Mandeville and Shaftesbury: Some Facts and Problems

Abstract

Beginning with his doggerel verse in The Grumbling Hive (1705) and concluding vigorously with A Letter to Dion (1732), Bernard Mandeville elaborated his famous “selfish system” in publications which span a period of twenty-seven years. In 1714, a year after the death of the third earl of Shaftesbury and three years after the publication of the first edition of Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks, Mandeville amplified his Grumbling Hive with many pages of prose “remarks” which elaborated upon specific passages in the reprinted poem. This enlarged work was renamed The Fable of the Bees. It is almost impossible to believe that Mandeville by 1714 had not yet encountered, either directly or indirectly, the central tenets of Lord Shaftesbury’s ethical system, the so-called “social system.”¹ Nevertheless the simple fact remains that Mandeville’s first overt reference in print to Lord Shaftesbury’s works appeared in 1720 in the first edition of Free Thoughts on Religion, the Church, and National Happiness.² Here Mandeville cites Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks with obvious approval in three separate passages. Not until 1723, when he added “A Search into the Nature of Society” and other essays to his expanding Fable of the Bees, did Mandeville publicly oppose Shaftesbury’s social system.³