The organisation of society. Mandeville, his bees and the futile catalogue of virtues

“Never had bees a more excellent government, / nor were bees ever more restless and discontented.” Bernard de Mandeville had been in London for a dozen years when he published the short poem The Grumbling Hive. Around him he saw a prosperous and flourishing society, perhaps the most prosperous and flourishing ever seen.

In 1652, an Armenian from Smyrna, Pasqua Rosée, set up a sort of hut where coffee was served for the first time: the ‘wine of the Turks’, brought from dervish ceremonies and the shops of Istanbul, arrived in the courtyard of an Anglican church. A kiosk is a place of passage, quick sales and few seats. However, Rosée was so successful that he soon moved into a building with four walls. Over the next forty years, despite doctors fuelling fears that the new drink caused tremors in the limbs, heart problems and even impotence, some two thousand coffee houses opened across the city: one for every three hundred inhabitants. Around the same time, a juniper-flavoured grain spirit was imported from the Netherlands. During the Thirty Years’ War, English soldiers in Flanders had seen their comrades knocking it back before heading into battle. “The soul of the fighter in this war is alcohol. The primary driving force is alcohol. That is why the soldiers, in their infinite wisdom, call it ‘petrol’,” Emilio Lussu would write, several wars later.

Gin – the drink the English would go mad for and whose consumption they would seek to curb, first through prohibition and then through anti-prohibitionism – is not the only Dutch import to find favour in London. The English travelled to the Netherlands to find themselves a new king, one less prone to excess than the Stuarts had been. A wealthy country that, in order to be governed, appoints the leader of an even wealthier country—one that is slightly smaller but also oriented towards the sea, the Indies and trade. And while gin plays with emotions and distorts memories, coffee is the drink of clarity; it awakens and sharpens the mind. So much so that, in places where it is sold, people begin to discuss politics and business. Coffee houses were regarded as ‘penny universities’. Just as today people go to Starbucks for the internet rather than the White Chocolate Mocha, back then, for a penny, one could buy access to information and knowledge, including the chance to flick through some of those magazines which, in the late 17th century, with the end of prior censorship, began to proliferate. The London Stock Exchange and Lloyd’s were founded in a coffee house. Gin and coffee: two ‘drugs’ with opposite effects: on the one hand, the intoxication that governments try to prevent; on the other, the calculation and the eagerness to seize the opportunities on which markets are based. London does not choose between the two; it keeps them both.

Drinking coffee, like sniffing tobacco, are “silly habits” which “do infinitely more harm than good to those who are addicted to them”. But “how much money have tea and coffee brought in!”. “Gin makes people of a lean build and a restless temperament brutal, savage and quarrelsome; it leads them to come to blows over the slightest thing, and is often the cause of murders’. The fact that so much of it is in circulation is ‘surprising proof of the number of corrupters who, whilst carrying out a legally permitted occupation, contribute to introducing and increasing all the sloth, laziness, poverty and misery of which the abuse of spirits is the immediate cause’. But on the other side of the scales lie “the rents that are collected, the land that is cultivated, the tools that are manufactured, the livestock that is utilised and, above all, the multitude of poor people who derive their livelihood from the activities necessary to produce that commodity”. Ordinary people, who are “short-sighted”, “rarely manage to see beyond a single link in the chain of causes”. Mandeville, on the other hand, looks around and thinks that the English are not doing badly at all, even though they all complain – about the corruption of politicians, the licentiousness of trade, and probably even the changeable weather. We are in the midst of the ‘Little Ice Age’, but the summer of 1701 was, as far as is remembered, ‘unbearably hot’. The four seasons had already ceased to exist. And so, in April 1705, he penned the satire The Grumbling Hive: a six-penny pamphlet, a few hundred lines in couplets with rhyming end-rhymes, which at the time hardly anyone took any notice of. The theme is ‘the thousand ways’ in which good can arise from evil ‘as naturally as a hen hatches from an egg’. The good that arises from evil is life in society.

