How a Book About Bees Scandalized Europe

On July 8, 1723, a book was put on trial. The Grand Jury of Middlesex County Court, in England, was presented with a work that corrupted public morals to such an extent that it might “debauch the nation.” Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees was said to recognize no evidence of God’s influence or providence in the world; it attacked all the decent institutions of society — politicians were derided, the clergy were slandered, and universities mocked; and, most offensive of all, it attempted to “run down religion and virtue as prejudicial to society, and detrimental to the state … and to recommend luxury, avarice, pride, and all kind of vices, as being necessary to public welfare.” The book claimed that vice ought to be pursued because the immoral activities of individuals can generate an overall economic benefit for society as a whole. Vice was not only necessary but desirable. Like Milton’s Lucifer, its author seemed to declare: “Evil, be thou my Good.”

The Fable that was published in 1723 comprised a poem, “The Grumbling Hive,” alongside a series of philosophical reflections on everything from sexual mores to the social function of fashion. It concluded with some brief essays on the nature of virtue, society, and charity. This wasn’t the first edition of the book. It had originally appeared nearly a decade earlier in 1714. In fact, its central claim, expressed poetically in an extended piece of doggerel verse, had first appeared in print as “The Grumbling Hive” as early as 1705. Bernard de Mandeville (he later dropped the “de”), a Dutch doctor who had migrated to England in the 1690s, had set out to establish both a medical practice and a literary reputation. While his medical practice had done reasonably well, his writings had initially failed to attract any attention at all. This time it was different. The grand jury declared that Mandeville’s work promoted a “general libertinism,” one that had “a direct tendency to propagate infidelity, and consequently to the corruption of all morals.” Thanks to the Middlesex County Court, Bernard Mandeville had arrived — nearly a quarter of a century after immigrating to Great Britain.

The central idea of The Fable of the Bees was that private indulgence in traditional vices — such as drunkenness and gluttony, the squandering of energy in leisure activities, the conspicuous consumption of luxury goods, and materialism in general — is a crucial part of any dynamic large-scale economy. Were one to eliminate these elements from an economy, that economy would stagnate, to the detriment of everyone. There was a “paradox” at the center of modern life, one that had to be acknowledged and tolerated. This paradox formed the subtitle of the Fable: Private Vices, Public Benefits.

The story of The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves Turn’d Honest, the poem that begins the Fable, is one of a prosperous beehive populated by rich but vice-riddled bees. Despite living lives of depraved indulgence, the bees find themselves in a state of peculiar dissatisfaction, perpetually “grumbling” about the behavior of those who seem to have achieved the greatest success. This envy begins to manifest in entirely hypocritical moral condemnation of one another, and soon cries of “Damn the Cheats,” “The Land must sink for all its Fraud,” and “Good Gods, had we but Honesty!” become a constant refrain in the hive. Eventually their god, Jove — more in irritation than beneficence — grants their wish and rids the beehive of all immoral behavior overnight. All the bees are now virtuous and good; the knaves have been turned honest.

The consequences are not quite what the bellowing moralists had anticipated, however. It turns out that the presence of the bees’ vices had been the very thing that made the hive flourish. In this reformed beehive everyone pays their debts, and if misfortune means that they are unable to do so, then the spirit of charity intervenes to wipe the debt clean. The problem is not just that certain dealings are now run honestly, however; it is that all the industries that are associated with the regulation and correction of moral wrongdoing are now redundant. Once the last wrongdoers have been taken care of, the business of crime and punishment is otiose, and all the honest trades contingently connected with the maintenance of prisons and prison services are decimated:

Justice hanged some, set others free;
And after gaol delivery,
Her presence being no more required,
With all her train and pomp retired.
First marched some smiths with locks and grates,
Fetters, and doors with iron plates;
Next gaolers, turnkeys, and assistants,
Before the goddess, at some distance.

It is a similar story for all the industries that are sustained by the bees’ vanity, by their love of social one-upmanship and demonstrations of wealth, culture, and power.

The reduction in conspicuous consumption extends down from the highest echelons of society to the newly emerging bourgeoisie. Now the latter’s taste for coffee, sugar, silk, and every other imported product is disdained. Instead, the hives learn to make do with the dull local produce, finding themselves perfectly content to shun the luxurious pleasures for which they had once lived. The very lifeblood of foreign trade has disappeared:

As pride and luxury decrease,
So by degrees they leave the seas,
Not merchants now, but companies,
Remove whole manufactories,
All arts and crafts neglected lie,
Content, the bane of industry.

