Abstract
This paper argues that Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, Part II (1729), is the first work to bring together all the elements of conjectural history, a form that rose to prominence in the Enlightenment, between 1750 and 1800. Conjectural history builds on the natural law tradition of Hobbes and Locke, but it is non-contractual and considers a longer span of history. In both these respects, Pufendorf’s account of early society opens a way that is taken by later conjectural historians. Of these, Mandeville’s Fable, Part II, is the earliest to present a naturalistic, non-contractual narrative of the early stages of civil society. Although Vico’s New Science exhibits some of these features, it remains tied to a providential and cyclical view of history.
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Notes
- 1.
I am not aware of evidence that either Vico or Mandeville influenced the other’s thought or use of form.
- 2.
Istvan Hont traced the way that Pufendorf’s revisions of Hobbes’s state of nature – incorporating commerce in the earliest stage, and distinguishing between the founding of society and of the state – prepared the way for the stadial narratives of the Scottish Enlightenment (Hont 2005). I do not conceive of conjectural history as being limited to accounts that specify exactly four stages based on means of subsistence; this conception of the genre as “four-stage theory” owes much to Meek 1976. On the theological underpinnings of Pufendorf’s natural jurisprudence and its role in histories of early society in the Scottish Enlightenment, see Moore and Silverthorne 1983.
- 3.
In support of this picture of earliest man, Pufendorf cites Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, Bk. 5, and refers as well to the similar account of Diodorus Siculus, Bk. 1, ch. 5. Wiktor Stoczkowski provocatively argues that later conjectural, evolutionary, and anthropological accounts of the earliest human societies and their stages of development almost all conform to the paradigms established by traditional or common-sense anthropology, often traceable to ancient writers (Stoczkowski 2002).
- 4.
- 5.
I am thus in agreement with Mikko Tolonen, who considers Mandeville’s Part II as a conjectural history (Tolonen 2013: 77–99), and discusses Mandeville’s account of the unintended, non-contractual development of society through stages over a lengthy period of time. My emphasis here, however, is on Mandeville as the first thinker to put together these elements of the form we now recognize as conjectural history.
- 6.
Malcolm Jack draws attention to Mandeville’s emphasis on the extreme length of time required for the gradual processes of socialization of early mankind, as well as the relation of Mandeville’s account of early men to the descriptions of tribal people in European travel narratives of the preceding two centuries (Jack 1989: 53–62). Jack’s analysis of Mandeville is particularly valuable for placing the Fable, Part II in relation to a pair of later conjectural histories that see social development as a deeply ambiguous process of both progress and decline – Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality and Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society.
- 7.
Martin Otero Knott emphasizes Mandeville’s shift away from “theoretical stories” of social contracts to a “conjecturally speculative . . . history of society” in the Fable, Part II (Knott 2014: 40).
- 8.
J. A. W. Gunn argues that Mandeville does not deny the existence of providence as the ground for the “mysterious realm of origins” or the ultimate answer to the problem of good and evil in the world (Gunn 1975: 117). Even if granted, this is a very attenuated concept of providence, especially as compared with the prominence of the concept in thinkers such as Vico, or, among later conjectural historians, Kames and Herder. E. J. Hundert argues for the naturalistic character of Mandeville’s analysis (Hundert 1994: 84, 113).
- 9.
In this, his practice resembles that of Nietzsche, in the Genealogy of Morals, Essay 1 (1888), a later conjectural history.
- 10.
The early appearance in Vico’s account of the division between the strong and the weak parallels the originary status of this opposition in Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, Essay 1.
- 11.
The concept of the cyclopean family is based on the isolated, primitive, cave-dwelling single families of Cyclops, as depicted, for example in the Odyssey. The cyclopean family also figures as the first stage of human society in Henry Maine’s influential history of Roman legal institutions, Ancient Law (1861).
- 12.
Mark Lilla argues that from his earliest works through the final New Science, Vico is committed to a view of history in which providence exercises a directing hand, shaping human nature for beneficial results. On this account, the New Science falls short of providing a naturalistic account of the genesis and course of human societies (Lilla 1993). Leon Pompa characterizes one of Vico’s many cryptic statements about the world of gentile history as a “strange mixture of claims” which asserts that this historical world is created by man but also that it is the work of a superhuman mind that acts for human ends (Pompa 1990: 161). Karl Löwith argues that Vico “never intended to discard revelation” (Löwith 1949: 135), but for Löwith this retention of providence somehow balances perfectly with a history of merely human actors, so that Vico combines theology and philosophy of history in a way that is not matched by any modern historical thinker.
- 13.
James Thomson’s Liberty (1735–1736) provides another instance, nearly contemporaneous with Vico’s, of the idea that societies develop from primitive beginnings through stages to a possible state of luxury and decline, after which the cycle begins again in another country. See Liberty, Part II: Greece, ll. 3–85 and 391–420 (Thomson 1986). Mandeville’s narrative is notable for its avoidance of the Polybian cyclical or helical return from luxury or corruption to a newly primitive state.
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Palmeri, F. (2015). Bernard de Mandeville and the Shaping of Conjectural History. In: Balsemão Pires, E., Braga, J. (eds) Bernard de Mandeville's Tropology of Paradoxes. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 40. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19381-6_2
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