When I saw that Princeton University Press had recently published a book titled Man-Devil: The Mind and Times of Bernard Mandeville, the Wickedest Man in Europe by John Callanan, I was immediately intrigued. The excellent red and black front cover, designed to look like an eighteenth-century title page with a bee perched on the right edge, and the captivating title were only a few of the reasons why.

Mandeville is a fascinating character in the history of political economy. One notices more than a few commonalities between his career and that of Thomas Malthus: both men are mainly remembered for one very controversial work, both of these works were often misunderstood, both works went through several editions and changed significantly with each edition, and while there were legitimate critiques of both works, both men were also savagely attacked by people who did not seem to have read their work all that carefully (or at all). As the title of Callanan’s book implies, some people genuinely believed Mandeville was the Antichrist.

The Fable of the Bees, Mandeville’s famously controversial work, began as a roughly four hundred-line poem titled “The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves Turn’d Honest.” This “story written in doggerel,” as its author would call it, was published in 1705 and then republished in 1714 with a new title, a preface, an additional essay, and many more pages of “Remarks” providing commentary on various lines. Mandeville produced yet another edition in 1723 with a few more essays and then finally published a massive two-volume edition in 1728. With all the expansions and elaborations, the general argument remained much the same: man’s “vilest and most hateful qualities are the most necessary accomplishments to fit him for the largest, and, according to the world, the happiest and most flourishing societies,” and to understand this fact is also to accept “the impossibility of enjoying all the most elegant comforts of life that are to be met with in an industrious, wealthy and powerful nation, and at the same time, be blessed with the virtue and innocence that can be wished for in a golden age.” And for this reason, according to Mandeville, we ought to admire the ingenuity of statesmen that enables them to construct such an excellent structure as civilization out of such depraved parts.

The poem demonstrates this moral through the story of a hive of bees, a powerful, populous and prosperous hive, but one rife with corruption and vice at every level of society and in every occupation. In spite of their comfortable existence, these bees complain to the gods about the prevalence of immorality in their society until an exasperated Jove grants their wish and makes them all honest. The transformation of their corrupt and sinful society into an honest and virtuous one puts many of the bees out of work, causes an exodus of bees from the hive and leaves them vulnerable when attacked by a foreign army. Only a small number of survivors remain following the invasion and the resulting war, and these survivors then desert their fallen society and fly into a hollow tree to start over afresh.

Mandeville was accused of being a libertine and an atheist, of advocating vice and of being a paid propagandist for London distillers, but one need not be a self-righteous moralist to be unsure what to make of his writings; there are layers of complexity to many of his arguments, and his frequent use of irony sometimes makes it difficult to determine how literally his assertions should be interpreted. A book-length exploration of the man’s “life and mind” has the potential to shed useful light on his ideas and their place in intellectual history, and Callanan’s book delivers.

The aim of Man-Devil is decidedly not biographical. As Callanan explains in the opening pages, such a book would be very difficult to write given the paucity of extant primary source material; there is very little extant correspondence, and very little seems to have been known about him. Instead Callanan offers a reading of Mandeville’s literary persona and philosophy primarily “through his writings,” including many of his now lesser-known works beginning with his early medical treatises, while also discussing the historical context in which he was writing and the influence of various writers and traditions on his philosophy.

Despite the explicitly non-biographical scope of the book, the biographical information it does contain is often illuminating. There is something inherently amusing about the fact that Mandeville was banished from Rotterdam because of his and his father’s role in the Costerman Riots and ended up living in an England ruled by the same man (William III) who had ruled the country he had fled, and it adds a layer irony to the fact that Mandeville wrote a pamphlet defending William III’s legacy a year after the latter’s death. Mandeville’s affection for city life and the fact that he essentially never left London once he arrived there suggests there may have been something of a personal bias behind his mockery of those who would extoll rustic simplicity. The fact that, in spite of his literary reputation, he was well-liked by those who actually knew him and appears to have been “a cheerful type” lends additional support to the final chapter’s argument against reading Mandeville as a pessimist or a misanthrope. But what Callanan mainly offers is what he claims at the outset he intends to offer: an understanding of the man’s mind through his writings.

