B E R N A R D M A N D E V I L L E : T H E IMPORTANCE OF W O M E N IN T H E 
D E V E L O P M E N T OF CIVIL SOCIETIES 

By 

C A R O L J E A N GIBSON 

B.A., The University of British Columbia, 1982 

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ii 

A B S T R A C T 

This study examines a relatively unacknowledged feature of Bernard 

Mandeville's writing - his discussion of women and women's issues and the 

significance of this discussion to his larger thesis. The work is intended to 

demonstrate that the essential elements in Mandeville's developed thinking, 

fully argued by him in The Fable, were first discussed in his earlier reflections on 

women. By examining some of Mandeville's earlier, less well-known writing, 

in particular The Virgin Unmask'd and The Female Tatler, the study attempts to 

demonstrate that in them Mandeville lays out the essence of his argument, 

which is only later developed fully in The Fable of the Bees. 

The study, by concentrating on the role of women in the civilizing process, 

is intended to bring to the fore a number of neglected features in Mandeville's 

writing. By closely scrutinizing Mandeville's theory of the psychological basis of 

all social relations, and the role of the passions, particularly pride, in the 

development of materially prosperous societies, the study attempts to 

demonstrate that the ideas and arguments that provoked Mandeville to develop 

his own comprehensive theory of the genesis and development of economically 

advanced societies were first articulated in the context of a discussion of female 

roles and feminine psychology. Further, that the formulation of Mandeville's 

ideas concerning the basis of society and social improvement did not originate as 

a ridicule of Richard Steele's priggish Squire Bickerstaff, his persona in The  

Tatler, as M . M . Goldsmith claims, but rather that these conceptions were present 

as early as The Virgin Unmask'd, written, it is argued, before Steele's Tatler was 

published. 



iii 

The Introduction surveys the current scholarship on Mandeville and his 

significance as a social and economic theorist, and reviews scholarly opinion 

about the motives which may have prompted him to develop his controversial 

theories. Chapter One discusses the elements and significance of Mandeville's 

social theory. The chapter begins with a review of Mandeville's life, sketches out 

the development of the ideas presented in his writing, the effects these ideas had 

on his contemporaries, and his importance within a broad range of speculation 

in the early eighteenth century about the impulses which propel individuals to 

seek private gain. 

Because the passions, particularly pride, play a dominant role in 

Mandeville's theorizing, Chapter Two is an examination of Mandeville's theory 

of pride and its role in the civilizing process. Mandeville's intellectual 

predecessors and his place within a long line of moral argument concerning the 

role of the passions in the development of society are examined. The argument 

proper begins in Chapter Three with a discussion of the intellectual inheritance 

about women. Special attention is given to two elements of Mandeville's 

argument concerning the establishment of civil societies, the creation of chastity 

as a moral virtue and the development of marriage as a civil institution. 

Mandeville's own attitude towards women and his ideas concerning sexuality 

and marriage and the significance of both to his theorizing are reviewed at some 

length. The chapter concludes with an analysis of Mandeville's economic theory 

and the importance of women to it. 

The conclusion reached is that Mandeville's speculations on women are 

an important, but neglected, feature of his social thinking, without which his 

Fable would not be the powerful book it is. 



iv 

T A B L E OF C O N T E N T S 

Page 
No. 

Abstract ii 
Table of Contents iv 

Introduction 1 

Chapter I. The Elements and Significance of Mandeville's Social Theory 13 

Chapter n. Pride and the Civilizing Process 39 

Chapter HI. The Role of Women in Mandeville's Work 56 

. UI.l The Inheritance 56 
1II.2 Passions, Sexuality and Marriage 62 
in.3 Women and the Critique of 'Virtue' 74 
TJI.4 Female Chastity 83 
JTI.5 Fashion and Improvement 89 

Conclusion 99 

Bibliography 105 



1 

I N T R O D U C T I O N 

In spite of the furor that surrounded the publication of his Fable, and his 

considerable eighteenth-century notoriety, Bernard Mandeville was a relatively 

obscure figure in the scholarly literature until F.B. Kaye's edition of The Fable of  

the Bees in 1923.1 Mandeville's work, traditionally studied in departments of 

English, nevertheless exerted a powerful, yet often subterranean, influence on 

social theorizing, particularly in economics and sociology. More recently, 

"Mandeville has come to enjoy widespread scholarly recognition as a theorist, a 

precursor of Thorstein Veblen and Robert Merton, of Friedrich Hayek as well as 

Keynes."2 Students of Mandeville have described him as a thinker primarily 

concerned with the description and analysis of society.3 Yet the nature of these 

concerns is still contested. Mandeville was, it has been claimed, "a psychologist 

interested in giving a naturalistic account of ethical phenomena"by scrutinizing 

human motives, 4 a compulsive debunker of human pride and received 

opinion, 5 and a "thoroughgoing antiheroic utilitarian" interested in economic 

growth.6 Mandeville's technique has produced similar scholarly disagreement, 

being seen as satire,7 mock satire,8 satire underpined with paradox9 or not satire 

at all. 1 0 

1 Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees: or. Private Vices, Publick Benefits, F.B. Kaye, ed., 
2 vols., (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924). References will be cited parenthetically in the text by 
volume and page number. 

2 E. J. Hundert, "Bernard Mandeville and the Rhetoric of Social Science," Journal of the History  
of Behavioral Sciences, vol. 22, (October, 1986), p. 311. 

3 Richard I. Cook, "The Great Leviathan of Lechery: Mandeville's Modest Defense of Public 
Stews (1724)", Mandeville Studies: New Explorations in the Art and Thought of Dr. Bernard  
Mandeville (1670-1733). Irwin Primer, ed., (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1975),p. 23. 

4 M.R. Jack, "Religion and Ethics in Mandeville", Mandeville Studies, Primer, ed., p. 35. 
5 Robert Adolph, "What Pierces or Strikes: Prose Styles in The Fable of the Bees," Mandeville  

Studies, Primer, ed., pp. 158/63. 
6 Ibid^ pp. 161/2. 
7 Cook, "The Great Leviathan of Lechery," p. 28. 
8 M . M . Goldsmith, Private Vices, Public Benefits: Bernard Mandeville's Social and Political  

Thought, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 55. Goldsmith claims that 
Mandeville's ironic exposure of the intellectual folly of the proponents of public and Christian 



2 

The almost universal reliance upon Kaye's edition of The Fable1 makes 

his views an appropriate place to start in reviewing Mandeville scholarship. 

Kaye argues that Mandeville's thought revolves around a paradox which turns 

on his definition of virtue. Kaye identifies two major contemporary currents of 

thought concerning virtue, one ascetic or theological, the other rational. In the 

ascetic or theological tradition, virtue denoted a transcending of the demands of 

corrupt human nature, a conquest of self. In the rational tradition, it suggested 

conduct ruled by reason, which was held to be the distinctly human property 

making moral life possible (I: xlvii). Mandeville's own definition of virtue 

melded these two strands of argument. Virtuous acts, he claims, could only be 

those "by which Man, contrary to the impulse of Nature, should endeavour the 

Benefit of others, or the Conquest of his own Passions out of a Rational 

Ambition of being good."2 Kaye points to this definition as the crucial element 

in what he calls Mandeville's "rigourism" (I: xlvii). When Mandeville applies 

this definition of virtue to human behaviour, Kaye argues, he can find no 

virtuous conduct in the world (I: xlviii). By judging men's actions not by their 

consequences but by their motives, only acts springing from rational impulses 

virtue is a k i n d of mock satire. Satire as a genre, he argues, ridicules i n d i v i d u a l s or social types 
for failing to adhere to k n o w n standards. M a n d e v i l l e ridicules this standard. Satire exposes 
men's follies so that they can be corrected a n d assumes that m e n can act differently; M a n d e v i l l e 
assumes that they can not. Ibid., p. 56. 

9 A d o l p h , "What Pierces of Strikes," p. 161. 
10 P h i l i p P i n k u s , "Mandeville's Paradox," M a n d e v i l l e Studies, Primer, ed., p . 200. 
1 M o s t of what is k n o w n about M a n d e v i l l e derives from Kaye's "excellent a n d exhaustive edition 

of T h e Fable." M . R . Jack, "Progress a n d C o r r u p t i o n i n the Eighteenth C e n t u r y : Mandeville's 
•Private Vices, Public Benefits' ", l o u m a l of the H i s t o r y of Ideas, v o l . 37, (1976), p. 370. See also 
J . C . M a x w e l l , "Ethics a n d Politics i n Mandeville," P h i l o s o p h y , xxvi, 1951; T h o m a s H o m e , T h e  
Social T h o u g h t of B e r n a r d M a n d e v i l l e - V i r t u e a n d C o m m e r c e i n E a r l y Eighteenth C e n t u r y 
E n g l a n d , ( N e w Y o r k : C o l u m b i a University Press, 1978), p. xi. E v e n scholars w h o d o not accept 
Kaye's interpretation feel compelled to base a considerable part of their w o r k o n it. 

2 T h e F a b l e I, p. x l v i i . K a y e quotes Mandeville's o w n definition f r o m T h e Fable I, p p . 48-9. 
Later, M a n d e v i l l e argues that "real V i r t u e requires a conquest over untaught Nature." T h e  
Fable II, p. 127. Both definitions require a rational conquest of h u m a n nature before an act can 
be deemed to be virtuous. 



3 

could be judged virtuous, and Mandeville discovers no actions dictated entirely 

by reason, free from self-regarding passions (I: xlviiipdix). Central to Kaye's 

thesis is his argument that, although ostensibly holding up an ideal of virtuous 

conduct, Mandeville was adamant that such conduct was impossible to attain. 