When "The Grumbling Hive" was published, Mandeville was approaching his thirty-fifth birthday. In the Netherlands, he belonged to a prominent family: his father, Michael, was a doctor, the son of a doctor and administrator of Rotterdam Hospital. Bernard attended a local school. The persecution of the Huguenots also drove Pierre Bayle from France; he ended up teaching in Rotterdam itself. Although it is unclear whether the young Mandeville had him as a lecturer, he was well acquainted with his "Dictionary": as John Callanan demonstrates in "Man-Devil: The Mind and Times of Bernard Mandeville, the Wickedest Man in Europe" (Princeton University Press, 2025), Bayle’s influence runs through his entire body of work. Yet perhaps the first school of scepticism—more important than any teacher—is life itself. It is 28 August 1690. It is late afternoon, and a group of town militiamen are carrying a cask of wine home to honour it as it deserves. They encounter tax collectors, who immediately realise that the cask is contraband: it has not been declared and is therefore untaxed. One side insists that the excise duty must be paid; the other tries to evade it, and a scuffle ensues. Cornelis Costerman, hereafter referred to as the smuggler, stabs an excise officer to death. He confessed and was arrested. In Rotterdam, the chief of police and the public prosecutor were one and the same person: the bailiff, Jacob van Zuylen van Nijevelt. For Costerman, he sought and secured the death penalty – not for murder, but for tax evasion. Van Zuylen had been appointed to the post in 1676 by the stadtholder William III, to whom he was a staunch loyalist.

The sentence is excessive and sparks public outrage. But to no avail: the sentence is carried out, and, according to reports, Costerman’s execution requires five blows to be completed. A bloodbath. Moreover, rumours circulate that the stadtholder had granted a pardon and that van Zuylen had kept it to himself. Three weeks later, on 5 October, an enraged mob targeted his home. Among the ringleaders of the uprising were Michael de Mandeville and his son. The latter is said to have written and publicly posted a lampoon against the bailiff, portraying him as a ‘bigoted atheist’. Bernard graduated in medicine from Leiden in March 1691; two years later, when the provincial authorities dealt with the uprising, the ringleaders were expelled from Rotterdam – including the Mandevilles – without trial. His father moved to Amsterdam, where he would die; Bernard went to seek his fortune elsewhere. He travelled to England, probably to learn the language. He found the island so pleasant that he decided to settle there. William of Orange was the indirect cause of his exile: it was he who had appointed, supported and protected van Zuylen van Nijevelt. Yet Mandeville chose precisely the country that had just accepted him as king, as if sensing that there was nothing to fear.

Shortly after settling in London, Bernard began practising his profession without the necessary licence. He was put on trial for practising without a licence, though this did not jeopardise his career. He married at the age of twenty-eight: a marriage we can imagine to have been a happy one. After all, when he writes – describing himself as a ‘layman’ – his defence of brothels, one of the arguments in favour of them, is that they confine within their walls the female population most prone to ‘prostitution’, thereby limiting the demand for non-profit debauchery. He took part in a scandalous trial – that of the Duke of Norfolk’s divorce – but as an interpreter for one of the Duke’s Dutch maids. He moved in high society and forged important friendships, yet he remained a foreigner, concerned about the outbursts of anti-Dutch hatred. The new monarchy is Dutch; trade is Dutch; the goods and luxuries that come from afar, passing through Amsterdam, are Dutch. The scandal of his life was entirely literary. Mandeville wrote fables in the style of La Fontaine, contributed to magazines, and pursued literary fame with the serenity of one perfectly convinced of the universal tyranny of vanity. The language suited him so well that he alternated between his medical practice and writing, often under a pseudonym – particularly female ones. In Queen Anne’s England, Richard Steele’s Tatler—the first society magazine to act as a mouthpiece for the news it gathered in coffeehouses—was rivalled by a Female Tatler, to which Mandeville contributed some thirty articles, signing them as Lucinda and Artesia.

