Abstract
Luxury entails a public differentiating use of objects and commodities, which is grounded on the overlapping of the spending with commodities and the ostentation of perceptible signs stimulating social imitation. In the eighteenth century, the debates on luxury emphasized the importance of the scrutiny of the power of imagination as intimately related to the contagious and mimetic character of the use of luxury objects. Thus, “luxury” represents a conceptual and, more generally, a semantic momentum in the evolution of the description of the society grounded on the influence of imitation. The several textual testimonies of the luxury debates in the eighteenth century, including Bernard de Mandeville’s contribution, attest the epistemological perplexity regarding the status of the psychic side of the definition of commodities, or economic goods, as utilities responding to specific human needs: the escalade of the emulation in the acquisition of luxury objects seems to deny any relevant connection of luxury to basic needs. This justifies the reference to imagination as the psychic source of the needs connected to luxury consumption and the absence of a direct correspondence between luxury goods and needs. B. Mandeville’s views on the theme of luxury and overconsumption in his Fable of the Bees and other writings are a privileged starting point for the explanation of these aspects of the evolution of the modern commercial society.
This text is a contribution to the discussion of the theme of luxury as an aspect of the evolution of the modern society and modern semantics. It develops perspectives on the semantic of luxury from B. Mandeville’s theoretical positions regarding the subject. The paper addresses again some problems already scrutinized by the authors that have studied the theme of luxury from T. Veblen (The Theory of the Leisure Class, 1899), Guglielmo Ferrero (The Evolution of Luxury, 1901) and W. Sombart (Luxus und Kapitalismus, 1913) to J. Sekora (Luxury: the concept in Western Thought, 1977) and C. Berry (The Idea of Luxury, 1994).
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- 1.
- 2.
Read a description of the popular literature on luxury published in magazines and newspapers along eighteenth Century, in Britain in D. Zylberberg work (Zylberberg 2008).
- 3.
Hundert (1994: 28–40). In many cases, the imaginary character of the needs associated to luxury gives the subject of the moral discussions on the utility or social convenience of the consumption of some goods. A positive evaluation of the economic use of imagination is many times accompanied by a positive appreciation of luxury. The degree of moralization of the discussions on luxury changes also with the value given to the imagination in the formation of the human needs. See also the work of M. Hilton for an historical account of the demoralisation/moralisation of the discussions on luxury: (Hilton 2004).
- 4.
A discussion on William Temple’s evaluation of the Dutch model of consumption and B. Mandeville’s reaction is in the work of A. Bick (2008).
- 5.
The discussions on luxury in France changed substantially with the Revolution. See the work of J. Shovlin (2000) about this evolution.
- 6.
The hesitation concerning the real contribution of luxury to the progress of Mankind is remarkable also in Turgot’s “Sketches of a Universal History”. Le luxe outré, où la vanité fait accumuler les ornements, parce qu’elle les considère moins comme ornements que comme signes d’opulence. Étouffe le goût. On ne cherche plus le plaisir que font les choses aux sens et à l’esprit, on ne rentre plus en soi-même: on n’écoute plus que la mode. (…) Arts, vertus, tout est infecté de cette erreur; de là, les fausses vertus de beaucoup de philosophes (Turgot 1844: 657).
- 7.
In Erasmus Jones’s Luxury, Pride and Vanity, the Bane of the British Nation (1736, with a second edition in 1750), a libel against the “pleasures and novelties of the Times”, the contagion of luxury across the ranks, due to imitation, and its complement in the theatrical character of the social habits associated to waste, is a repeated censure.
- 8.
Motivated by B. Mandeville’s distinction between a “malicious” and a “fashionable hypocrisy” in the An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, the social reflective structure in the self-concealment of hypocrisy was recently reassessed by David Runcinam in line with his own distinction of a first- and second-order hypocrisy (Runcinam 2008: 45–73). Both distinctions seem able to identify levels of dissimulation and/or dissimulation awareness of the agents. However, the difference of first- and second-order hypocrisy depends on the type of social interaction, on the intervention of social imitation to coordinate the actions of the agents and on the structure of the society. A serious discussion of the nature of social causation can contribute to the understanding of the formation of the “person” as a social agent and the relative extent of a second-order hypocrisy. From the point of view of the formation of society as an autonomous cycle of communications the notion of hypocrisy is only provisional.
