‘The wickedest man in Europe’ was just an intellectual provocateur

In Paris in 1740 the hangman publicly burned his most famous book. In England some of the best and brightest – Alexander Pope, Henry Fielding, Bishop George Berkeley, Jonathan Swift and John Wesley – queued up to destroy his reputation. The book was The Fable of the Bees (1714) and the author was Sir Bernard Mandeville, popularly known as the Man-Devil.

After Mandeville’s death in 1733, Samuel Johnson, perhaps the wisest Englishman who ever drew breath, admitted that the book had ‘opened my views into real life very much’. And David Hume, the great British philosopher, said the Man-Devil was, in fact, one of the most important figures in the development of ‘the science of man’. Immanuel Kant saw his importance in the history of ethics and even Maynard Keynes and Karl Marx approved – the latter two because Mandeville had introduced economics to the study of humanity.

The ‘Man-Devil’ popularised one simple idea. He said that human beings are animals

In this engrossing and very readable book the philosopher John Callanan celebrates Mandeville’s emergence as the creator of ‘one of the most influential theories of human nature and society of the 18th century’. And the Man-Devil title was not entirely unfair – Mandeville was a provocateur, an intellectual prankster. He wanted to be known, he wanted to sell books and he succeeded by popularising one simple idea that today seems unremarkable. He said that human beings are animals.

He was a doctor – though at the time this did not mean much. As he wryly noted, little or nothing was known about the workings of the human body and the best any physician could do was talk, and try out any remedies that seemed to have worked on others. But what intrigued him most was animal behaviour, in particular the organisational skills of bees.