He really advised men to abandon the attempt to be virtuous and instead rest 

content to achieve socially useful goals (I: 1). A n d this, Kaye argues, makes 

Mandeville "a thoroughgoing utilitarian." 1 

Malcolm Jack criticizes Kaye for his conclusion that Mandeville applied 

two common contemporary standards in his assessment of the morality of 

actions, the rigouristic and the utilitarian,2 and, by holding to both, designed a 

paradox that led to a "reductio ad absurdum" of rigourism as a literary device 

introduced for satirical purposes. This interpretation of Mandeville's ethical 

position, he argues, is based on a misunderstanding of his intentions, which 

were to satirize the position of those who retain these two contrary ethical 

criteria. Jack claims instead that Mandeville's writing should be understood as 

an early and sophisticated attempt to explain moral phenomena solely in terms 

of human psychology.3 

1 The Fable I, p. lviii. Kaye defines utilitarianism as an ethic whose moral touchstone is results 
and not abstract principle. (I, xlix, n.l) While not a modern definition of utilitarianism, Kaye 
says, it reflects the condition of ethical thought of the day. (Ibid.) 

2 The rigoristic as a criterion for judging the motives of individuals' behaviour; the utilitarian as 
a criterion for judging the social consequences. Jack, "Progress and Corruption in the Eighteenth 
Century," p. 370. 

3 Ibid., pp. 370/71/75. 



4 

M . M . Goldsmith sees a similar importance in Mandeville's work.1 He 

argues that, despite the ironic and mocking tone of The Fable, it is a serious 

examination of social interaction, following the philosophical pattern of an 

analysis of human nature and the genesis of society from a state of nature.2 

Mandeville's theory of the development of society differs from a Lockean or 

Machiavellian one because he sees no possibility of a social contract or a founder-

legislator forming humans into a society.3 Mandeville's theory requires a long 

gestation period during which change is gradual and incremental. For him, 

Goldsmith says, "the mechanism by which humans are socialized is society 

itself."4 Although he does "not believe Mandeville was an economic theorist at 

all," 5 Goldsmith joins an associated debate over Mandeville's economic 

principles, arguing that he was a precursor of capitalism.6 It is difficult to 

discover any writers of the early eighteenth century, he argues, who warmly 

embraced the new commercial capitalism. By his "full-fledged acceptance of 

commercial modernity", Mandeville can be singled out as the great exception.7 

1 M. M. Goldsmith, "Public Virtue and Private Vices: Bernard Mandeville and English Political 
Ideologies in the Early Eighteenth Century," Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. ix, (1976), pp. 
477-410; "Bernard Mandeville and the Spirit of Capitalism," pp. 63-81, Journal of British  
Studies, vol. 17, (1977); Private Vices. Public Benefits: Bernard Mandeville's Social and  
Political Thought; "The Treacherous Arts of Mankind: Bernard Mandeville and Female 
Virtue," History of Political Thought, vol. vii, no. 1, (Spring, 1986), pp. 93-114. 

2 Goldsmith, Private Vices, Public Benefits, p. 58. 
3 Ibid., p. 71. 
4 Ibid., pp. 72/3. 
5 Ibid., p. 124. 
6 Goldsmith, "Mandeville and the Spirit,of Capitalism", pp. 63-81. Similarly, but for different 

reasons than Goldsmith, Nathan Rosenberg argues that, except when he is dealing with foreign 
trade, Mandeville presents a conception of the role of government in economic and social affairs 
which encourages a self-regulating economy. N. Rosenberg, "Mandeville and Laissez-faire," 
Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. xxiv, no. 2, (April-June, 1963),pp. 183-196. A different 
interpretation of Mandeville's economics comes from Jacob Viner who argues that Mandeville 
advocates state intervention in economic matters. Jacob Viner, The Long View and the Short:  
Studies in Economic Theory and Policy, (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1958), pp. 340-342. 

7 Goldsmith, "Mandeville and the Spirit of Capitalism," p. 71. 



5 

"The man who takes delight in continuous business and piling up wealth was 

invented by Bernard Mandeville", Goldsmith continues, 

to expose and to ridicule the shallow, narrow-minded self-
righteousness of the prevalent ideology of early eighteenth-century 
England, especially as that ideology was expressed in Richard 
Steele's Tatler; to oppose those who would "prescribe Rules of 
Happiness to every body else", Mandeville, living in a society which 
was becoming capitalist, invented the 'spirit of capitalism'.1 

A different view of Mandeville's significance comes from Thomas Home, 

who provides a valuable guide to Mandeville's social and economic ideas. Like 

Goldsmith, Home believes that Mandeville alone in the early eighteenth 

century openly argued that traditional moral and social assumptions are 

inconsistent with the goals of the wealth-generating state. But Home differs 

from Goldsmith's interpretation of Mandeville as a capitalist theorist, arguing 

instead that "in Mandeville the psychological analysis of self-love is explicitly 

joined to a social and economic theory which is similar to what has been called 

the mercantilist conception of society."2 It is Mandeville's provocative, even 

scandalous, economic arguments that demanded the attention of his 

contemporaries, Home claims. His attack on frugality and his defense of luxury 

forced him to consider and then reject the basic analogy used by those who feared 

widespread luxury consumption: the comparison of the economy of the 

individual or family with the economy of the state.3 Like Goldsmith, Home 

recognizes Mandeville's sensitivity to the long and slow process by which 

political and economic institutions evolve as central to his argument. Society 

1 Ibid., p. 81. 
2 Home, The Social Thought of Bernard Mandeville, p. 51. 
3 Home argues that one of the strongest, most persistent, themes in Mandeville's economic 

thought is his refusal to equate the state with the individual. Ibid., p. 63. 



6 

does not depend upon the genius of individual men to make good laws, but on 

the cumulative experience of many generations.1 

In Mandeville, Horne claims, the great streams of mercantilism and of the 

seventeenth-century tradition of French moral discourse come together. With 

their strong emphasis on the importance of self-interest, these two traditions 

provided Marideville with a method of psychological investigation that 

uncovered the operation of self-love in all human actions, a method which 

permitted him to expose the delusions which allow men to damn vices in 

others, while ignoring the same vices in themselves.2 Mercantilist theory 

provided Mandeville with specific doctrines about the poor and the balance of 

trade and luxury; but more important, it provided him with a model of society 

based on the spending of the wealthy and the labour of the poor, held together by 

the power of the state. By debunking the arguments of public-spiritedness upon 

which the tradition of civic humanism rested, a tradition central to those who 

argued that England needed a moral revival, Mandeville's work constitutes one 

of the most important criticisms of that tradition.3 

Mandeville's dislike of hypocritical cant is recognized by many scholars as 

one of the strongest motives behind his work. Horne, Malcolm Jack4 and Jacob 

V i n e r 5 see this as providing a powerful incentive for Mandeville, whose aim 

1 Ibid., p. 74 
2 Ibid., p. 9. 
3 Ibid. 
4 Jack, "Progress and Corruption in the Eighteenth Century", p. 375. 
5 Jacob Viner, "Satire and Economics in The Augustan Age of Satire", The Augustan Milieu, ed. by 

Henry K. Miller, Eric Rothstein, G.S. Rousseau, (Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 95. Viner 
argues that Mandeville parodied the pretensions of those who flourished under the social 
structure, and believed that they and it operated from moral principles. He attacked both the 
principles and those who, from sentimental albeit genuine attachment to them, advocated 
""even minor changes in existing institutions to bring them nearer to what those principles 
demanded." 



7 

was not to parody the social structure itself, but to expose to ridicule the 

inconsistency of his contemporaries, who at once decried material progress 

because it brought in its train a corruption of moral and ascetic values, while 

fully enjoying the fruits of this development.1 Mandeville's real interest was the 

psychology of moral behaviour. Jack argues that the development of 

Mandeville's arguments constitute an early and sophisticated attempt at 

explaining moral phenomena in terms of human motivations alone.2 Like 

Home, Jack credits the moralists of the French tradition with providing 

Mandeville with an intellectual framework within which to work out his ideas.3 

One aspect of Mandeville's thought has, however, received little attention 

in this midst of this considerable recent revival of interest, the role of women in 

his work, a peculiar omission in light of the large body of his writing directed to 

them, the number of times they act as his spokesmen, and the frequency with 

which he specifically discusses women's behaviour. Only four works on 

Mandeville attend to the role of women at any length. Paul Bunyan Anderson, 

Gordon Vichert, Richard Cook and M . M . Goldsmith have discussed 

Mandeville's treatment of women, but none has seen women as of any 

particular significance to his larger theory of society. In his consideration of The  

Virgin U n m a s k ' d , Vichert argues that this work, "a moral dialogue devoted 

largely to a defense of feminism,"4 is part of a large body of contemporary and 

controversial writing about the role of women. Mandeville's concern is to show 

the facts of marriage from a woman's point of view and to destroy male illusions 

about the real life of women. "It is this anxiety to give the truth, to show what 

1 Jack, "Progress and Corruption in the Eighteenth Century," p. 373. 
2 Ibid- p. 371. 
3 Ibid., pp. 374/5. 
4 Gordon S. Vichert, "Bernard Mandeville's the Virgin Unmask'd," Mandeville Studies. Primer, 

ed., pi. 



8 

the condition of women is really like, in contrast to the various popular 

representations of them, that remains the most important aspect" of this seminal 

discussion of female virtue.1 Cook, on the other hand, claims that Lucinda, 

Mandeville's spokesman in The Virgin Unmask'd, is the foil he uses to point 

out the absurdity in arguing that reason prevails over human nature in social 

and moral matters. By her austere and uncompromising attitude towards 

marriage, Lucinda forces the reader to "choose between a bleakly unworkable 

rigourism on the one hand and a human and hence imperfect reality on the 

other." 2 Cook claims that the title, The Virgin Unmask'd, refers to the 

unmasking of Lucinda's rigid position, by which she "has reasoned herself into a 

life of literal and figurative sterility."3 

Goldsmith argues that Mandeville uses women as a literary tactic to 

increase his ironic tone and to tweak the civic humanist tradition by subverting 

the prevalent hierarchy of values which excluded women from the pursuit of 

virtues appropriate to landed gentlemen and of aristocratic ideals of honour.4 In 

a recent article, he discusses Mandeville's concept of virtue from this 

perspective. Goldsmith analyzes Mandeville's treatment of female honour, 

discussed in several issues of The Female Tatler, and concludes that what is 

significant about Mandeville's discussion is his views about female virtue and 

roles.5 What is significant for him about Mandeville's definition of virtue is 

that, in opposition to traditional views, it applies equally to both men and 

women. 6 To qualify as virtuous, one's motives must be pure and one's actions 

1 Ibid., p. 10. 
2 Richard I. Cook, Bernard Mandeville, (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1974), p. 59. 
3 Ibid. 
4 Goldsmith, Private Vices, Public Benefits, p. 163. 
5 Goldsmith, "The Treacherous Arts of Mankind," p. 110. 
6 Goldsmith's point here, as it is in all his work, is that Mandeville was motivated to develop 

his argument by his desire to satirize and mock Richard Steele's Issac Bickerstaff who, in The 



9 

brave. 1 Mandeville set out to demonstrate that women are as capable of the 

classical, cardinal virtues like courage, magnanimity, and strength of soul as 

m e n . 2 Mandeville's sole purpose in doing so, Goldsmith continues, was his 

dislike of hypocrisy and pretension, and his desire to undermine civic 

humanism through ridicule and to suggest that there are goals worth pursuing 

other than virtue and glory, namely happiness.3 Goldsmith pays no attention to 

Mandeville's psychological probing into the motives behind the argument for 

different virtues for different sexes, except to argue that Mandeville was 

particularly opposed to the civic humanist conceptions of courage and honour. 

Although Goldsmith agrees with Vichert that Mandeville's design is to let 

young ladies know whatever is dreadful in marriage,4 and concludes that he was 

prepared to argue a case for women,5 he is essentially content to limit 

Mandeville's purpose in discussing women so often and at such length to his 

desire to satirize the arguments of his opponents. Unlike Goldsmith, Paul 

Bunyan Anderson makes a grand claim for the loftiness of Mandeville's 

thought.6 He identifies the problem of women as next to that of war and brute 

force in fascination and difficulty in Mandeville's work.7 But Anderson draws 

no conclusions about women's importance in this work, except to note that 

Tatler, advocated a sentimental and romantic ideal of women, one in which they were limited 
to domestic and excluded from civic virtues. 

1 Ibid. 
2 Ibid., p. 113. 
3 Ibid. 
4 Ibid- p. 107. 
5 Ibid., p. 114. 
6 Paul Bunyan Anderson, "Splendor out of Scandal: The Lucinda-Artesia Papers in The Female 

Tatler," Philological Quarterly, 15 (1936), p. 298. Anderson compares Mandeville's "splendid 
intellectual and spiritual vision of the possibilities in imperfect material", to Shakespeare's 
mind as he was writing Measure for Measure and Christ's insight into human nature as recorded 
in the New Testament. 

7 Ibid- p. 292. 



10 

some of Mandeville's writing is "brimming over with a humourous and 

eminently sane feminism."1 

Is Mandeville's discussion of women and women's issues integral to his 

larger thesis or, is it, as Goldsmith claims, merely a satirical device used to 

ridicule civic humanism and expose the hypocrisy of those who would cling to 

one set of moral standards while practicing another? This work is intended to 

demonstrate that the essential elements in Mandeville's developed thinking, 

fully argued by him in parts one and two of The Fable, were first expounded in 

his early reflections upon women and their unusual, and sometimes privileged, 

conceptual status. I will argue that a concentration upon the role of women in 

the civilizing process brings to the fore a number of neglected features of his 

argument. Further, not only does Mandeville use women to satirize the civic 

humanist tradition of virtue, as Goldsmith claims; more important, and 

overlooked by Goldsmith, Vichert and other scholars who have studied 

Mandeville's work and his discussions concerning women, he addresses 

conceptions of femininity in ways that are integral to his entire project. By 

examining some of Mandeville's earlier, less famous writing, particularly The  

Virgin Unmask'd and The Female Tatler, two works either addressed to women 

or women's issues or "written" by women, I will demonstrate that in them 

Mandeville lays out the essence of his argument, which will only later be 

developed fully in The Fable of the Bees. 

A close scrutiny of Mandeville's theory of the psychological basis of all 

social relations, and the role of the passions, particularly pride, in the 

development of rich and prosperous civil societies, will demonstrate that the 

1 Ibid., p. 294. 



11 

ideas and arguments that provoked his attention, stimulated his interest and 

challenged him to develop his own comprehensive theory of the genesis and 

development of these societies, were first articulated in the context of a 

discussion of female roles and feminine psychology. I will argue that 

Mandeville's five months as contributor to The Female Tatler, together with 

The Virgin Unmask'd, provide valuable information about his thoughts on 

women, and that, in them, he discusses women and women's issues in a way 

that is central, both to his theory of society and the development of moral virtues 

and to his discussion of economic life. Equally as important, I will also attempt 

to demonstrate that Mandeville's early formulation of his ideas concerning the 

basis of society and social improvement did not originate as a ridicule of Richard 

Steele's priggish Squire Bickerstaff, his persona in The Tatler, as Goldsmith 

claims, but rather that these conceptions were present as early as The Virgin  

U n m a s k ' d . Since this is a work of some 214 pages, and was published just 

shortly after The Tatler began, it is reasonable to assume that Mandeville wrote 

his book well before Steele's Tatler was first published. 

I will begin by analyzing the elements and significance of Mandeville's 

social theory, tracing the genesis of his ideas to show the consistency between his 

mature thinking and his earlier writing, and the traditions from which his ideas 

both emerged and diverged. Because Mandeville's satirical style sometimes 

makes it difficult to know when he is serious, I have tried to identify common 

themes throughout his work. It is impossible to appreciate Mandeville and the 

innovative nature of his ideas without an awareness of the social climate and 

circumstances within which he wrote. Therefore, a considerable portion of the 

first chapter is devoted to a review of the assumptions and conditions prevalent 

at the time and the reactions Mandeville's notions provoked amongst his 



12 

contemporaries. The second chapter is devoted to a discussion of the major 

tenent of Mandeville's social theory: mankind's egoism and the dominance of 

the passions, particularly pride, in all human interactions and endeavours. The 

third and final chapter begins with a review of the intellectual inheritance about 

women, and contemporary attitudes towards them, and then develops the major 

arguments of the thesis. 

M y purpose in examining Mandeville's attitudes towards women and 

women's issues is to demonstrate that his reflections on women are an 

important and neglected feature of his theorizing; one without which we miss a 

central element of his importance. Through his discussion of women, 

Mandeville reveals something important about his social and economic thought 

and gives us a valuable insight into early eighteenth-century moral, social and 

economic arguments. 



13 

C H A P T E R I 

T H E E L E M E N T S A N D SIGNIFICANCE OF MANDEVILLE'S SOCIAL THEORY 

Bernard de Mandeville (1670-1733) was born in Holland and studied 

philosophy and medicine at the University of Leyden. Graduating with the 

degree of Doctor of Medicine in 1691, he practiced as a specialist in nerve and 

stomach disorders, the "hypochondriack and hysterick passions" or "diseases".1 

Mandeville's admiration for Thomas Sydenham (1621-89), "the English 

Hippocrates," may have influenced his decision to visit England. 2 After 

travelling on the continent, Mandeville moved to London "to learn the 

Language" and "happen'd to take great delight" in it.3 Although he continued 

to practice medicine, writing occupied much of his life from then on. 

Not a great deal is known about Mandeville's adult life.4 In one of two 

known contemporary comments, Benjamin Franklin wrote that Mandeville was 

"a most facetious, entertaining companion."5 Although an entertaining 

companion and, in his own words, "a great Lover of Company,"6 he appears to 

have valued his solitude, where, surrounded by his books, he could lose himself 

in "Study and Contemplation."7 These brief glimpses of Mandeville as witty and 

charming, learned and thoughtful, are born out by his obituary. Published in K 

Berington's Evening Post. 23 January 1733, and Applebee's Original Weekly 

1 The Fable I, p xix, quoting from Mandeville's medical Treatise. 
2 Bernard Mandeville, The Virgin Unmask'd : or. Female Dialogues Betwixt an Elderly Maiden  

Lady, and her Niece, On Several Diverting Discourses on Love. Marriage. Memoirs, and Morals,  
Etc.. (London, 1709), with an introduction by Stephen H. Good, ed., (New York: Scholars' 
Facsimiles & Reprints, 1975), p. iii. Page references in the text are to Good's edition. 

3 The Fable I, p. xix, quoting Mandeville's Treatise (1730), p. xiii. 
4 Thomas Home says that the most complete account of Mandeville's life can be found in Kaye's 

introduction to The Fable. Home, The Social Thought of Bernard Mandeville. p. xi. 
5 The Fable I, p. xxix. 
6 Ibid. Kaye quotes from a comment by Philopirio, Mandeville's spokesman in The Fable I, p. 

337. 
7 The Female Tatler, November 2,1709. 



14 

Tournal, 27 January 1733, the notice extolled him as a man of "an extensive 

Genius, uncommon Wit, and strong Judgment" who was "well skill'd in many 

Parts of Philosophy, and a curious search into Human Nature; which 

Accomplishments rendered him a valuable and entertaining companion."l 

"One of the most successful authors and widely famed men of his day, 

(whose) works were selling not only by editions but literally by dozens of 

editions,"2 Mandeville wrote over a dozen works in English between 1703 and 

1733. His literary career began quietly with a translation of Some Fables after the  

Easie and Familiar Method of Monsieur de la Fontaine (1703).3 The following 

year, he published ten additional verse fables as AEsop Dress'd; or, a Collection of  

Fables Writ in Familiar Verse.4 The first book-length translation into English of 

La Fontaine's fables, this collection contained two of Mandeville's own verses, 

"The Carp" 5 and "The Nightingal and the Owl."6 Following Aesopic tradition, 

each fable is followed by a short moral which sums up its message. The style is 

similar to that of another of Mandeville's works published anonymously the 

1 The Fable I, pp. xxix/xxx. 
2 Ibid., p. xxv. 
3 Mandeville had published three works prior to leaving Holland: Bernardia Mandeville di  

Medicina Oratio Scholastica. Rotterdam, (1685): Disputatio Philosophica de Brutorum  
Operationibus, Leyden, (1689); Disputatio Medica Inauguralis de Chylosi Vitaita, Leyden, 
(1691). The Fable I, p. xxx. Goldsmith claims that Mandeville's first published work appears 
to have been The Pamphleteers: A Satyr (London, 1703), "a clearly Whig work". Goldsmith, 
Private Vices, Public Benefits, pp. 28 & 91. 