In the 1705 pamphlet, the author plays down his own importance and declares that his sole aim is to entertain the reader. Nine years later, in 1714, he published a version enriched with a series of notes on the text – in which, to defend himself against his critics, he offers a self-exegesis – and an essay on the origin of morality: it is here that the title destined to endure first appears. True success came with the third edition, a further nine years later, in 1723, which, in addition to the notes, included the ‘Enquiry into the Nature of Society’ (a polemic against Shaftesbury) and, above all, an ‘Essay on Charity and Schools of Charity’. It was this edition that would make the volume what some would come to regard as ‘the most wicked and most intelligent book in the English language’. In his ‘rhapsody of thoughts’ on schools of charity, Mandeville argues that amongst those who can neither read nor write ‘we shall find more unity and love for one’s neighbour, less wickedness and attachment to the world, more serenity of mind, more innocence’ than amongst those who have filled their heads with words. In a similar vein, in his Treatise on Hypochondriacal and Hysterical Diseases (1711, expanded in 1730), he describes melancholia as a disorder typical of the intellectual. In July 1723, the Middlesex Grand Jury brought charges against the Enlarged Fable as a public nuisance: the book ‘would discredit religion and virtue as prejudicial to society and harmful to the State, and would recommend luxury, avarice, pride and all vices as necessary for the public welfare’. There was no trial or conviction, but the volume acquired a terrible reputation. At the same time, an anonymous and vitriolic letter addressed to the Lord Chancellor appeared in the London Journal, accusing Mandeville of impiety. He responded with a Defence of the Book, and made a move that says everything about his character: in the subsequent edition, he included in the appendix to the volume both his own defence and the accusations, transforming them into promotional material. The attack was due less to the arguments themselves than to the enemy he had chosen. The essay on charity schools struck at an institution of which the devout public was proud, and benefactors did not like to be seen as vain people who bought popularity through donations.

In 1729, The Fable of the Bees was published. Part Two: a dialogue between Cleomene (the author’s alter ego) and Horace, a gentleman who is determined to give a piece of his mind to those writers who portray ‘everything about our nature’ as ‘the ugliest and most despicable thing possible, and go to great lengths to persuade people that we are devils’. One hundred and two years ago, Frederick Benjamin Kaye published The Fable of the Bees in a critical edition so well-crafted that no one has since dared to produce another. Kaye died a few years later, aged just thirty-eight (little of his own work survives, though he had contributed to a survey of British periodicals between 1620 and 1800); he succeeded, almost single-handedly, in saving Mandeville from the merciless treatment that time reserves even for the most brilliant prose. The complete Fable, in a single volume, had never before been published in Italy: it has just been published by Silvio Berlusconi Editore, 828 pages, edited by Andrea Branchi, who has translated The Grumbling Hive into verse for the first time (much to the reader’s delight).

The thesis with which Mandeville graduated in medicine deals with the link between the stomach, the nerves and ‘animal spirits’ – which are thought to be an extremely fine fluid, produced by the brain and carried by the nerves, a sort of messenger between the mind and the body. Contrary to the prevailing view, Mandeville argued that it is a malfunction of the stomach that causes nervous disorders, and above all that the stomach and the brain influence one another. A malfunction of the stomach leads to a deficiency of these spirits and triggers anxiety, hypochondria and so on. But moods, too, can affect the stomach, altering its functions. In short, Mandeville the physician believed that body and mind were one and the same, and Mandeville the philosopher was of no different opinion. When he played with his cat, Montaigne did not know whether he was making it his pastime or vice versa. The sceptic doubts that man is, after all, such a different animal from the rest (again, according to Montaigne: ‘there is more difference between one man and another than between a man and an animal’).

It is precisely the premise that humans are animals like any others that makes the analysis of social institutions less predictable. We share self-preservation with other animals: the instinct to survive. But what also sets us apart is self-satisfaction, a tendency towards pride that leads us to always value ourselves higher than we are worth. Who among us, when looking in the mirror, does not see a little of Leonardo, Churchill, J.K. Rowling or Messi? Fortunately, this tendency towards conceit, however pronounced, is tempered by a feeling of insecurity and a pervasive doubt: am I overestimating myself? To find confirmation of our intuitions about ourselves, we need the approval, esteem and consent of others. We are never certain that we deserve our self-esteem: the world must endorse it. For Mandeville, it is precisely this fragile and insatiable thirst for approval that becomes the glue holding society together. The desire to be esteemed makes us docile, polite and cooperative. To gain the approval of others, we learn to mask our selfish instincts and to behave in a virtuous and socially acceptable manner. The fear of shame and contempt becomes a more effective tool of social control than any law.

All this happens unintentionally and without design. Not only are the rules of our morality not the conclusions of our reason; they have absolutely nothing to do with our reason at all. From Bayle, the Dutch physician drew the conviction that men do not behave as they believe they do, and that there is no connection between the opinions they profess and the actions they perform, contrary to what moralists take for granted. In his Pensées diverses sur la comète, Bayle had drawn the conclusion that earned him the accusation of impiety: a society of atheists could be as orderly and civilised as one of the devout, because it is not dogmas that hold people together, but passions, honour and the fear of others’ judgement. The story of the grumbling beehive applies the same insight to commerce and social life in general.