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About the meaning of shame read the “Remark C” in volume I of The Fable of the Bees (Mandeville 1924 I: 87): First, to define the Passion of Shame, I think it may be call’d a sorrowful Reflexion on our own Unworthiness, proceeding from an Apprehension that others either do, or might, if they knew all, deservedly despise us.
- 10.
Christianity can be useful in war because it combines the incitement to virtue with the practice of honour. The religious enthusiasm is an additional ingredient that contributes to strengthen the belief on the courage and fortitude of the Christian soldiers in war (Mandeville 1732: 160–161; 164).
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I’ll not depict here the complete constellation of B. Mandeville’s political background and his own position regarding the social and moral discussions and the projects of moral reformation of manners in England, in the epoch. On this particular subject see the work of M. M. Goldsmith (1976). I am only concerned with the framework of Mandeville’s critique of the correspondence or continuity of the private and the public aspects of agency in the tradition of Shaftesbury’s “civic morality”.
- 12.
The combination of the growth of global trade, the constitution of a global web of tastes and products of manufactures and the fascination with the exotic characterises a culture of luxury in the Eighteenth-Century, which transformed the pre-modern categorisation of luxury and consumption typical of the “sumptuary laws” (Berg 2004; Eaton 2006; McCabe 2008).
- 13.
On the semantic relations of taste, beauty, civility and commercial society in Eighteenth-Century Britain, see the work of Robert W. Jones (1995).
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In many points of his remarks and letters J. Dennis takes luxury as equivalent to a vice. At the end of “Public Mischiefs” he explicitly declares that private vices are all included in luxury (Dennis 1997: 172) reducing the whole to a part. Ignoring the singularity of the social causality and establishing a continuous line from the individual actions and purposes to its social effects in interaction, J. Dennis says that the subtitle of the Fable is a contradiction (Idem: 165) and contrary to the revealed as well against the natural religion. The critique mentions various examples from the Ancient Testament and Ancient History to prove that luxury, private and public, is the opposite of virtue and that it can never be for the public benefit (Idem: 168–169). Notwithstanding the ingenuity of the arguments, J. Dennis’s text An Essay upon publick Spirit, London, 1711, epitomizes the general design of the moral and religious vision of society and “manners” that identifies in the growth of luxury a symptom of decadence and a consequence of the adoption of a foreign way of living.
- 15.
About this aspect, see also the thesis of Thomas A. Horne (1978: 51–75).
- 16.
It is probable that B. Mandeville’s medical formation contributed to his new approach to social causality and to the use of the terminology of the “emergent properties”. One can find analogies with the model of chemical emergence in biological processes in many passages of his work. This means that he was attentive to the difference of chemical and mechanical causality in the physiological domain. The differences in the two models of causality entail the rejection of an additive representation of the cause -> effect sequence. In the physiological causal sequences, given the conditions the effects produced are never a simple prolongation of the same causes. The discussion of the appropriate model for the description of digestion engaged the attention of the young B. Mandeville. Apparently, he conceived literary imitation as an analogous of digestion, continuing a locus communis of the classics. But the analogy may have unexpected consequences if one shifts the concept of imitation from the literary field to the social. For a detailed discussion of these topics, read A. P. McKee’s Ph. D. Dissertation (McKee 1991).
- 17.
See The Fable of the Bees, I “Remark L”, p. 111.
- 18.
At the end of “Remark L”, B. Mandeville summarized his own ideas regarding the beneficial contribution of luxury to a Nation’s progress. Idem, op. cit., “Remark L”, p. 113: (…) with a wise Administration all People may swim in as much foreign Luxury as their product can purchase, without being empoverish’d by it (…) a wealthy Nation may live in all the ease and plenty imaginable and in many parts of it, shew as much pomp and delicacy, as human wit can invent, and at the same time be formidable to their neighbours.
- 19.
This means that the psychic and the social dimensions of action are not connected in a mechanical way or according to an additive principle. (Cf. Jones 2011).
- 20.
In A Letter to Dion B. Mandeville confirmed the positive contribution of luxury to the progress: I own, Sir, it is my opinion, and I have endeavour to prove, that Luxury, tho’ depending upon the vices of Man, is absolutely necessary to render a great Nation formidable, opulent and polite at the same time (Mandeville 1997: 585).
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Balsemão Pires, E. (2015). Mandeville and the Eighteenth-Century Discussions About Luxury. 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_3
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