4 Bernard Mandeville, AEsop Dress'd: or, a Collection of Fables Writ in Familiar Verse. 
(London, 1704). 

5 There is some disagreement over whether or not this fable is Mandeville's own. Paul Bunyan 
Anderson claims that "The Carp" was published earlier in Some Fables after the Easie and  
Familiar Method of Monsieur de la Fontaine. Anderson, "Splendor Out of Scandal," p. 423. 

6 Horne, The Social Thought of Bernard Mandeville, p. 26. There is also some disagreement about 
whether or not this is Mandeville's own fable. Anderson claims that "The Nightingal and the 
Owl" was also published in Some Fables. Anderson, "Splendor.Out of Scandal" p. 291, n.7. 
However, when Mandeville presented the fable in The Female Tatler, (Wed. Feb.22,1710), he 
called it "a Fable of English Growth." But in his next contribution he printed another fable, 
"The Wolves and Sheep," not credited as his own, which, he says, came from the same 
collection as "the Carp." 



15 

following year, "a sixpenny quarto" (I: xxxiii) of twenty-six pages, The Grumbling  

Hive: or. Knaves Turn'd Honest.1 The Grumbling Hive, a "short bit of doggerel, 

written in Hudibrastic verse, was a satirical attack upon the ideas and efforts then 

associated with the Societies for the Reformation of Manners,"2 which had 

sprung up in England in the 1690s. It was also, Issac Kramnick says, "a complex 

catalogue of all the corrupt individuals necessary for a flourishing society."3 This 

"general defense of corruption," Kramnick argues, answers a group of poets of 

the preceding fifteen years who had attacked luxury.4 The Grumbling Hive 

introduces themes that occupied Mandeville for the rest of his life, principally, 

his insistence on showing that it was their own egoism that tricked men into 

believing that moral virtues, such as honour, chastity and love for one's fellow 

man, were theirs by nature, not art and, further, that the kinds of behaviour they 

decried as being destructive to the body politic, prodigality, "that noble Sin,"5 

luxury, vanity, pride and all other things they labelled vices, were those which 

gave them "what they lov'd": a rich and flourishing society.6 

The Grumbling Hive now lay fallow for almost a decade until, in 1 7 1 4 , it 

reappeared as part of an anonymous book called The Fable of the Bees: or. Private  

Vices, Publick Benefits.7 The Fable was published separately in two parts. The 

first edition, published twice in 1714, consisted of the poem "The Grumbling 

1 Bernard Mandeville, The Grumbling Hive: or. Knaves Turn'd Honest. (London, 1705). 
2 Home, Social Thought of Bernard Mandeville. p, 7. 
3 Issac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole, 

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), p. 201. Kramnick writes that these "second rate 
poets" had produced a series of long moral poems between 1695 and 1710 arguing the corrupting 
power of money on all classes of society. Robert Hopkins argues that Kramnick has suggested 
the only really plausible motive for Mandeville's writing The Grumbling Hive. Robert 
Hopkins, "The Cant of Social Compromise : Some Observations on Mandeville's Satire", 
Mandeville Studies, Primer, ed., p. 169. 

4 Ibid. 
5 The Fable I, p. 25, quoted from "The Grumbling Hive: Or, Knaves turn'd Honest." 
6 Ibid., p. 27, quoted from "The Grumbling Hive: Or, Knaves turn'd Honest". 
7 Ibid., p. xxxiii. 



16 

Hive: or, Knaves turn'd Honest" (1705), followed by a prose commentary, "An 

Enquiry Into the Origin of Moral Virtue," the work's most radical and influential 

part,1 and twenty "Remarks" expanding on the themes in the poem. In 1723 a 

second edition was published, expanding the "Remarks" and adding "An Essay 

on Charity & Charity Schools" and "A Search into the Nature of Society." 

Further editions appeared in 1724, 1725, 1728, 1729 and 1733. In 1728 The Fable of  

the Bees, Part II, was issued, amplifying and defending the first part. In the first of 

its six dialogues, Cleomenes, Mandeville's spokesman, recommends The Fable 

to his antagonistic friend, Horatio, and entreats him to "Yield something to our 

Friendship, and condescend for once to read 'the Fable of the Bees'...It's a 

handsome Volume" (II: 57). At the very end of the last dialogue, his friend, now 

won over, confesses, "I am your Convert, and shall henceforth look upon 'the 

Fable of the Bees' very differently from what I did; for...there is certainly more 

Truth, and Nature is more faithfully copied in it almost every where" (II: 356). 

The Fable lays out Mandeville's larger thesis. If social virtue forms the 

basis of civil societies 2 , the "great Ends" of which are mutual happiness and 

more comfortable conditions of life 3 , then, ironically, this virtue must be 

founded, not on selflessness, benevolence or natural affection for one another,4 

but on self-interest5 or "Pride", "the hidden Spring, that gives Life and Motion to 

all [men's] Actions."6 The Fable expands on the metaphor of a bee-hive. 

1 Hundert, "The Thread of Language and the Web of Dominion: Mandeville to Rousseau and 
Back," Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 21, no. 2, (Winter 1987/8), p. 172. 

2 The Fable II, p. 75. 
3 Ibid., p. 46. 
4 Ibid., p. 183. Mandeville insists that "this pretended Love of our Species, and natural Affection 

we are said to have for one another...is neither instrumental to the Erecting of Societies, nor 
ever trusted to in our prudent Commerce with one another." 

5 Mandeville argues that self-interest is composed of two passions, self-liking and self-love. All 
actions, he claims, are motivated by self-interest. The Fable II, pp. 129-136. 

6 The Fable II., p. 79. 



17 

Mandeville lists some of the many inventions, activities and talents found in a 

prosperous kingdom, "Engines, Labourers, Ships, Castles, Arms, Artificers, Craft, 

Science, Shop or Instrument" (I: 18), and shows how all are the result of 

prodigality and luxury. A l l citizens, rounder or respectable, who make up that 

kingdom, are "Knaves," not only "Sharpers, Parasites, Pimps, Players, Pick-

pockets, Coiners, Quacks, South-sayers," (I: 19) but also "the grave Industrious 

were the same" (I: 19). Lawyers, physicians, government ministers, priests and 

soldiers are as worthy of the name "Knave" as the rest, for "All Trades and Places 

knew some Cheat, No Calling was without Deceit" (I: 20). Unlike many of his 

contemporaries who similarly described this state of affairs and pronounced it 

evil, Mandeville knew it and pronounced it good: "Thus every Part was full of 

Vice, Yet the Whole Mass a Paradise" (I: 24). 

Between the publication of The Grumbling Hive and The Fable, 

Mandeville published other important works, both for an understanding of his 

developed thinking and of his arguments about women in particular. 

Mandeville's first prose work in English, The Virgin Unmask'd: or. Female  

Dialogues Betwixt an Elderly Maiden Lady, and her Niece, O n Several Diverting  

Discourses on Love, Marriage, Memoirs, and Morals, Etc., was published in 1709 

and reprinted in 1724. The Virgin Unmask'd is an insightful commentary on 

English society and politics at the turn of the eighteenth century in which 

Mandeville discusses a variety of topics ranging from fashions (V., 2-7), marriage 

portions (V., 34-5), jointures (V., 43) and childbirth (V.,119-122), to politics (V., 

157, 173), government finance (V., 138), the class structure (V., 163-65) and the 

aesthetic merits of different languages (V., 170-71).1. In dialogue form, Lucinda, 

1 Good argues that this work, Mandeville's "most racy", is and "early and experimental work in 
which may be seen the seeds of much that was to develop in later works." The Virgin  
Unmask'd, intro., p. iii. 



18 

an older, wiser woman, instructs her niece, Antonia, in the arts of the world. 

Mandeville may have deliberately chosen the title as "a sucker trap"1 to lure 

unsuspecting buyers into assuming it was a pornographic work,2 since it bears a 

close resemblance to an earlier erotic work, A Dialogue between a married lady  

and a maid, published in 1688.3 Indeed, a prospective buyer, browsing through 

the book's first few pages, finds Lucinda chastising her niece for "going bare-

ass'd" (V., 3) and telling her, knowingly, that "tis the Heat of your Blood, your 

Wantonness, and Lascivious Thoughts, 'tis they, that are the Cause of all your 

immoderate Behaviour" (V., 2). 

The Virgin U n m a s k ' d is not in fact a pornographic titillator, but an 

exposition of the themes first seen in The Grumbling Hive and expanded later in 

The Fable. Mandeville's distinctive approach is evident throughout the book. 

Always the diagnostician of secular society, he is concerned to show the futility as 

well as the difficulty of judging the results of our actions by the motives which 

prompt them. Lucinda, Mandeville's spokesman, demonstrates this dilemma. 

After describing in detail the life of a nobleman of ancient family and the benefits 

the many dependant on him received because of his largesse, the following 

exchange takes place: 

1 David Foxon, "Libertine Literature in England, 1660-1745", The Book Collector, vol 12, no. 3, 
(Autumn, 1963), p. 296. 

2 See Vichert, "Bernard Mandeville's The Virgin Unmask'd"; Goldsmith, Private Vices, Public  
Benefits, p. 80. Goldsmith refers to Vichert's discussion of this tradition. David Foxon also 
discusses this tradition. Foxon's work, in three parts, traces the history of pornographic 
writing. Foxon says that the Ragionamenti of Aretino. a realistic and satirical view of the 
lives of women in different occupations, printed in 1534 and 1536 and first collected in a London 
edition of 1584, established the form - a dialogue between an older and younger woman - which 
remained the norm for at least 150 years. Foxon, "Libertine Literature in England, 1660-1745," 
p. 164. 