The story is a familiar one: a hive teeming with politicians who steal, doctors who ‘care more about their own reputation than the condition of all their patients’, and lawyers who quibble, probing every law ‘just as a thief does with shops and homes’ – it was a rich and flourishing society. Just like early 18th-century England. And, just as in early 18th-century England, amidst reports of this or that scam—big or small—and a body of literature that fuels nostalgia for times gone by and for the vocabulary of virtue, everyone complains about everything. “Oh mighty gods, if only there were honesty!”. Jupiter, ‘overcome with indignation’, swears, ‘filled with wrath, to rid, at once, / the chattering hive of all fraud’. The result is a decline that is by no means a happy one. ‘The haughty Chloe, who, for the sake of a distinguished lifestyle, / had driven her husband to plunder the State, / now sold at the market the furnishings / for which he had sacked the Indies’. The hive’s spartan condition suits only its small scale: the corrupt hive was large and populous; in the honest one, only a few remain. An extensive division of labour, of the sort found in a large society, requires a degree of tolerance towards such vices. In the Preface, Mandeville explains this using the example of rubbish: in London, the streets are inevitably dirty. Commercial activities, the work of kitchens and taverns that serve to feed a large city, the needs of the horses pulling carriages – all these factors combine to ensure that the streets cannot remain spotless. But dirt is ‘a necessary evil inseparable from the happiness of London’.

Kaye’s edition had fallen into the hands of two economists, John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich von Hayek, who both appreciated it for different reasons. Keynes found in Mandeville an ally in upholding the paradox of saving. More generally, the Fable served the author of The General Theory as a means of taking a swipe at the idea that a country is like a large family, at least when it comes to the management of public finances. ‘What is prudence in the conduct of any private household can hardly be folly in that of a great kingdom’: so wrote Adam Smith, and this was – and remains – the view of advocates of all forms of fiscal discipline. Hayek, however, was interested in something quite different: he counted Mandeville amongst the ‘Darwinists before Darwin’. What interested him was precisely the dynamics by which moral rules were established. Mandeville had taken part in two controversies that would run through the eighteenth century: the dispute between the ancients and the moderns, and the debate on luxury. He had defended the moderns, their more populous societies and their standard of living, arguing that the ancients’ catalogue of virtues would not have been of much use in guaranteeing it. And he had defended luxury, not only because even Ferraris contribute to GDP, but because the production of luxury goods sets in motion ever-changing forms of creativity and human labour. Those who ‘invent the most elaborate manufactures’ are society’s best friends. In some ways, Mandeville would inspire both Adam Smith – when he placed the division of labour at the heart of The Wealth of Nations – and David Hume, who, like him, would re-evaluate luxury as a driver of progress. For Mandeville, civilisation is that state in which everyone works for themselves but also for others, and vice versa. It is that society, Smith would say, in which ‘everyone becomes a merchant’, and in becoming a merchant perhaps even becomes a bit of a sycophant: the tailor needs to please his customer, the waiter makes no comment on the waistlines of his patrons, and whilst, in the course of our dealings, we may not all love one another any more, at least we do a little less harm to one another.

Good manners are a form of self-deception. A great evolutionary biologist, Robert Trivers, argued that we deceive ourselves because, from an evolutionary perspective, it is important to know how to deceive others. Two and a half centuries earlier, Mandeville believed that we deceive others by showing them the people they would like to see, so as not to disillusion ourselves. Initially, he appears to suggest that it was wise legislators who convinced humanity that good deeds can stroke one’s pride. In 1729, he described it as a leaderless and spontaneous phenomenon, drawing a sort of parallel between the way trade functions and the way institutions function. In both cases, it is the unexpected consequences that matter most: not the merchant’s immediate profit, but the chain of events he has set in motion. Writing well is a limitation for a thinker. Mandeville’s vanity was nourished by elegant style and the utmost luxury: never giving the impression of taking oneself too seriously. In the short term, he derived pleasure from having to explain and re-explain himself. In the medium term, he was regarded as less than those who knew how to don the philosopher’s tailcoat. The most wicked of all books in the English language ultimately offers the reader the balm of the sceptic: you are small and petty, and the world will not end because of it. Yet it is precisely the mechanism of self-satisfaction illuminated by Mandeville that explains why nobody likes this message. ‘Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalising animal.’ This was written by a science-fiction novelist, Robert Anson Heinlein. Mandeville certainly thought so. It is a curse that can only be taken in its stride.