The Grumbling Hive concludes with disaster for the beehive. Now that glorious military ventures are frowned upon and the bees’ standing army has been stood down, the hive begins to look vulnerable to its enemies. It comes under sustained attack, and in the ensuing wars is almost completely destroyed. In the end only a few bees are still alive: those that have been toughened by a new character that “counted ease itself a vice.” In the poem’s final couplet, we discover that the few poor remaining bees have had to regroup and find a new home, living now with only their sense of moral superiority to warm them: “They flew into a hollow tree, / Blessed with content and honesty.”

Mandeville’s poem, with its clever interplay between prosperity and vice, touched upon a particularly sensitive spot in the public consciousness of the time. At the beginning of the 18th century, England was undergoing cultural and political changes that might not seem entirely unfamiliar today. London could justifiably claim to be the financial center of the global economy, and the relatively new economic phenomenon of market speculation had led to an explosion of commercial activity. It also began the process of creating a new economic class. The generation of wealth was decreasingly tied to landownership, and therefore no longer decisively dominated by the aristocratic class. One could now make one’s fortune in the city, and with that possibility came another: that of a radical shift of political influence from the country landowner to moneyed men and city merchants.

The commercial class might have defended the new prosperity as something that could be channeled into improvements for human welfare and could even provide the means of eliminating the short-term increases in vice that may arise from this fast wealth. This more hopeful attitude claimed that modern commerce might be the source of the solution to its own problems.

The Fable addressed head-on this question of the relationship between economics and morality. But it gave an answer that no one wanted to hear. On the one hand, it agreed that increased commercial activity would bring about benefits for society. However, it would not — in fact, could not — do so by eliminating individual vice. According to this book, it was individual vice that generated the increased commercial activity in the first place, vice being an ineliminable part of what we have now come to think of as the whole modern capitalist project. It is in the nature of that same project to prey upon the frailties of human beings’ desires — and it is the indulgence and, indeed, the stimulation of those desires that generates increased economic activity. What is more, having sold people the indulgence of vice, one need not worry about the individual problems this causes, because one could simply sell yet more cures and treatments: medicines and health spas for our overindulgences, the latest fashions for our insecurities over social status. Mandeville laid bare the reality of modern economic life: that it functioned to perpetuate itself in endless cycles of stimulating our desires and soothing their consequences. One could not use increased prosperity as a means of eliminating vice, because it was vice that made the world go round.

Mandeville would ultimately escape any formal punishment, but the presentment to the Middlesex County Court initiated a barrage of outrage against both the Fable and Mandeville himself. Critics found various grounds for protest. On September 28, Robert Burrow, chaplain to the bishop of London, preached in a sermon to the Lord Mayor of London in the Guildhall Chapel against those “men, who strike at the foundations of virtue and morality; and who labour to sink the dignity of human nature extremely low.” William Law, the priest who would become known for his religious work “A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life” (1729) claimed in his “Remarks on the Fable of the Bees” that Mandeville would “dare … affirm in praise of immorality” and dismissed Mandeville for (among other things) his self-avowed “low” style:

These are the chief doctrines, which with more than fanatic zeal you recommend to your readers; and if lewd stories, profane observations, loose jests, and haughty assertions, might pass for arguments, few people would be able to dispute with you.

Mandeville, Law concluded, was an “advocate for moral vices” and wanted to give human beings the “privileges of brutality.” There is no doubt that some of the opposition concerned just how Mandeville wrote. Mandeville set out to offend, and it could be said that he made offence a skill. One can find on almost any page an outrageous claim uttered with casual simplicity, and a jocular matter-of-factness.

In 1724, the writer and dramatist John Dennis published Vice and Luxury Publick Mischiefs. Mandeville, Dennis claimed, “made an open attack on the public virtue and the public spirit of Great Britain.” Dennis put an interesting and overtly political slant on his critique. The Fable, and similar publications, put the hard-won British tradition of individual liberty from tyrannical monarchs at risk. Works of this kind should not be allowed to circulate, since “if we should ever have a prince, who should be weak enough to become an infidel, by the delusion of these free-thinking authors, the main obstacle to arbitrary power would be removed.” For Dennis, the very existence of Mandeville was proof of the degradation of British society caused by the unchecked publication of those “free-thinking” writings that advocated atheism and licentiousness. While there have in the past been authors whose positions perhaps opened the door for excusing occasional vice, he claimed, Mandeville was an author who openly and boldly advocated in vice’s favor; “to show the utmost profligacy of the times which we live in, vice and luxury have found a champion and defender, which they never did before.”