3 Vichert argues that by "an initial Mandevillian irony the unsuspecting male book-buyer is 
tricked into anticipating a work of pornography. Vichert, "Bernard Mandeville's The Virgin 
Unmask'd," p. 1. Mandeville's intended audience for this work was not limited to males. 



19 

Lucinda: and don't you think now Niece, that this Noble-man had a 
tolerably good Relish? 

Antonia: I think so well of him, that I wish you could help me to 
such a Husband. 

Lucinda: Take Care you don't repent....the Bottom of all this was 
Pride! 

Antonia: Yet it was commendable, as long as so many receiv'd the 
benefit of it (V., 179). 

Brutally cutting away Antonia's illusions and social delusions, Lucinda forces 

her to see herself and others, not as they appear or would want to be seen, but as 

they really are. Throughout the work, Mandeville repeatedly shows that "all is 

not Gold that glitters" (V., 73)1: actions which may be judged as virtuous proceed 

from base motives, while actions conventionally judged as vile have 

consequences beneficial to society. 

The Virgin Unmask'd does not seem to have made much of a stir when it 

was published. Indeed, it was not until 1724, the year after The Fable was 

reprinted in an enlarged edition and really began to attract attention,2 that it was 

even reprinted. In the same year in which The Virgin Unmask'd was first 

published, a new periodical, The Female Tatler, printed its first issue on 8 July, 

1709. The popular periodicals which proliferated at the beginning of the 

eighteenth century, "the newest and most original form of literary publishing," 

perhaps best illustrate the prevalent ideas of the period.3 Inspired by a similar 

periodical, The Tatler. first published on 12 April, 1709 by Richard Steele, The 

1 Mandeville repeats this homily in Part II of The Fable, writing "all is not Gold that glisters." 
p. 61. 

2 The Fable I, p. xxxiv. 
3 Goldsmith, "Mandeville and the Spirit of Capitalism", p. 72; Anderson 'Splendor Out of 

Scandal", p. 286. According to Anderson, periodicals were "most fruitful in bringing new 
experience into manageable shape." 



20 

Female Tatler satirizes and closely parallels Steele's publication.1 Just as the first 

edition of The Tatler promises, "Whatever men do, or say, or think, or dream, 

Our medley Paper seizes for its theme" (Tatler, 12 April, 1709), so the supposed 

author of The Female Tatler, a Mrs. Crackenthorpe, promises in the first number 

that she too is "a Lady that knows everything" (F.T., 8 July, 1709). Unlike Steele's 

publication, which ridicules and chastises people publicly for transgressions that 

Steele deems improper, Mrs. Crackenthorpe vows to be "very Careful, unjustly 

or ungenteely, not to reflect upon any Person whatsoever." Nonetheless, she 

parodies Steele, promising "gently to correct the Vices and Vanities which some 

of Distinction as well as others, wilfully commit" (F.T. 8 July, 1709). The first 52 

editions of The Female Tatler, alternating days with The Tatler, were published 

every Monday, Wednesday and Friday by Mrs. Crackenthorpe; but on 2 

November, 1709, she retired from the scene, and the remaining issues were 

"Written by a Society of Ladies": Lucinda, Emilia, Araballa, Rosella, Artesia and 

Sopronia.2 

1 Richmond P. Bond, The Tatler: The Making of a Literary Journal, (Cambridge: Harvard 
University Press, 1971), pp. 196-7. Bond claims that "from the first paper to the last the 
derivative character of the periodical was obvious." 

2 Anderson established that the "ladies", Lucinda and Artesia, were, in fact, Mandeville, and 
argues eloquently that The Female Tatler presents Mandeville's "characteristic thinking on 
the topics with which he continued to be concerned for the rest of his life." Although he found 
no "external evidence to connect Dr. Bernard Mandeville with the Female Tatler," he argues 
that the internal evidence is inescapable. "The Lucinda-Artesia papers are of one piece 
throughout: four or five years earlier than the prose remarks of The Fable of the Bees-.they 
present Mandeville's characteristic thinking." Anderson, "Splendor Out of Scandal", p. 299. 
Thirty years later, Gordon Vichert, in an attempt to spare future scholars the labour of 
checking Anderson's work, published an article in the Quarterly verifying Anderson's claim . 
Vichert writes that Anderson's argument is devoted to pointing out the similarity in thought 
between the Lucinda-Artesia papers and Mandeville's acknowledged works. While this 
"internal evidence...is overwhelming," Vichert claims "there is external evidence as well." He 
refers to the reprinting of three of Mandeville's verse fables in the papers, and the printing of 
the poem "On Honour" two years before its appearance in Mandeville's miscellany collection, 
Wishes to a Godson. Gordon Vichert, "Some Recent Mandeville Attributions," Philological  
Quarterly, xiv, II, April 1966, pp. 459-63. 



21 

In the first edition of The Tatler, Steele explained that his periodical was 

designed to entertain 'the fair sex', in whose honour he has invented the title.1 

But Steele's paper has another and ultimately, to Mandeville, more disturbing 

objective than just entertaining the ladies. Through example, public ridicule and 

exposure of those whose behaviour he finds offensive, Steele seeks to enforce 

norms of conduct which Mandeville finds both hypocritical and harmful.2 

Steele warns his readers that, from time to time, he intends to "print bills of 

mortality," and "all such who are named therin, if they...are good for nothing 

shall find themselves in the number of the deceased."3 Having thus given fair 

warning to all "good for nothing[s]" in the first issue, in later numbers Steele, in 

the guise of the priggish Squire Bickerstaff, aligns himself with his "friends and 

fellow-labourers," members "of the Society for Reformation of Manners."4 The 

purpose of the Society, begun in 1690, was to suppress profaneness and 

debauchery, "abominable impieties [which] had overspread the nation."5 In the 

forty years after its inception, the Society calculated that it prosecuted about 

101,683 persons in or near London. 6 Both the Society and Steele's Tatler were 

favourite targets of Mandeville's, and both have been credited with providing 

him with the incentive for writing the Lucinda-Artesia papers.7 

1 The Tatler. in Three Volumes, vol. 1, Edinburgh, Robert Martin, MDCCCXLV, No. 1. 
2 See Dario Castiglione, "Considering Things Minutely: Reflections on Mandeville and the 

Eighteenth-Century Science of Man," History of Political Thought VII, 3 (Winter, 1986), pp. 
463-488. 

3 Ibid. 
4 The Tatler, No. 3, note, p. 14. 
5 Horne, The Social Thought of Bernard Mandeville, quoting from Edward Stephens, The 

Beginning, and Progress of.Reformation (1691). p. 1. 
6 The Tatler, No. 3, p. 14. 
7 Horne comments that it seems appropriate for Mandeville to use The Tatler as a foil because it 

symbolized much of the effort to convert England to more polite manners. Horne, The Social  
Thought of Bernard Mandeville, p. 9. Horne also points out that many of the later editions of 
The Female Tatler were directed against the reform movement. Ibid., p. 28. Anderson credits 
Steele's "superficial thought" with stimulating Mandeville's interest in using The Female  
Tatler to compel his readers to examine both themselves and human nature. Anderson 
"Splendor Out of Scandal," pp. 287/8. 



22 

Other catalysts which might have prompted Mandeville to become one of 

"The Society of Ladies" have been suggested, including his concern with the 

political and religious tension created by Dr. Henry Sacheverell's notorious 

sermon on passive obedience delivered in Saint Paul's cathedral on 5 

November, 1709.1 The most fully developed thesis about Mandeville's motives 

for writing the Lucinda-Artesia papers, and their subsequent importance to the 

development of his theories on society and politics, however, comes from 

Goldsmith. Mandeville's original formulation of his views, Goldsmith argues, 

was inspired by and directed against Squire Bickerstaff, Steele's persona in The  

Tatler.2 Like Anderson,3 Goldsmith argues that Mandeville's theory of society 

was first presented in the satirical attack on Bickerstaff put forward by the The  

Female Tatler's Oxford gentleman.4 It is these ideas, he claims, reworked into a 

single social theory, that are propounded in The Fable of the Bees.5 

Another, very important influence on Mandeville was Anthony Ashley 

Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury. Although not mentioned directly by 

Mandeville until his essay "A Search into the Nature of Society" (I: 323), 

1 H.J. Dickinson, "The Politics of Bernard Mandeville," Mandeville Studies, Primer, ed., p. 87. 
Unless Mandeville was prescient, Sacheverell's speech, delivered three days after 
Mandeville's first contribution, could not have prompted him to join The Female Tatler. A 
month later however, Mandeville wrote a satirical announcement in the paper advertising a 
soon to be published sermon, The Case of Passive Obedience, preached in the "Chief Mosque of 
Constantinople in the Christian Times, call'd St. Sophia...By Sache-ali-Verello, A Seditious 
Priest, that having no other Merits, would fain have dy'd a Martyr for the Cause, but was 
preserved by the Lenity of th/Successors. Translated by a Non Juror". The Female Tatler, 5 
December, 1709. 

2 Goldsmith, Private Vices. Public Benefits, p. 55. Like Goldsmith, Anderson also believes 
Steele to be Mandeville's opponent. Anderson claims that in The Female Tatler, Mandeville is 
practicing periodical journalism rather than philosophical controversy and that his natural 
opposite is not Shaftesbury, but Steele. Anderson, 'Splendor Out of Scandal," p. 297. 

3 Anderson claims that the fullest expression of Mandeville's social vision is found in issues no. 62 
and 64 of The Female Tatler. Anderson, "Splendor Out of Scandal," p. 297. 

