James Boswell relates a brief exchange in which Samuel Johnson, defending luxury according to its stimulative effect on the poor, is accused of endorsing “Mandeville’s doctrine” of “private vices publick benefits.” Johnson confesses that he read Mandeville 50 years prior: “he did not puzzle me; he opened my views into real life very much.” Ultimately, Johnson rejects Mandeville’s notions: “Without truth there must be a dissolution of society … I remember this remark of Sir Thomas Brown’s, ‘Do the devils lie? No; for then Hell could not subsist.’”

This exchange suggests, first, that Mandeville’s name was closely associated with a notorious view of the relationship between virtue and vice and the role played by each in a thriving society; second, that Mandeville’s name and reputation were sufficiently well-established to be commonplace still, a half-century after the so-called “Battles of the Bees” instigated by the 1723 edition of The Fable of the Bees, and four decades after his 1733 death. This contemporary fame moves interpreters to consider him among those lonely specters of intellectual history: the “since-forgotten” figure in the mold of a Gassendi, a Bolingbroke, or a Pierre Bayle, the French philosopher who may have taught Mandeville in Rotterdam. It is unclear how much longer Mandeville can remain a merely minor figure in the history of Western thought. John Callanan’s new monograph, Man-Devil: The Mind and Time of Bernard Mandeville, the Wickedest Man in Europe, joins a swelling body of scholarship that includes recent books by, among others, Andrea Branchi (Pride, Manners, and Morals, Brill, 2021), Robin Douglass (Mandeville’s Fable, 2023, also from Princeton University Press), and Mikko Tolonen (Mandeville and Hume, Voltaire Foundation, 2013)—alongside Tolonen’s 2024 entry for Mandeville in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Callanan’s book is, as far as I know, the most comprehensive treatment of Mandeville’s writing in English. Its ten chapters examine the familiar but important early work—the original 1705 poem “The Grumbling Hive” and the expanded first volume of The Fable of the Bees—and the remarkable mature work of the second volume of The Fable of the Bees (1729) and its sequel, the Enquiry into the Origin of Honour (1732). They also offer treatments of less well-known elements of Mandeville’s thought: a chapter on 1709’s The Virgin Unmask’d and Mandeville’s other writing on women (Chapter 4), discussions of Mandeville’s limited political dalliances (Chapter 7), and an extended examination of the Treatise of the Hypochondriack (1711/1730) and the medicological elements of Mandeville’s thought (Chapters 2–3). Mandeville’s medical background and its influence on his social thought have become a topic of scholarly interest, but Callanan threads together Mandeville’s history as a physician, his published work on medical topics, and his overall theory of human nature in ways that illustrate, in compelling fashion, the depth and profundity of Mandeville’s insights.

Callanan’s approach here is to synthesize the various Mandevilles—satirist, doctor, late-blooming philosopher—and the unusual and often inscrutable authorial guises he assumed—ironist, partisan, skeptic. These many Mandevilles, “for all the informality of their presentation,” nonetheless “bear a remarkable unity” (128). There are dangers here. Callanan sometimes pushes beyond what the evidence allows, often in an effort to fill out our overall picture of his subject. The fact is that we know surprisingly little of Mandeville the man, due in no small part to his own caginess regarding personal history. We simply cannot know, for example, that the Treatise was “the work that meant most to [him] personally” (46), or that “he would have had no interest in country retreats” and “lived for city life” (262). These flourishes, considered alongside the decision to assemble the book chronologically upon the various phases of Mandeville’s career (to say nothing of the book’s striking title and cover sleeve), suggest a generalist audience. One regards likewise Callanan’s light engagement with the secondary literature on Mandeville and the tendency, at times, to provide blow-by-blow accounts of the lesser-known primary sources.

Nevertheless, political theorists and specialists in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thought will profit considerably from attending closely to the argument of Man-Devil. Throughout Mandeville’s long career, Callanan argues, there rests an understanding of human nature, a “picture of humanity” developed “first-hand in his practice as a physician” (21). This Mandeville is the well-trained and well-practiced doctor whose examinations of human nature work, as it were, from the inside out—the subtle and skeptical observer who attempted, in his own words, to “anatomiz[e] the invisible part of man” (Fable, Remark O). The key insight gleaned from this approach—the insight to which “everything in Mandeville’s thought can be traced back”—is the notion that “human beings are merely another species of animal” (29). This principle provided him a bold intellectual path through his early experiences with a medical field shot through with Cartesian dualism (Ch. 1), an early eighteenth-century moral and social culture that held that morality must derive from some special quality of human cognition—whether reason or a moral “sense”—and his late interest in the possibility of morality and law developing from unplanned and irrational human behavior.

This notion propels Mandeville to ideas that—like those of Montaigne and Hume—retain even today their capacity to confuse and incite. From the Treatise—a medical dialogue that Mandeville revised and enlarged over the course of two decades—Callanan convincingly teases out the idea that, “in Mandeville’s view, there is no distinct thinking soul,” no substance “to which the word ‘self’ applies.” What we know as the “self” is an adaptation, something “constructed in the course of an animal’s life, through physical and societal conditions, and through education and enculturation,” something “the human animal needs in order to manage its desires in the complex interactions of social relations” (69). That we experience “the self”—indeed, that we cannot make sense of our desires and obligations without reference to a “self”—is on this view evidence of a kind of deception, one we play on ourselves, what Callanan describes as a “coping mechanism” that functions as a kind of nexus of social interactions. The self refers to the site where the body’s desires identify and engage those conduits of human behavior—moral and social norms and conventions—that are most advantageous to it.

This places Mandeville in interesting company; he appears at times as an early theorist of what would come to be called the subconscious, and Callanan offers a suggestive discussion of the affinities between Mandeville and figures like Sigmund Freud in Chapter 10. It also makes him a startlingly original social theorist, particularly after he begins to think about how self-deception is converted, through his late idea of “self-liking,” into a method of deceiving others and thereby adapting to social setting. In the book’s best chapter (9), Callanan pieces together Mandeville’s account of how the mind and its social setting evolve slowly as a system of mutual striving and accommodation. It isn’t that vice is merely economically beneficial, for Mandeville; it’s that self- and other-deception are the means best adapted to our very organism. To bastardize Johnson: “Do the devils lie? Yes; otherwise society could not subsist.”