An Enquiry Whether a General Practice of Virtue Tends to the Wealth or Poverty, Benefit or Disadvantage of a People, published anonymously in 1725, marked out the Fable’s particular offense as its attack on the concept of virtue. The paradox of private vices being public benefits seems to imply that there are actions that can be morally wrong in a private context, which are nevertheless justifiable if we take the broader public context into account. This seemed to undermine the idea of inherently moral action, action that is right in every possible context. While numerous writers before Mandeville had argued that actions carried out in the name of virtue might in fact be covers for vice, Mandeville was now attacking the very idea of morality. More than this, he was claiming that any attempt to be virtuous could in fact be harmful to the public good, since “it is not only that most things are not virtue, which the world take for such, but the thing itself, we are told, is ridiculous in theory, and mischievous in practice.”

Mandeville of course denied that the Fable was written to “debauch the nation.” He declared that his motive for writing the Fable was solely that of “the reader’s diversion” — humorous entertainment for the type of gentleman who had sufficient time and means to reflect on its contents. Yet Mandeville knew that he was presenting to that gentleman a set of new and thoroughly modern questions: Was it possible to be morally good in a commercial capitalist society? Is the very idea of virtue out of place in the market? Isn’t greed just a straightforward good for the modern individual, who is now as much a consumer as they are a citizen? That modern individual has been the subject of attack ever since, from Anthony Trollope’s Melmotte in The Way We Live Now (“Gentlemen, it is your duty to make yourself rich!”) to Oliver Stone’s Gordon Gekko in Wall Street (“The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works”).

Mandeville’s critics were forthcoming as to what they supposed to be the motives behind his writing such a monstrous work. The implication that the Fable could have been written only as a justification for Mandeville’s own immoral lifestyle would be a constant refrain in the work’s reception. George Walker, a curate at Twickenham, in London, sermonized in 1728 that the only plausible motive for advocating such a philosophy was to support one’s own licentious disposition. Mandeville was one of those who “generally undervalue what is good, because they have followed the practice of the contrary.”

In 1732, an anonymous tract called The Character of the Times Delineated claimed that the kingdom’s tolerance of immorality was entirely unprecedented in the whole of history, even among non-Christian cultures:

We discover not only common vices and immoralities surpassing any age or nation that we read of, and the very heathens, who knew not God, but every species of vice improved to so monstrous a size, so daring and bare-faced, as publicly to triumph in our streets, and to bid defiance to the laws of both God and man.

The author leaves us in no doubt as to who he believed to be the high priest of this new religion of immorality. In the following couplet he compares Mandeville to the Antichrist. God’s son was made incarnate to rescue humanity from sin; now the devil had become incarnate to push us back into sin once more: “And, if GOD-MAN Vice to abolish came, / Who Vice Commends, MAN-DEVIL be his Name.”

As Mandeville’s reputation grew, more eminent literary figures took the opportunity to oppose him. The philosopher Francis Hutcheson published several works targeting Mandeville specifically. The Irish philosopher Bishop George Berkeley devoted a chapter of his dialogue Alciphron to opposing Mandeville. Another bishop, William Warburton, wrote in The Divine Legation of Moses (1737) that Mandeville’s proposal was an “execrable paradox.” With Warburton’s encouragement, Alexander Pope immortalized Mandeville (along with the radical dissenter Thomas Morgan) in the last edition of The Dunciad in 1742. Lauding their passing — Mandeville had died in 1733 — Pope wrote that thankfully “Morgan and Mandeville could prate no more.” In Henry Fielding’s Amelia, published in 1751, the Mandevillean references to self-interest and society — merely implicit previously in Tom Jones (1749) — were now stated outright. In Amelia Miss Matthews evinces skepticism at the very words “virtue” and “religion”: “I look upon the two words you mention, to serve as cloaks under which hypocrisy may be better enabled to cheat the world. I have been of that opinion ever since I read that charming fellow Mandevil.” Her interlocutor is scandalized, since in his view “Mandevil” has “represented human nature as a picture of deformity” — at which point Miss Matthews quickly retracts her admiration. By the middle of the 18th century, everyone knew Mandeville’s name as a byword for immorality. The Fable of the Bees was publicly burned — in reality, finally — by the Paris hangman when translated into French in 1740.