A major point of emphasis in Man-Devil is how Mandeville frequently anticipated or pioneered ideas and concepts like division of labor, false consciousness and the paradox of thrift that would eventually become popularized through the work of later writers. He was controversial enough that eighteenth-century writers had to tread carefully when acknowledging his influence, but Hume was nonetheless willing to credit him with inventing “the science of man.” Modern economists like Keynes and Hayek recognized Mandeville’s importance to the history of economics, not as a contributor to economic theory but as an early advocate of thinking like an economist, of viewing society and ordinary behaviour through an economic lens. Callanan also suggests Paul Riceour could justifiably have included Mandeville alongside Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, the three thinkers Riceour classifies as “masters of suspicion,” because of the way Mandeville preceded the other three in cautioning us against trusting our own consciousness. But perhaps even more surprising is the nature of his arguments on the matter of gender. Callanan observes how impressive it is that in the first decade of the eighteenth century Mandeville was essentially making the case that “male narratives (many of which still abound today about men’s susceptibility to ‘bewitching’ women, the canniness of the fairer sex, how women are the ‘real bosses’ in relationships, and so on) are ultimately just so much propaganda functioning to mask women’s disempowered status in society.” Such uncannily prescient insights are indeed remarkable.

Yet, Callanan is appropriately wary of anachronistically reading too much into Mandeville’s statements. For instance, he is skeptical of the temptation to read The Virgin Unmask’d, for all its insights into gender relations, as a “proto-feminist” text. While it is certainly possible to interpret Mandeville as implicitly advocating for something like gender egalitarianism, it is not altogether clear that such was his intention. As is often the case in Mandeville’s writings, it is hard to tell if he had any particular end in view beyond that of “exposing societal hypocrisy.” Callanan similarly resists the temptation to read Mandeville’s ostensibly “conservative” attack on charity schools as an early iteration of the “family values” rhetoric of contemporary politics, resting though it does in part upon the premise that large institutions are ill-suited to the task of instilling young people with good values.

The amount of space in Man-Devil devoted to describing how Mandeville appropriated and built upon ideas from earlier and contemporaneous authors and traditions strengthens rather than undermines the case that he was an original and innovative thinker; Callanan calls him “an original pilferer.” The idea so central to Mandeville’s writings that the difference between humans and other animals has been greatly overestimated was, for example, an enlargement upon similar arguments made by Montaigne. The latter had argued that certain animal behaviours, like a fox testing ice before walking across a frozen pond, demonstrate that reason is not unique to humans. Mandeville’s frequent contention that ostensibly virtuous actions were not really virtuous had a surprising predecessor in arguments advanced within the Calvinist, Augustinian and Jansenist traditions that sought to show the hollowness of what looked like “ordinary secular moral behaviour.” Also from the theology of the day came the idea that the world was governed by laws beyond what the individual could discern. Madeville’s innovation upon this premise was essentially to secularize it and make these laws natural rather than divine.

Why exactly Mandeville wanted to develop these ideas and make the arguments he made is another question, and one on which Man-Devil has a lot to say. Mandeville’s ultimate aims are not usually obvious. At times one is tempted to take seriously his claim that he wrote “The Grumbling Hive” for no reason other than “the reader’s diversion.” However, it would be a mistake to view him as a non-ideological actor. As Callanan explains in the seventh chapter, “Politics and the Ideology of Virtue,” Mandeville was a committed opponent of religious intolerance, whether Catholic or Calvinist, and a champion of freedom of thought. He was also writing at a time when the narrative that England was a sick nation in steep moral decline was extremely pervasive, with “Societies for the Reformation of Manners” proliferating in the years between the publication of “The Grumbling Hive” and that of the 1714 edition of The Fable of the Bees. In fact, the reason why the third edition generated so much controversy was because it was published shortly after the South Sea Bubble financial scandal when alarm over the new financial status quo and the nation’s moral state was at its zenith. Mandeville was extremely critical of the theory of supposed moral decline and the corresponding calls for greater public virtue and frugality, in part because he feared the use that would be made of these narratives by the religiously intolerant.

