity can bring about an egalitarian system of government.¹³ Whilst Godwin’s revolutionary Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) asserts that individuals can develop to a point where they ‘forget’ their self-interest, Hazlitt’s Essay on the Principles of Human Action (1805) aligns an ‘essentially disinterested’ view of humanity with republican politics.¹⁴ Nevertheless, it is significant that one of the most prominent Romantic writers, Percy Shelley, incorporates Mandevillean and Smithian ideas into his work, specifically his theory of imagination. In his fragmentary Speculations on Morals and Metaphysics (1817-1821), Shelley emphasizes the importance of self-interest in both moral and socio-economic progress. He remarks: ‘We are intuitively conscious of our own existence. We are conscious also of the existence of other minds; but not intuitively’.¹⁵ This idea that individuals are not ‘intuitively’ aware of ‘other minds’ highlights Shelley’s surprising attraction to the self and its sympathetic qualities. His description of ‘the imaginations’ of his predecessors as ‘misguided’ appears to criticise Godwin and Hazlitt in their rejection of the self. Yet it also implies that the imaginative qualities within Smith and Mandeville’s notions of integrity contain greater egalitarian potential than either proponent recognises. Whether such propensities can be aligned with the Romantic outlook is a question for further discussion.

Works Cited:

Bentham, Jeremy, ‘Commonplace Book’ (1774-5) in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. by John Bowring, 11 vols (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1843), 91-138.
Connell, Philip, Romanticism, Economics and the Question of ‘Culture’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Godwin, William, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), in The Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, ed. by Mark Philp, 7 vols (London: Pickering, 1993), 1-447.
Hazlitt, William, An Essay on the Principles of Human Action (1805) in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. by P. P. Howe, 21 vols, (London: Dent, 1930-4), 6-7.
Hume, David, A Treatise on Human Nature (1739-40), ed. by David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Jefferson, Thomas, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. by Andrew A. Lipscomb, 20 vols (Washington DC: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1903).
Keynes, John Maynard, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (London: Macmillan, 1936).
Locke, John, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), 4 vols , 2nd edn. (London: Printed by Eliz. Holt for Thomas Bassett, 1690).
Mandeville, Bernard, The Fable of the Bees or Private Vices, Publick Benefits (1714), ed. by F. B. Kaye, 3rd edn., (1723) (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1988).
Rothschild, Emma, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, Speculations on Morals and Metaphysics (1817-1821), in a facsimile of Bodleian Shelley MS. d. 1., Vol. 4 of The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts facsimile series, ed. by E. B. Murray, 2 Parts (New York: Garland, 1986-2002), i.
Smith, Adam, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Vol. 1 of The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. by D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 1-383.
——, ‘Of Systems of Political Economy’, in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), Vol. 2 of The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. by R. L. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976-87), 13-544 (Books 1-3), 545-948 (Books 4-5).
Winch, Donald, Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750-1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

Readings

click to download…

• Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees or Private Vices, Publick Benefits, 3^rd edn. (1723), ed. by F. B. Kaye, 2 vols (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1988).
  • ‘The Grumbling Hive, or Knaves Turn’d Honest’ (pp. 66-74), ‘The Introduction’ (p. 76) ‘An Enquiry into the Nature of Moral Virtue’ (pp. 77-83) and ‘Remarks’ A, B, and C (pp. 84-95).
• Adam Smith,
  • ‘On Sympathy’ in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), vol. 1 of The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. by D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie, in (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976-87).
  • ‘Of Systems of Political Economy’, in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), vol. 2 of The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. by R. L. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976-87).