Robin Douglass's "Mandeville’s Fable"

Robin Douglass is professor of political theory in the Department of Political Economy at King's College London. He is the author of Rousseau and Hobbes: Nature, Free Will, and the Passions.

Douglass applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Mandeville’s Fable: Pride, Hypocrisy, and Sociability, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book takes the browser to the early parts of the third chapter, entitled “Sociability, Hypocrisy, and Virtue,” in which I reconstruct the debate on these topics between Bernard Mandeville and Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury. On page 99 I outline the relationship between Shaftesbury’s understanding of sociability and virtue, stressing the importance of his notion that we all have a “natural moral Sense” that leads us to act virtuously unless it is stifled by stronger or more selfish passions. While the Page 99 Test introduces the browser to an important theme that runs through much of the book – the relationship between human sociability and virtue – overall the test does not work very well for one very simple reason: the book is about Bernard Mandeville, and I do not mention him once on the page!

Mandeville would come to view Shaftesbury as representing the complete antithesis of his own philosophy, and he regarded the idea that we have a natural moral sense as nothing more than a pleasing fiction which many people believe only because it makes them feel better about themselves. Mandeville instead maintains that pride and hypocrisy are central to explaining how humans learn to live peacefully together in society, and the main aim of my book is to offer a sympathetic interpretation and qualified defence of this pride-centred theory of sociability.

A wider goal of the book is to make the case for taking Mandeville seriously as a philosopher. Mandeville is not that well-known today and when he is remembered it is usually in relation to the history of economic thought. In particular, he is sometimes regarded as an early theorist of laissez-faire capitalism, who, half a century before Adam Smith, scandalously captured the idea that economic prosperity is based on the pursuit of self-interest by subtitling his most famous work “Private Vices, Publick Benefits.” In Mandeville’s Fable, however, I look beyond this view of Mandeville as a theorist of homo economicus and show that he in fact offers us a far richer understanding of human nature and society. For Mandeville, I argue, it is our desire for social esteem, far more than our desire for material prosperity, that keeps the world turning.

Learn more about Mandeville’s Fable at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue