In the summer of 1723, a book and its author were hauled before the Grand Jury of Middlesex County, now part of London, on charges that the book would “debauch the nation.” The book was The Fable of the Bees: Or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, which consisted of a poem, “The Grumbling Hive: Or, Knaves Turn’d Honest,” and the poet’s commentaries on it. The author, Bernard Mandeville, was a physician who, after relocating from Holland to London, soon gave up the practice of medicine to write. Write what? Satire, mainly.

While the court did determine that the book encouraged a “general libertinism,” Mandeville escaped punishment, though the details of the case are sketchy. Judging from John J. Callanan’s account of Mandeville’s mischievous nature, the author must have enjoyed the controversy his work had caused, which seems to have brought him to the attention of all the great minds of his time. That many of them were scandalized surely made this enjoyment all the richer.

John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, “looked over” the Fable, saying that he had never imagined there had “appeared in the world such a book as the works of Machiavelli. But [Mandeville] goes far beyond it.” Others less stuffy than Wesley admitted, albeit grudgingly, that Mandeville was a perceptive rascal whose insights influenced their own thinking. A proper young lady in Henry Fielding’s Amelia (1751) has come to view “virtue” and “religion” with fresh eyes. Both high-sounding notions, she concludes, are little more than “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.” When The Fable of the Bees was translated into French in 1740, Parisians publicly burned it.

This would have delighted Mandeville, too, but by that time he had died. Born in Rotterdam in 1670, he was gone but far from forgotten, and this thorough study of his life and thought by a philosophy professor at King’s College London amply demonstrates the ways in which his influence is still felt. David Hume in his Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740) named Mandeville as one of the pioneers in the development of the “science of man.” Émilie du Châtelet, to whom Voltaire had recommended the book, said its author “could be called the Montaigne of the English if it were not for the fact that [Mandeville] has more method and healthier ideas about things.”

Not a great deal is known about Mandeville’s personal life, though Callanan makes a persuasive case for his having left Holland after his father, also a physician, had been banished. Mandeville, Sr., apparently, had incited mobs to riot in a 1693 tax revolt, during which a local tax collector was killed. Mandeville, Jr., was twenty-three at the time, and there are claims—never adequately substantiated—that he was involved as well, lampooning the bailiff overseeing the case as “a money-grubbing tyrant” and “spawn of hell” who had “raped the law.”

Our Mandeville was not kicked out of the country but left of his own accord. There is also reason to believe that the Mandevilles were not acting solely out of concern for other taxpayers or the public purse. They might simply have been trying to replace one bailiff with another, “from whom they might reap political and financial advantages,” Callanan writes, adding—with a sly smile—that it remains “unclear in this tale as to who is motivated by public virtue and who by private interest.”

So what, three decades later, was all the fuss about? “The Grumbling Hive: Or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” imagines a thriving, prosperous beehive, populated by wildly dissipated bees. “Despite living lives of depraved indulgence,” as Callanan puts it, “the bees find themselves in a state of peculiar dissatisfaction, perpetually ‘grumbling’ about the behaviour of those who seem to have achieved the greatest success. This envy begins to manifest in entirely hypocritical moral condemnation of one another,” leading to cries to their god Jove for “Honesty!”

Jove, “more in irritation than beneficence,” rids the hive “of all immoral behaviour overnight,” Callanan writes. “All the bees are now virtuous and good—the knaves have been turned honest.” And the result? Productivity ends. The hive collapses. It is the vices, it turns out, that have kept the hive—and its economy—humming. Because no one was cheating someone else (to offer but one example), the law courts shut down:

The Bar was silent from that Day;
For now the willing Debtors pay.

When there are no crooks, there’s no need for police or prisons, the law enforcement economy collapses, and on and on and on. And thus the subtitle, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, explains itself. In market economies, the stimulation of desires—even those we don’t like to talk about—generally benefit the whole.

Anyone who was not already sufficiently horrified should have been made to reread “Remark H” in the Fable’s commentary section. While insisting that he was not promoting wickedness, as his critics alleged, Mandeville wrote that “far from encouraging Vice,” he thought it would be “an unspeakable Felicity to a State, if the Sin of Uncleanness cou’d be utterly Banish’d from it; but I am afraid it is impossible.” For that reason, he advocated legalizing “public stews,” an eighteenth-century term for brothels.

“If Courtezans and Strumpets were to be prosecuted with as much Rigour as some silly People would have it,” Mandeville wrote, no locks “would be sufficient to preserve the Honour of our Wives and Daughters. . . . some Men would grow outrageous, and Ravishing would become a common Crime. Where six or seven Thousand Sailors arrive at once, as it often happens at Amsterdam, that have seen none but their own Sex for many Months together, how is it to be suppos’d that honest Women should walk the Streets unmolested, if there were no Harlots to be had at reasonable Prices? For which Reason the Wise Rulers of that well-ordered City always tolerate an uncertain number of Houses in which Women are hired as publickly as Horses at a Livery-Stable.”

Mandeville, who courted controversy, elaborated on this argument the year after The Fable of the Bees appeared in “A Modest Defence of Publick Stews, or an Essay Upon Whoring as It Is Now Practis’d in These Kingdoms.” Published five years before Jonathan Swift’s more famous “Modest Proposal,” this essay stirred up even more trouble, again to its author’s evident amusement. So did his attack on “charity schools,” which appeared in the 1724 edition of the Fable.

Mandeville believed—or claimed to believe—that these schools, run by well-meaning private organizations for the education of the poor, did a disservice to society. They were raising vast hordes of what Callanan calls “overeducated ne’er do wells,” and any healthy society “requires a poor underclass if it is to prosper.” It is necessary, Mandeville argued, that “great numbers should be ignorant as well as poor. Knowledge both enlarges and multiplies our desires, and the fewer things a man wishes for, the more easily his necessities may be supplied.” (It is only the desires of the well-to-do for luxuries, he seemed to imply, that benefit society as whole.)

Callanan, as Mandeville’s take on charity schools suggests, might well be seeing his subject as a more systematic thinker than is warranted. Even if that is the case, it is precisely by doing so that he enables his readers to appreciate his subject’s own influences and the influence he has had on us. In exploring his understanding of the societal function of envy, for example, Callanan calls Mandeville a “proto-anthropologist.” This echo of Hume is apt. While Mandeville cannot be called an economist or even a proto-economist, his impact on subsequent economic thought is indisputably considerable. Published during a period of unprecedented commercial expansion, The Fable of the Bees would become “an important text in future analyses of free-market capitalism,” Callanan writes. Mandeville has emerged as “one of the most influential thinkers of the eighteenth century. Within a few years, his infamy had spread not just in England but throughout France and Germany, and later America also,” his works “cited appreciatively by figures as diverse as Marx, Darwin, Hayek and Keynes.” (Alexander Hamilton was influenced, too, apparently, having read Swift on the consequences of excessive taxes. Swift, of course, had been influenced in this matter by Mandeville.)

Hume, Adam Smith, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau “disavowed Mandeville, while in the same breath they took up his ideas and integrated them into their own more well-known works.” He understood, before all these others, the “division of labour,” the phenomenon of “spontaneous order,” and Smith’s “invisible hand.” Mandeville, Callanan writes, even “anticipated Nietzsche by about a century and a half” in his insight into how we develop entire philosophical systems whose function is to convince ourselves that our disadvantages are in fact advantages. This is what Nietzsche would call a “slave morality” and seems later to have been developed by Engels and his successors into the idea of “false consciousness.”

All this might suggest that Mandeville, with his seemingly Hobbesian view of human nature, was a morose character—except that he was so obviously amused by mankind’s foibles and their function. Callanan calls him a “bold, playful and thoroughly original thinker,” which seems at this distance undeniable. From what little information we have about his personal life, Mandeville, given that playfulness, was also great company. Benjamin Franklin, a bit of a scamp himself, met him at the Horn in the Hoop, an ale house on Fleet Street, and called him “a most facetious, entertaining companion.” No doubt he was.