Mandeville’s public response to his many critics seems to have been decidedly facetious: He certainly wasn’t going to spoil the fun now with recantations or apologies for over-egged satire. His protestations that the Fable was in fact a work of the “strictest morality” were rarely believed, and understandably so. He added a “Vindication” of the Fable in the next edition, reprinting a letter to The London Journal where he expresses shock and confusion that anyone could have so misread him. His aim was never to recommend vice, merely to point out that it cannot be eradicated from the human species: “I am far from encouraging vice, and should think it an unspeakable felicity for a state, if the sin of uncleanness could be utterly banished from it; but I am afraid it is impossible.” Mandeville again states that the Fable “is a book of severe and exalted morality” — after all, it is his keen sense of the standards for moral probity that have revealed to him how rarely they are met in practice. Little can be said with absolute certainty about his sincere private views, as we have no personal writings wherein he confesses his true position. It is highly likely, however, that his reaction to the hatred and abuse directed at him would have been one of sheer delight. By the time of the outcry, he had toiled for two decades in literary obscurity, and if he was unable to achieve the fame of the contemporary greats to which he aspired, he was happy to settle for infamy. The Fable aimed to shock — in fact, one could say that Mandeville was a pioneer of the literary succès de scandale.

When asking what made Mandeville’s work so offensive, we should also ask why it nevertheless emerged as one of the most influential theories of human nature and society in the 18th century. The answer concerns the distinction between Mandeville’s method and his theory, especially in the later sections of the Fable that deal with the hypocrisy of modern mores. Mandeville approached his subject matter — the nature of human beings and their society — in a manner quite unlike anyone before him. He did not proceed from a stipulated definition of the human being, setting down the rules of society a priori, or by sermonizing upon God’s plan for humanity. Instead, Mandeville adopted the method of a social anthropologist. The introduction to the Fable begins with a complaint: “One of the greatest reasons why so few people understand themselves, is, that most writers are always teaching men what they should be, and hardly ever trouble their heads with telling them what they really are.”

We may naturally think that understanding ourselves involves firstly an examination of how human beings ought to behave, and what it is to be a good human being. But for Mandeville, our first question should not be such an ethically loaded one. We must observe the human being just as it is in its current form, in society as it has evolved and as it continues to evolve. Mandeville analyzed human beings’ behavior, noted the small details of their interactions, and characterized the complex psychological processes at play in daily social interaction. Far from eschewing the mundane, Mandeville turned precisely to the quotidian aspects of human existence as the place where the most profound parts of human nature are on display, if we only care to look.

Mandeville’s picture of humanity was formed firsthand in his practice as a physician: He saw what human beings were like literally under their skin. He worked with the poor and the rich alike. He observed the new phenomenon of commercial society, the capacity for individuals to spring from poverty to wealth and back down again. He saw the rules that people claimed to behave by, and then their actual behavior (behavior for which they occasionally had to visit Mandeville to seek medical treatment). He observed the role of women in society, the hazardous nature of their situation, and the precariousness of their social existence, as well as the arbitrary and punitive character of sexual mores. Remarkably, Mandeville saw these cruel realities as being reinforced by the emergence of romantic literature, with its conventional repackaging of feminine virtue sold to and eagerly consumed by the new fashionable reading public.

All of this — this gamut of humanity — Mandeville observed and satirized. He was the perfectly right man to say the perfectly improper thing. Mandeville’s opening complaint — that human beings struggle to accept what they really are — sets the agenda for everything that follows in the Fable. He thinks that, as a species, we have a natural and powerful tendency toward self-deception. We are not who we like to think we are. The aim of the Fable is to enable at least some human beings — the small portion of society that constituted his readership — to understand their own species a little better. Mandeville introduced the idea of false consciousness. His message was that the whole of modern society was premised on a confabulated self-image, one that it worked hard to perpetuate. Mandeville’s aim was to show society to itself.

This essay is adapted from Man-Devil: The Mind and Times of Bernard Mandeville, the Wickedest Man in Europe (Princeton University Press, 2025).