4 Goldsmith, Private Vices, Public Benefits, p. 49 & 58. 
5 Ibid., pp. 58 & 77. 



23 

Shaftesbury's "lovely System" (II: 44) draws Mandeville's scorn both here and in 

Part n, where he satirizes Shaftesbury's "System" of social virtues in the first 

dialogue and rejects his account of morality and social virtue as innate and 

originating in the other-regarding sentiments mankind has for one another. 

Mandeville's criticism of Shaftesbury centered on the latter's insistence on 

calling "every Action perform'd with regard to the Publick Good, Virtuous; and 

all Selfishness, wholly excluding such a regard, Vice" (I: 324). This scheme, and 

Shaftesbury's moral absolutism, are diametrically opposed to Mandeville's 

moral relativism. Unlike Mandeville, who argues that morality, like artistic 

standards and fashions, is culturally determined,1 Shaftesbury "looks upon 

Virtue and Vice as permanent Realities that must ever be the same in all 

Countries and all Ages" (I: 324). Mandeville uses suicide to illustrate his 

argument that morality is not the same everywhere for everyone. Although 

self-murder is a "heinous crime" to a Christian, he argues "it ought not to be 

considered so to a Heathen who has been taught it by his most venerated 

philosophers" (F.T., 3 Feb., 1710). Mandeville contrasts Shaftesbury's argument 

to his own and criticizes his naivety in imagining 

that a man of sound understanding, by following the Rules of good 
Sense, may not only find out the Pulchrum & Honestum, both in 
Morality and the Works of Art and Nature,2 but likewise govern 
him-self by his Reason with as much Ease and Readiness as a good 
Rider manages a well-taught Horse by the Bridle (I: 324). 

Mandeville is very clear about their incompatibility, commenting that two 

systems "cannot be more opposite than his Lordship's and mine" (I: 324). With 

1 The Fable I. p. 324. See Kaye's note. 
2 Home, The Social Thought of Bernard Mandeville. p. 44. Horne points out the intimate 

connection in Shaftesbury's own mind between a moral and an esthetic sense, his siding with 
those who argued that art has a moral purpose. It is an argument Mandeville rejected. The  
Fable II, p. 33. 



24 

tongue-in-cheek praise of Shaftesbury's "generous and refined" notions (I: 324), 

Mandeville concludes, "What Pity it is that they are not true...that the Solidity of 

them is inconsistent with our daily Experience" (I: 324). 

There are a number of similarities between Mandeville's attack on 

Shaftesbury's moral and aesthetic absolutism in The Fable, published in 1723, 

where he argues that "what is called Beautiful...varies according to the different 

tastes of Nations and Ages," (I: 328) and his argument in The Virgin Unmask'd 

that there are no absolute aesthetic criteria because "Fashions and 

Customs...have alter'd with the Times" (V., 3). The close parallel between this 

and his statement in The Fable that "What is admired or approved of will 

change, as Modes and Fashions alter and Men vary in their Tastes and 

Humours" (I: 326), demonstrates that at least some of the ideas behind his 

criticism of Shaftesbury, put forward after 1720,1 were integral to his arguments 

long before that. 

In addition to The Virgin Unmask'd, The Female Tatlers and The Fable, 

Mandeville wrote one other work important to this paper. In 1724 he published 

an anonymous essay, Modest Defense of Publick Stews: or. A n Essay Upon  

Whoring, As it is now practis'd in these Kingdom's. "Written by a Layman," it 

expands on "Remark H" from Part I of The Fable and, with Mandeville's 

characteristic sarcasm, is addressed to the "Gentlemen of the Societies," whose 

"Endeavours to suppress Lewdness, have only serv'd to promote it" (M.D. ii). 

The treatise, designed "to promote the general Welfare and Happiness of 

Mankind" (M.D. 1), proposes the establishment of a chain of whorehouses 

throughout the kingdom, stocked with just enough women to satisfy the sexual 

1 Home argues that Shaftesbury did not become Mandeville's adversary until the 1720s. Home, 
The Social Thought of Bernard Mandeville. p. 33. 



25 

needs of the male population. These public stews would not only prevent the 

seduction of young virgins (M.D. 10) and preserve the chastity of many women 

(M.D. 50, 56/63), they would also keep men free from venereal disease and 

benefit the economy by allowing men to satisfy their sexual urges without 

wasting precious time and energy, better spent on business, wooing and seducing 

virtuous women into moral sin and economic and social ruin (M.D. 22-25). 

Like The Grumbling Hive and The Virgin Unmask'd, Modest Defence of  

Publick Stews illustrates Mandeville's penchant for exposing men's pretences. 

As he explains in the introduction to Part 1 of The Fable, "most Writers are 

always teaching Men what they should be, and hardly ever trouble their Heads 

with telling them what they really are" (I: 39). Sometimes brutally, sometimes 

gently, but always wittily, Mandeville persists in stripping away illusions, 

demonstrating that morality, like fashion, depends on the mores of a particular 

society, and that many practices, such as whoring, considered moral offences, are 

in reality only social ones.1 Virtues and vices are nothing more than those acts 

which society deems to be either beneficial or harmful. But herein lies the 

paradox of the Grumbling Hive and The Fable: for if the qualities identified as 

virtues are to be encouraged and those identified as vices discouraged, then the 

flourishing society all enjoy will wither and die. 

Mandeville's portrayal of the bee-hive as a microcosm of human society, 

where "These Insects liv'd like Men, and all Our Actions they perform'd in 

small" (I: 18), was not original.2 The Roman fabulist Phaedrus, who translated 

1 Bernard Mandeville, Modest Defence of Publick Stews: Or, An Essay Upon Whoring as it is now  
practis'd in these Kingdoms. 0-ondon, 1724), p. 8. 

2 For example. Sir Humphrey Mackworth, in England's Glory, (London 1694) wrote "The more 
the merrier....like Bees in a Hive, and better Cheer, too." pp. 20-23. Quoted in Joyce Appleby, 
"Ideology and Theory: The Tension Between Political and Economic Liberalism in Seventeenth-
Century England," The American Historical Review, vol. 81, no. 3, Oune, 1976), p. 507. See also 



26 

and imitated the fables of Aesop, wrote a fable of the bees that may be the source 

of a number of La Fontaine's fables which Mandeville employed, including that 

of the wasps and the bees.1 Yet Mandeville's use of the bee-hive as a metaphor 

for society is remarkable "for the new [and, to his own generation, startling] 

pattern he made out of [these] old materials."2 The orthodox view in the late 

seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was that without vice the world 

would be a better place. Virtuous societies were believed to be those where 

benevolence and love for one's fellow-man flourished and vices such as sloth, 

lust, avarice, pride and prodigality were vigorously policed. Mandeville insists 

that this view of human nature and society is an elaborate fiction. He 

persistently points out that if men will examine themselves and "think on the 

Cause" (V., 88) of their actions, they will find that "When People are too Lazy, or 

fearful to undertake anything, they are praised for being Contented, and the 

Effects of Avarice are often called Temperance and Sobriety" (V., 73). Not 

content to have men examine their motives and "judge of every Thing 

according to the Merits" (V., 130), he declares that there can be no merit in their 

motives, only self-interest. Mandeville insists that societies as we know them 

need vice and, moreover, that not only are all actions in these societies the result 

of base motives, but "that the public benefits existed not in spite of, but because 

of, the private vices."3 

Roseann Runte, "From La Fontaine to Porchat: The Bee in the French Fable," Studies in 
Eighteenth-Century Culture, 18,ed., J.W. Yolton and L.E. Brown, pp. 79-90, for a useful 
discussion of the bee as metaphor and image in early-modern Europe. 

1 J.A.W. Gunn, "Mandeville and Wither: Individualism and the Workings of Providence", 
Mandeville Studies, Primer, ed., p. 99. Gunn claims that Phaedrus was probably Mandeville's 
source of inspiration for writing his fable. English examples of other works that draw social 
conclusions from the life of bees can be found in W.H. Greenleaf, Order, Empiricism and Politics 
(London, 1964), p. 24. 

2 Basil Willey, The Eighteenth Century Background, (London: Chatto & Windus, 1940), p. 95. 
3 Ibid. 



27 

Mandeville's Fable received spectacular attention in recently altered social 

circumstances. J.G.A. Pocock argues that the period after the Revolution of 1688 

was one of change and development in some ways more radical and significant 

than even those of the Civil War and Interregnum.1 The arrival of William III, 

with his continental interests, meant that English troops and money were 

committed to a series of major continental wars. The problem of raising money 

to support this quasi-permanent enlargement of the standing army forced the 

government to develop new financial institutions, particularly the Stock Market, 

the National Debt and the Bank of England, which revolutionized not only the 

government and the way it could conduct its affairs, but the shape of English 

society itself. In 1693, the first English Loan was floated, and in 1694, "the great 

Engines we had then to move (our Trade and our War) under a great scarcity of 

money, to keep them agoing" gave rise to the establishment of the Bank of 

England. 2 By the end of the seventeenth century, England was a leading trading 

nation, and the wealth generated by trade provided a ready source of revenue 

that government was able to tap through these new institutions. The creation of 

new forms of wealth through the expansion of commerce into the West Indies 

and North America, and technical innovation among the merchants and traders 

of London, resulted in a significant redistribution of wealth to new groups.3 

London lawyers, government officials, and particularly merchants who had 

made their fortunes in commerce,4 had money to invest in these new 

institutions, which "were essentially a series of devices for encouraging the large 

1 J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 
423. 

2 J. Broughton, The Vindication and Advancement of our National Constitution and Credit- 
Attempted in Several Tracts, (1710), [Goldsmith, Kress Collection], p. 25. 

3 P.G. M . Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A study in the Development of Public  
Credit, 1699-1756, (Toronto: The MacMillan Company, 1967). p. 4. 