But there were clearly non-ideological motives at work as well. A recurring argument in the book is that Mandeville seems to have actively sought to be provocative and probably enjoyed the hostile reaction to his work. After all, many aspiring literary men wanted the kind of reputation and audience that Joseph Adison and Richard Steel had, and it was by being provocative that Mandeville eventually achieved this, specifically with the 1723 edition of The Fable of the Bees. Moreover, once he had earned a reputation in this way, he largely maintained it by doubling down on his most controversial arguments. It is also important to note, Callanan reminds us, that to the very end Mandeville was a satirist, a calling which influenced both the style and content of his writings; it might be the reason he never wrote a comprehensive theory of humans (a work like Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1757) comes to mind). It is also a good reason not to take everything he says at face value. It is not always easy to determine which of Mandeville’s statements to take literally, and Callanan does not claim to have all the answers.

While Mandeville may have written with the goal of provoking a strong visceral reaction, and he often succeeded in doing so, not all of the criticism his ideas drew from his contemporaries was hysterical or unreasonable. The later chapters of Man-Devil explore some of the more justified critiques. William Law, for instance, took issue with Mandeville’s assumption that morality was “invented” rather than discovered and his lack of evidence for the supposed conspiracy on the part of legislators to use our susceptibility to pride and flattery to manipulate us into exhibiting prosocial behavior. Another astute critic of Mandeville’s ideas was Francis Hutcheson, who pointed out that the affection of parents toward offspring appears to be observable in plenty of non-human animals and so, contrary to Mandeville’s assumptions, such affection might also be a natural instinct in humans. But an even more fundamental issue Callanan raises is that Mandeville’s theories are premised upon our fundamental inability to understand ourselves and the origin of our motives for acting as we do, which necessarily undermines Mandeville’s apparent confidence in his own explanations for these motives.

In addition to its explication of Mandeville’s philosophy, the book also conveys a sense of his peculiar style of humor, among the most revealing illustrations of which is the story behind the two prefaces to The Virgin Unmask’d. According to the first preface, the publisher asked Mandeville to write a preface for the work prior to publication. Mandeville, strongly disliking prefaces, grew increasingly irate over the idea until the publisher suggested they calm down and have a drink. A few drinks later, in a generous mood, Mandeville went a step further and promised the publisher two prefaces. The second of these two prefaces explains his dislike of preface-writing; if authors were honest, he argues, they would be open about the fact that they wrote because they wanted fame and money.

Callanan’s description of this rather unique feature of The Virgin Unmask’d reinforces the impression one receives throughout the book that Mandeville did not take himself or his literary ambitions too seriously; the picture of Mandeville that reveals itself through Callanan’s exploration of his output is that of a congenital anti-alarmist. The Fable of the Bees is a thoroughly anti-alarmist text, defending a rapidly changing society and its new, rather complicated, economy against both simple-minded nostalgia and utopian reformism. It is possible that living in an age that has largely grown disillusioned with utopian thinking makes it easier for us now to appreciate Mandeville. Perhaps the most valuable piece of wisdom Mandeville has to offer for the present generation is that when the world seems like a strange and chaotic place the wisest course lies not in yearning for a past that never was or in striving for an idealized future that will never be, but in earnestly and candidly attempting to better understand how our complex society operates in all its beauty and ugliness, lest our ignorance lead us to misguided grumbling.

Robert Rich received his PhD in English from the University of Rochester where he currently teaches first-year writing. While completing his dissertation on historical economics and British realism, he also served as a project assistant with the William Blake Archive.

***