Robin Douglass’s erudite and intellectually rigorous Mandeville’s Fable takes up an interpretive challenge that has long bedevilled both casual readers and dedicated scholars of eighteenth-century social and political thinker Bernard Mandeville. What would it mean to take Mandeville’s work—known for its biting wit and satirical tone—seriously as a work of philosophy? And more to the point, is it possible to read Mandeville as a philosopher without filing down the sharp critical edges that are the hallmark of his thinking and writing? In Mandeville’s Fable, one of still only a few scholarly monographs dedicated to comprehensive study of Mandeville’s oeuvre as meaningful contribution to social theory, Douglass ably meets this challenge. He argues that Mandeville developed a serious theory of pride-centered sociability, a theory that derived its social force from its satirical mode of delivery. Douglass’s readers thus emerge with an aptly complex portrait of Mandeville as a highly original thinker, one who anticipated but perhaps was never fully eclipsed by the theorists of sociability who came after him.
From the start, Douglass clearly identifies his purpose: to do for Mandeville’s work—especially The Fable of the Bees—“what countless scholars have done for canonical texts in the history of moral and political thought; that is, to analyse it philosophically … by attempting to make sense of and evaluate Mandeville’s ideas and arguments on their own terms” (3). This methodological statement tells us something about how scholarship in political theory and intellectual history has traditionally situated Mandeville: either as an early theorist of commercial society or even capitalism, who famously argued for a link between “private vices” and “public benefits” like national prosperity; or as a social theorist who centered the sentiments as robust bases of sociability. In both of these lines of interpretation, Mandeville is usually identified as an important forerunner of later (and it is frequently implied, more sophisticated) thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, or Adam Smith, who investigate the relationship among moral sentiments, commerce, and sociability. Differently, and without sacrificing detailed attention to how Mandeville’s work was received both by his rough contemporaries and by later readers, Douglass asks the reader to recognize Mandeville’s theory of sociability as worthy of attention in its own right.
The major argument of Mandeville’s Fable is therefore “a sympathetic and qualified defence of Mandeville’s pride-centred theory of sociability” (3). Douglass reconstructs Mandeville’s account of why and how we human beings live together; from whence the norms and institutions that shape our interactions come; and how these are sustained over time. For Mandeville, Douglass establishes, while pride cannot explain everything we do in all places and times, our tendency to overvalue ourselves and to seek esteem from others can explain quite a lot about how we behave in society (56). Pride should, therefore, be taken seriously as the dominant, but not the only, passion that shapes the social fabric.
In part I of Mandeville’s Fable, Douglass pieces together and critically evaluates Mandeville’s account of human nature, considering both whether Mandeville is right to center pride as a key social passion and what the moral-psychological implications of accepting its centrality might be. If Douglass’s Mandeville is right, we may in the end “have pride-based reasons for deceiving ourselves about the prominence of pride,” demonstrating that acknowledging our overweening desire for esteem may be a hard bullet for Mandeville’s readers to bite (55). This layered account of pride constitutes much of the argument of chapter 2, an exceptionally good treatment of the reflexive character of Mandeville’s social criticism, in which Douglass shows how Mandeville suggests that many of our social habits and practices originate in a desire to conceal our own prideful motivations for action from both ourselves and others—but only because our inescapable pride tells us that we should conceal that very quality.
In part II, Douglass digs into Mandevillean historical narratives of the origin of society and some of the practices and values that hold it together (e.g., manners, honor). Whilst acknowledging that Mandeville’s historical narratives do not, in hindsight, seem terribly plausible relative to the more enduring insights of his social psychology, Douglass deems them worthy of study for two reasons—one interpretive and one methodological. First, these narrative examples reiterate how doggedly Mandeville centered pride as a psychological throughline that might explain the developmental trajectory of many habits and norms that others take to be natural or inborn. Second, they point to Mandeville’s “more historically and sociologically sensitive approach to theorising politics” relative to many of his early modern intellectual peers, a perspective that Douglass thinks political theorists would do well to appreciate and emulate in our work today (228).
Mandeville’s Fable deserves attention from a broad range of readers: Mandeville scholars and enthusiasts; readers of eighteenth-century political thought and political economy; and social psychologists who wish to explore an early modern rendering of human passions that frequently seems quite fresh to contemporary eyes. Undoubtedly, Douglass’s book will leave an immediate impression on these readers first and foremost for its author’s remarkably painstaking scholarship. Douglass carefully weaves together a cohesive argument for the centrality of pride from Mandeville’s entire corpus, reading him against the backdrop of many of his influences and contemporaries. He also leaves no stone unturned in the relevant secondary literature, situating his own argument in fruitful dialogue with those of other scholars who have attempted to make sense of a thinker who left us with a sometimes vexing but always thought-provoking set of arguments and insights about human sociality to work through.
For this reader, however, the aspect of Mandeville’s Fable that has lingered longest is Douglass’s deft consideration of the genre and tone of Mandeville’s writing. Taking the firm position that Mandeville had both philosophical and satirical aims that frequently worked in tandem, Douglass offers an implicit argument for the value of satire as a mode of social and political criticism (13). He notes that Mandeville understood all too well how difficult it might be for readers to accept how central pride—a tendency to overvalue ourselves—is to our plans and relationships; indeed, one of Mandeville’s key insights is that we feel badly enough about pride’s dominance to try to conceal it from even ourselves as well as others (229). As Douglass shows, it is not really the philosophical rigor of Mandeville’s account of pride that made—and continues to make—his readers squirm. Rather, the naturalism and humor he deploys in the service of making this point has a Janus-faced quality. That is, it good-naturedly helps readers adjust our range of vision to better see the portrait of our character and society that he presents, only to leave us unsettled by its dark contours. This leaves the reader with hard questions: Are we the creatures of pride Mandeville thinks we are? Can pride generate social goods that are desirable and salutary? And if so, why does this revelation persist in making Mandeville’s readers uncomfortable and a bit ashamed? Simultaneously light-hearted and eviscerating, Mandeville’s satire gives his philosophical points about pride and its limits and possibilities their cutting edge, as Douglass shows convincingly in his persuasive reading of this difficult thinker.
