Bernard Mandeville

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Bernard Mandeville

Bernard Mandeville (born November 15, 1670 in Rotterdam , † January 21, 1733 in Hackney near London) was a Dutch doctor and social theorist who lived in England and published in English.

In his main work, the bee fable , he was one of the first to describe the economy as a circulatory system and put forward the provocative thesis that it is not virtue that is the actual source of the common good, but vice. Mandeville also spoke out in favor of legalized, state-controlled prostitution. Among other things, Friedrich Hayek was considered an important thought leader. His thesis that individual benefit does not have to be identical with global benefit became an important theorem of economics , which is also called the Mandeville Paradox after him .

Life

Mandeville was descended from a Walloon captain in the Duke of Alba’s army , who had married around 1574 in the north of the Netherlands and settled there. The family was of Huguenot origin. There were important doctors among Fernando's descendants. Bernard was baptized in the Gereformeerde Kerken in Nederland in Rotterdam. Mandeville studied at the University of Leiden from 1685 to 1689, first philosophy , then to 1691 medicine . At first he seems to have practiced as a doctor for nervous and gastric disorders in the Netherlands for a short time. In 1693 he moved to London, where he settled as a doctor and in 1699 married an Englishwoman, Ruth Laurence. They had a daughter and a son. He had good relations with the British ruling class; z. B. he was friends with the Lord Chancellor Thomas Parker, 1st Earl of Macclesfield , the father of George Parker .

The Fable of The Bees, 3rd edition 1724, title page

Fonts

Mandeville began a successful writing career in 1703. After English animal fable edits and Versgroteske he brought 1,705 anonymous satirical poem The disgruntled Beehive ( The Grumbling Hive: or, knaves Turn'd Honest ) as Sixpenny brochure out, which was so much in demand that in the same year a pirated edition appeared. Mandeville gradually added notes, essays and dialogues to the current version of the bee fable . The first expansion appeared (again anonymously) in 1714 under the title Die Bienenfabel, or Private Vices, public benefits ( The Fable of The Bees: or, Private Vices Publick Benefits ). Mandeville had the text supplemented and published in 1723. In 1729 a second part of the bees' fable also appeared , consisting of six dialogues. This also brought several editions and was translated into German in 1761. In 1732 a continuation of the second part, An Inquiry into the Origin of Honor and the Usefulness of Christianity in War, appeared .

Mandeville also published other works, including The Unmasked Virgin, or Female Dialogues between an Elderly Single Lady and Her niece (1709), on his medical specialty hypochondriac and hysterical ailments (1711), Free Thoughts on Religion, Church and National Happiness (1720 ), The Advocacy of Public Brothels (1724), Investigation of the Causes of the Numerous Executions in Tyburn , and Suggestions for the Treatment of Convicts (1725). Not only the bee fable, but also other of his writings were extremely successful and some of them were translated into other languages ​​during his lifetime.

The bee fable

The provocative ethical views that Mandeville formulated in the bee fable sparked a lively discussion among contemporaries, in which his views were almost entirely rejected. The central message of the work can be read from the last lines of the work:

"Virtue alone does not get you very far;

Who wants a golden time

Returning shouldn't forget:

Back then you had to eat acorns. "

The fact that personal virtue (frugality, peacefulness) are less conducive to the progress and prosperity of society than luxury, waste, war and exploitation aroused opposition. The Middlesex Supreme Court declared the bee fable to be suitable for overturning “all religion and civil rule”, while Mandeville protested in a “justification” (in the third edition of 1724). He met with opposition from the idealistic philosopher George Berkeley and the economists Francis Hutcheson and Adam Smith . Smith adopted a number of his examples.

Modest pamphlet for public cathouses

His Modest pamphlet for public brothels , published in 1726, advocated the establishment of public brothels and the medical control of prostitutes. In doing so, he named - in an unusually open manner for the 18th century - the clitoris as the pleasure-giving center of female desire. The text contains a sensitive and differentiated gender psychology for the time in view of the various Querelles des femmes . Jonathan Swift's satire A Modest Proposal , published a little later, probably alluded to the title, which had already become proverbial in 1729.

meaning

Mandeville offers a social psychology of the early bourgeois era, but is not considered a philosophical theorist and systematist. He himself called his bee fable a satire. “But his writings are more than satire. In Mandeville's work, satire and analysis of the mechanisms of bourgeois society of his time merge to form a grotesque unity: What if his cruelty should not be true is, in his eyes, naked, unalterable truth. The more analytically more precise his apology for early capitalism becomes, the more it comes close to black humor. ”(Euchner, p. 10.) His philosophical position is anthropological skepticism. "Mandeville stands in the tradition of French Epicurean-Pyrrhonic skepticism - his favorite writers include Montaigne , La Rochefoucauld and Pierre Bayle - of Calvinism and the English philosophy of the Enlightenment founded by Bacon , Hobbes and Locke ." (Euchner, p. 15.)

His astute and often witty analyzes of social behavior attempted to show which motives lie beneath the cultural trimmings of altruistic virtue: egoistic drives and affects. The progress of civilization and the economic potency of a nation are driven by selfishness and are related to a decline in morals. On this point Jean-Jacques Rousseau agrees with Mandeville . But "unlike Rousseau, as a true anti-Rousseau" (Euchner, p. 37), Mandeville opts for economic progress and accepts the vices of society with open eyes.