4 H.J. Habakkuk, "English Landownership, 1680-1740", The Economic History Review, vol. x, no. 
1, (Feb.,1940), p. 3. 



28 

or small investor to lend capital to the state, investing in its future political 

stability and strengthening this by the act of investment itself, while deriving a 

guaranteed income from the return on the sum invested."1 This new "monied 

interest", overwhelmingly London-based,2 became increasingly powerful as the 

government became more and more dependant on its members for the capital 

needed to wage war.3 

Wealth did not just stoke the engines of war, however. The marketing 

strategy of the East India Company managers, "equal to Macy's in the twentieth 

century," stimulated a fashion craze that created a "revolutionary force".4 By 

demonstrating the elasticity of demand, the East India Company provided 

domestic defenders of spending with a new paradigm, the citizen as consumer, 

driven by what Joyce Appleby calls the "propulsive power of envy, emulation, 

love of luxury, vanity and vaulting ambition."5 

Although benefiting the government and its investors, these new 

financial institutions and consumer demands nonetheless caused deep anxiety 

and concern. The financial institutions, not relying on land, the traditional 

source of wealth and power, created a new and threatening form of wealth, 

public credit. More and more, money came to be obtained on the security of 

1 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, p. 425. 
2 W.A. Speck, "Conflict in Society," Britain After The Glorious Revolution: 1689-1714. Geoffery 

Holmes, ed., (London: Macmillan & Co., 1969), p. 145. Speck says it is at this time that the 
term "the City" began to be used to describe the business section of the capital. 

3 Ibid., p. 142. War was expensive. Geoffrey Holmes calculates that the cost of conducting the 
wars against France during the reigns of William Ul and Anne was 130 million pounds. 
Geoffrey Holmes, 'Introduction: Post-Revolution Britain and the Historian," Geoffrey Holmes, 
ed., Britain after the Glorious Revolution. 1689-1714. p. 22. 

4 Appleby, "Ideology and Theory,"pp. 503/5. 
5 Ibid., p. 505. See also The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth- 

Century England, Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, J. H. Plumb, eds., (Bloomington: Indiana 
University Press, 1982). 



29 

remote revenues and ultimately on confidence alone.1 Although many of the 

large investors were the peers of the realm, a group that Roy Porter characterizes 

as being, by 1709, "collectively fabulously wealthy," these peers were a very small 

group.2 Below the peers in the social order, the squires, far from being rich, were 

caught in a vicious squeeze of land taxes, poor crops and the cost of emulating 

the peers who indulged in "an orgy of consumption."3 With their income 

derived almost solely from their land, squires had little money to invest and 

were thus unable to take advantage of the new financial devices and 

opportunities.4 Frozen out by "the great landlords who maintained their pre-

eminence by means of an unshakeable grip on political power,"5 many of the 

squires were left behind, becoming relatively poor and politically disaffected. By 

1709, the conflict between the "landed interest," who derived their revenues 

almost solely from rents and land, and the "monied interest," whose income 

came from "the new machinery of public credit," trade, government spending 

and the new financial institutions, had reached critical proportions.6 

To understand Mandeville's effect on his contemporaries, and the 

intensity of feeling generated by the conflict, it will help to reconstruct Pocock's 

1 Speck, "Conflict in Society," p. 142. 
2 Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century. (London: Penguin Books, 1982), p. 74. It 

is calculated that something in the order of 26% of the national income was in the hands of only 
6.5% of the population, composed of the aristocracy and gentry, lawyers, civil servants, 
merchants and sea-traders. W.A. Speck, "Mandeville and the Utopia Seated in the Brain," 
Mandeville Studies, Primer, ed., p. 70. 

3 Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 75-82. Joyce Appleby argues that the 
rich landowners spent rather than invested their income. Appleby, "Ideology and Theory", p. 
500. 

4 The burden of taxation, which fell most heavily on landowners, meant that they lacked 
capital. This was compounded from the 1690s to 1709 by the disastrous frequency with which 
poor harvests occurred. 1709 saw the biggest crop failure of the period. This cycle of crop 
failure, taxation and lack of revenue meant that land-owners did not have capital to invest. 
Speck, "Conflict in Society," pp. 139-142; Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 
81/2. 

5 Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century, p. 75. 
6 Speck, "Conflict in Society," p. 149. 



30 

argument in The Machiavillian Moment about the relationship between the 

notion of civic virtue and the polity. Pocock argues there was a historical 

progression from a morality founded on real property to one founded on mobile 

forms of wealth.1 At the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the 

eighteenth centuries, the archetypical landed gentleman, living exclusively on 

his rents, independent of any outside agency and therefore immune to venal 

corruption, was still the ideal of the virtuous citizen. Practicing frugality because 

he was anxious to improve his estate for inheritance, it was thought that he 

would engage in civic actions for public rather than private interest.2 To a 

society equating civic or public good with private virtue, and both with careful 

financial management, a revived "ethic of frugality"3 took on added significance. 

The citizen, corrupted by luxury, would be distracted from seeking the public 

good. The only way the nation's liberty could be preserved, and its decline into 

moral corruption, despotism and barbarity prevented, it was argued, was by 

promoting both public and private virtue.4 

Once public credit entered the political arena, and it became possible to 

increase wealth through means other than ownership of real property, the entire 

concept of public virtue was threatened. Although the agrarian values of landed 

independence and rural stability remained constants in the social perceptions of 

the period, the reality was that ownership of land came to depend more and 

more on trade and credit. But, as often happens in times of rapid change, there 

was a lag between what was deemed acceptable moral behaviour and social and 

economic realities. The great debate between the "landed" and the "monied" 

1 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, p. 441. 
2 Ibid., p. 445. 
3 Ibid., p. 464. 
4 Goldsmith, "Mandeville and the Spirit of Capitalism", p. 70. 



31 

interests in the early eighteenth century was conducted by the journalists and 

publicists of the day. Although champions of the monied interests, court writers 

like Addison and Steele were pitted against the landed interests or country 

ideologists. Pocock argues that even they never dreamed of denying that land 

was substantially what its partisans said it was: the foundation of civil virtue and 

society.1 Nor, he continues, did they challenge the concept that private virtue 

and frugality were necessary to ensure a strong 'Body Politick'.2. 

To his contemporaries, Mandeville's doctrines seemed to threaten both 

the secular and the religious assumptions from which virtuous citizens were 

held to be a prerequisite for virtuous states.3 By his insistence that "Nothing is 

more beneficial to the Publick than the Prodigal, or more immediately 

detrimental than the Miser, yet both are Vices, without which the Society could 

not subsist" (F.T., 25 Nov., 1709), Mandeville drew the wrath of his 

contemporaries who believed that vice, particularly prodigality, threatened the 

very existence of the nation. Mandeville alone in this period openly argues that 

conventional moral and social thought are inconsistent with the contemporary 

economic goals of the state.4 Championing "the ethic of self-interest" 5 over the 

ethic of private virtue and frugality, put forward by men like Steele and Addison, 

and those in the Societies who sought to enforce traditional norms of conduct, 

1 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, p. 446. Goldsmith claims that "for Augustans, public virtue 
and private virtue were connected; private vices were not the sole concern of private men for 
they were causally linked with civic corruption." Goldsmith, "Public Virtue and Private 
Vices," p. 480. 

2 The Fable I, 347. Mandeville says that "by Society I understand a Body Politick, in which Man 
either subdued by Superior Force, or by Persuasion drawn from his Savage State, is become a 
Disciplin'd Creature that can find his own ends in Labouring for others, and where...each 
Member is render'd Subservient to the Whole, and all of them by cunning Management are made 
to Act as one." 

3 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, pp. 441-6. 
4 Home. The Social Thought of Bernard Mandeville. p. 51. 
5 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, p. 464. 



32 

Mandeville not only insists that some vices "are so necessary to the State, that no 

Nation can be Great without them," but also claims "that to wish for a 

flourishing Trade, and the decrease of Pride and Luxury is as great an Absurdity, 

as to pray for Rain and Dry Weather at the same time" (F.T., 30 Nov., 1709).1 

Mandeville argues that no private action, however odious, which 

contributes to the public good, can be considered a vice; it must on the contrary 

be regarded as a virtue precisely because of its beneficent effects. In his Modest  

Defence of Public Stews, he argues at great length that "if a Publick Act, taking in 

all its Consequences really produces a greater Quantity of Good, it must, and 

ought to be term'd a good Act; altho' the bare Act, considered in itself, without 

the consequent Good, should be in the highest Degree wicked and unjust" (M. 

68/9). Not only must individual acts be considered good if their social effects are 

positive, but even "wicked" laws, if they produce public benefits, must also to be 

deemed good: "we may in Confidence affirm," he writes, that "no beneficial Laws 

can be sinful" (M. 68/9). Although his Female Tatlers were only speaking of 

moral virtues, not Christian ones, "as it is not the Business of Tatlers to meddle 

with Religious Matters" (F.T., 3 Feb., 1710)2, in The Fable Mandeville draws on 

1 Mandeville was not alone in recognizing the close relationship between rich and powerful 
nations and pride and luxury. Others, including Defoe, reached the same conclusion before him. 
Lovejoy claims that in the thought of late seventeenth and early eighteenth century writers, 
approbativeness or love of praise, the desire to be well thought of, came to be widely accepted 
as "the sole subjective prompting of good conduct, the motive of virtually all the modes of 
behaviour necessary for the good order of society and the progress of mankind." Arthur O. 
Lovejoy, Reflections On Human Nature. (Baltimore: Joseph Hopkins Press, 1968), p. 157. Both 
Dudley North, who, in 1691, wrote that "the main spur to Trade, or rather to Industry and 
Ingenuity, is the Exorbitant Appetites of Men," and John Houghton, who, ten years earlier, had 
written that "our High-Living, so far from Prejudicing the Nation,...enriches it," recognized 
the economic advantages that accrue to a nation from pride and vanity. Sir Dudley North, 
Discourses Upon Trade (1691), quoted in McKendrick, p. 14; John Houghton, A Collection of  
Letters for the Improvement of Husbandry and Trade (1681), quoted in McKendrick, 
"Commercialization and the Economy," The Birth of a Consumer Society, p. 15. 

