The Cant of Social Compromise: Some Observations on Mandeville’s Satire

Abstract

It is my belief that we must ultimately read Mandeville as a comic satirist and that we shall never fully understand him through an ossified history-of-ideas approach which in cataloging likenesses loses Mandeville’s devastating sardonic tone. The current trend of dealing with Mandeville as first and last a satirist should do much to restore to him his historical identity; for if, as Edward Rosenheim insists, satire attacks “discernible, historically authentic particulars” and if the critic has an obligation to identify these particulars we shall be forced to relate Mandeville’s satire to its historical context.¹ If we can show, furthermore, how The Fable of the Bees and An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour satirize certain ambiguities in Mandeville’s world that have not diminished in time and that are still very much a part of our contemporary experience, these works may still be found to be very pertinent indeed. In this essay I shall focus on what one recent critic has aptly termed the “sense of the pressure of the social scene” and try to show through the study of several words and phrases occurring in Mandeville’s works how this “pressure of the social scene” results in some of Mandeville’s most effective satire.²

Article Note

Let any Man observe the Equipages in this Town; he shall find the greater Number of those who make a Figure, to be a Species of Men quite different from any that were ever known before the Revolution; consisting either of Generals and Colonels, or of such whose whole Fortunes lie in Funds and Stocks: So that Power, which, according to the old Maxim, was used to follow Land, is now gone over to Money….

Jonathan Swift, The Examiner, No. 13 (Nov. 2, 1710)