Mandeville's economic theses are likely to cause offense today. For him, the prosperity of a society rested on the cheap labor of the underprivileged. So it is true that “in a free people, where slavery is forbidden, the surest wealth consists of a large number of hard-working poor” (p. 319) tried to grasp theoretically. Karl Marx called him an "honest man and a bright head" and gave Mandeville positive credit for being infinitely bolder and more honest than the philistine apologists of bourgeois society .

Today's economic ideology also draws on ideas that Mandeville is likely to have been the first to express with such clarity:

“If the working population in one country works twelve hours a day and six days a week, while in another country they only work eight hours a day and no more than four days a week, the products of the latter must be and have more expensive thus a competitive disadvantage. A trading nation can only undercut the other if its food and all basic necessities ... are cheaper, or else its workers are more hardworking or work longer or (they) are content with a simpler way of life than their neighbors. "

- p. 344 f.

Friedrich Hayek, Nobel Prize Winner of the Austrian School , presented Mandeville in his work Law, Law and Freedom (1979) and a lecture at the British Academy as a master thinker in economics.

Text output

  • Bernard Mandeville: The Bee Fable or Private Vice, Public Benefits. Introduction Walter Euchner. 2nd edition Frankfurt 1980 (stw 300) ISBN 3-518-27900-9 The German edition follows the text of the third edition from 1724. All citations with page numbers come from this edition.
  • The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits. By Bernard Mandeville. With a Commentary Critical, Historical, and Explanatory by FB Kaye, 2 vol. Oxford 1924, 2nd edition 1957. The definitive critical edition.
  • Bernard de Mandeville: A Humble Pamphlet For Public Whorehouses Or An Attempt At Fornication As Is Now Practiced In The UK. Posted by a layperson. Translated from English, annotated and provided with an essay by Ursula Pia Jauch. Carl Hanser, Munich 2001. ISBN 3-446-19989-6

literature

  • Hubertus Busche: From the morality of limiting needs to morality of cultivating needs. Old ethics and new economics with Bernard Mandeville. In: Archive for Legal and Social Philosophy. 87, 2001 ISSN  0001-2343 pp. 338-362.
  • Dany-Robert Dufour: Usefulness of the villains . In: Le Monde diplomatique . December 7, 2017 p. 3 (presentation of his theory).
  • Walter Euchner : An experiment on Mandeville's bee fable. In: Egoism and the common good. Studies on the history of bourgeois philosophy. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1973, ISBN 3-518-00614-2 , pp. 74-131.
  • Philipp Farwick: Bernard Mandeville in his time. Classification of the history of ideas and effects of Mandeville in the lines of development of the bourgeois Enlightenment. Grin, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-640-30985-6 .
  • Iring Fetscher : Bernard de Mandeville and the breakthrough of economic realism. In: Rule and Emancipation. On the philosophy of the bourgeoisie. Piper, Munich 1976 ISBN 3-492-00446-6 , pp. 101-116.
  • Friedrich Hayek : Dr Bernard Mandeville. "The bee fable". A modern appreciation. Edited by Mark Perlman. Publishing House Economics and Finance, Düsseldorf 1990 (series: Die Handelsblatt-Bibliothek “Klassiker der Nationalökonomie”)
  • Robert Kurz : Black Book Capitalism. Eichborn, Frankfurt 1999, ISBN 3-8218-0491-2 , pp. 46-53.
  • Filadelfo Linares: Bernard Mandeville, thinker abroad. Olms, Hildesheim 1998, ISBN 3-487-10745-7 .
  • Thomas Rommel: The self-interest from Mandeville to Smith. Winter, Heidelberg 2006, ISBN 3-8253-5239-0 .
  • Gerold Blümle , Nils Goldschmidt : Praise to the vice. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . May 17, 2010 ( sueddeutsche.de ).

in Project Gutenberg

Web links

Wikisource: Bernard Mandeville  - Sources and full texts
Wikiquote: Bernard Mandeville  - Quotes
Commons : Bernard Mandeville  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Friedrich Hayek: Dr Bernard Mandeville, Lecture on a Master Mind . In: Proceedings of the British Academy . 1967, p. 125-141 .
  2. ↑ a b c d e A pamphlet ..., essay by Ursula Pia Jauch. Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich 2001. Timeline p. 166 ff.
  3. ↑ Christoph Helferich: History of Philosophy: From the Beginnings to the Present and Eastern Thinking . Springer-Verlag, 2016, ISBN 978-3-476-00760-5 , pp. 201 .
  4. ^ Bernard Mandeville, Die Bienenfabel, quoted from: C. Helferich, History of Philosophy, 4th Edition, JB Metzler
  5. ↑ a b A pamphlet ..., essay by Ursula Pia Jauch . Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich 2001.
  6. ↑ Edwin Cannan published a comparative edition of the first five editions of 'Wealth of Nations' in 1904 and pointed out in several places that Smith was apparently influenced by Mandeville.
  7. ↑ Capital. Volume 1, Berlin 1960, p. 646.
  8. ^ Klaus Thiele-Dohrmann : Mandeville: Praise of vice. In: The time . 25, June 12, 2014, p. 2.
personal data
SURNAME Mandeville, Bernard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mandeville, Bernard de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Dutch-English doctor and social theorist
DATE OF BIRTH November 15, 1670
PLACE OF BIRTH Rotterdam
DATE OF DEATH January 21, 1733
Place of death Hackney near London