2 Mandeville may have been deliberately distancing himself from "Religious Matters" to ensure 
that the ecclesiastical courts could have no jurisdiction over The Female Tatler. Foxon points 



33 

the authority of religion to support his position that whatever produces good 

must be deemed to be good. "God, in his infinite wisdom, could not make errors 

or mistakes," he argues, "and therefore, every human scheme or act must be part 

of God's design; and if they are part of God's design, as it follows they must be, 

and God is all good, then all the actions committed by his design must be good" 

(U: 256). 

Mandeville's importance within a broad range of speculation in the early 

eighteenth century about the impulses which propel individuals to seek private 

gain is that he was one of the first to offer a thorough-going psychological 

analysis of the difficulty of self-knowledge and the stratagems employed by 

individuals in heightened commercial societies to hide these passions from 

themselves.1 His claim that virtue and public spiritedness are incompatible with 

a rich and flourishing nation and that passion, in the form of pride, must be 

encouraged rather than combatted (II: 119) in order to promote wealth, is a lesson 

Mandeville probably learned from La Rochefoucauld, Pierre Nicole, 2 La 

Fontaine, Jacques Esprit and, most of all, Pierre Bayle.3 Like them, he rejects the 

idea that society derives from anything other than the actions of self-interested 

individuals, and finds absurd the belief that communities cohere either because 

of men's natural sociability or because of their ability to act in strict accordance 

with moral rules.4 

out that "a general offence against morals...was a matter for the ecclesiastical courts." Foxon, 
"Libertine Literature", p. 30. 

1 Kaye says that Nicole, Fontenelle, Abbadie, and J.F. Bernard were writers who announced the 
pains of introspection somewhat in Mandeville's spirit. The Fable II, p. 107, n.2. 

2 Mandeville refers directly to Nicole in his discussion of Courage in Remark R of The Fable, p. 
213. 

3 Home, The Social Thought of Bernard Mandeville. pp. 31. 20-25. Malcolm Jack credits 
L'Abbadie, LaPlacette, Rochefoucauld and Bayle as Mandeville's French antecedents. Jack, 
"Progress and Corruption in the Eighteenth Century," p. 375. 

4 Home, The Social Thought of Bernard Mandeville, pp. 22/3. 



34 

Mandeville's insistence that all publicly-beneficial acts derive from egoism 

and self-interest, and that "if the most publick spirited Man in the Universe will 

be pleased strictly to examine himself, he will find that he has never committed 

any Action deliberately but for his own sake" (F.T.#80.), is similar to ideas 

expressed by Bayle, to whom he admitted a particular debt.1 Bayle, a Huguenot 

who fled France for Holland, stressed the importance of egoism in the analysis of 

human action and provided Mandeville with a full-bodied approach to moral 

relativism and a social justification for luxury.2 Bayle taught in Rotterdam at 

the same time as Mandeville was attending the Erasmian school there and may 

have been his teacher.3 Bayle's Pensees Diverses Sur La Compte (1683),4 

originally published when Mandeville was in his teens, was translated into 

English in 1708, the year before Mandeville published The Virgin Unmask'd. It 

is possible that Mandeville read Bayle's Continuation des pensees diverses 

(1704), which explicitly propounds the principle of the utility of luxury.5 Indeed, 

there is a striking similarity between Mandeville's ideas about the social origins 

of moral values and Bayle's, and a similarity of both to Epicurus, an explicit 

source of Bayle's arguments. Like Mandeville, Bayle argues that moral values 

are culturally determined. 

Car s'il est vrai que les persuasions generales de l'esprit ne sont pas 
le ressort de nos actions, et que c'est le temperament, la coutume, 

1 Mandeville refers directly to Bayle at different times in his work. For Example, The Fable I, p. 
167. 

2 Home, The Social Thought of Bernard Mandeville. p. 96. 
3 Popkin speculates that Bayle was Mandeville's teacher at the Erasmian school. Richard H. 

Popkin, "Isaac de Pinto's Criticism of Mandeville and Hume on Luxury," Studies on Voltaire 
and the Eighteenth Century, ed. by Theodore Besterman, vol 154, (1976), p. 1705, n.2. J.E. 
Labrouose, Bayle, (The Hague: M . Nijhoff, 1964), vol. II, p. 117, n.50. E.D. James and Home 
claim there is no evidence that Mandeville and Bayle ever met. E.D. James, "Faith, Sincerity 
and Morality: Mandeville and Bayle," Mandeville Studies, p. 44; Home, The Social Thought 
of Bernard Mandeville. p. 28. 

s x f 
4 Pierre Bayle, Pensees Diverses Sur La Comete. Edition Critique Avec Une Introduction & Des 

Notes, A. Prat., vol. I & II, (Paris: Librairie & Droz, 1939). 
5 See Bayle's Pensees Sur la Comete. II, pp. 100/01. 



35 

on quelque passion particuliere qui nous determine, il peut y avoir 
une disproportion 6norme entre ce que Ton croit, et ce que Ton 
fait.i 

Moreover, both credit the fear of worldly reproach as the greatest "Bulwark of 

Morality" (M.D., 17) and honour "qu'il y a d'hommes qui surmontent la crainte 

de la mort, la plus violente de toutes les passions, par la crainte de l'infamie."2 

Both Bayle and- Mandeville lay special stress on pride and vanity in the process of 

social interaction. Like Mandeville, Bayle not only suggested that vices can 

motivate the same acts as virtues, but also concluded that a society, in order to 

prosper, must rely on vices alone. 

II faut done dire, que c'est l'amour propre, cette passion inseparable 
de notre nature, qui nous rend avares. Car cette maudite passion 
nous faisant trouver du plaisir a tout ce qui flatte nrJtre vanife, a 
tout ce qui nous distingue des autres hommes, a tout ce qui nous 
peut procurer l'accomplissement de nos desirs, a tout ce qui nous 
peut servir de rempart contre les maux que nous craignons, nous 
porte a desirer ardemment d'avour du bien, parce que nous 
esperons de trouver tous ces avantages-la dans la possession des 
richesses.3 

Mandeville employed Bayle's central arguments about human 

motivation in the service of a wholesale critique of conventional moral 

assumptions within advanced economies. It was in this way that his "economic 

rationalism and moral cynicism"4 posed a threat to contemporary self-

understanding. By insisting on a direct relationship between vice (or "Evil both 

Natural and Moral") and "a Populous, Rich and Flourishing Nation," (I: 325) and 

on the relativity of moral virtues,5 Mandeville was "held to rival Machiavelli 

1 Ibid., p. 119. 
2 Ibid- p. 81. 
3 Ibid-pp. 100/101. 
4 McKendrick, "Commercialization and the Economy," p. 16. 
5 For an example of his argument on this see The Fable I, pp. 327-330. 



36 

and Hobbes as the Father of Lies."1 His economic and social theory, fully 

developed in The Fable of the Bees, was found morally intolerable by the 

majority of his contemporaries, who saw codes of moral behaviour as essential 

elements of the workings of the social scheme. As Kaye remarks in his 

introduction to The Fable, the most considerable thing about Mandeville's 

adversaries is their numbers (II: 4). His book was criticized by contemporaries as 

ill-written and incoherent, the style as mean and pitiful, the language as 

barbarous and the humour as low (II: 5). It was declared a public nuisance by the 

Grand Jury of Middlesex2 and burned by the public hangman in Paris.3 

Unlike Defoe and others among his contemporaries who justified vice in 

trade as an economic but not a moral virtue, Mandeville contended that what 

was commonly understood as vice was both. By seeking non-moral explanations 

for the evolution of society and its ability to provide individuals with goods and 

services, he "banished virtue from our consideration of government,"4 and 

sought to transform "Private Vices" into "Publick Virtues." It was this doctrine 

that earned Mandeville the enmity of his contemporaries. His insistence that 

emulative spending was not only necessary to the economic well-being of the 

nation, but instinctive in mankind's nature, was held to threaten the social 

order, draining the estates of the aristocracy, whose bills for luxuriant living 

would even further outstrip their incomes, and blur class distinctions with every 

1 James Redwood, Reason, Ridicule and Religion: The Age of Enlightenment in England, 1660- 
1750, (London: Thames & Hudson, 1976), p. 87; see also Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, p. 
465; and McKendrick, "Commercialization and the Economy," p. 16. 

2 Fable I, Introduction, xxxiv. 
3 Hundert, "Mandeville to Rousseau and Back," p. 182. The Fable was bumed by the public 

hangman in 1740. On 27 July, 1709, an abusive letter addressed to Lord C appeared in the 
London Journal, to which Mandeville replied two weeks later. This reply, together with the 
letter and the Grand Jury's presentiments, was reprinted in all subsequent editions of The Fable. 
The Fable, p. xxxiv. 

4 Horne, The Social Thought of Bernard Mandeville, p. 75. 



37 

level of society seeking to emulate the one above it.1 Orthodox Christian social 

assumptions ensured that the search for wealth and luxury, qualities long held to 

be vices by the Christian churches, would be vociferously denounced. 

Mandeville, while acknowledging the traditional Christian virtues, at the same 

time championed the traditional Christian vices, arguing that these virtues were 

incompatible with a rich and flourishing society. Why would men act 

virtuously, he asked, if all they would receive is the pleasure of doing it, "which 

most people reckon but poor Pay" (I. 222). Dorante, Mandeville's villain in The  

Virgin Unmask'd, a thoroughly despicable character, jibes at the moralists who 

would own that "bare Virtue" is worth nothing, "for telling us that it is its own 

reward, is as much as they would say be Virtuous as long as you live and you'll 

get nothing but your labour for your pains" (V., 64). Similarly, in The Female  

Tatler, Mandeville's Oxford Gentleman, admitting that "the certainty of a future 

State, makes it the Interest of every individual Person to be Virtuous," argues 

contrarily that "Humility, Temperance, Contentedness, Frugality, and several 

other Virtues, are very insignificant as to the Publick, and so far from making a 

Country Flourish, that no Nation ever yet enjoy'd the mosts ordinary Comforts 

of Life, if they were not Counter-ballanc'd by the opposite Vices" (F.T. 25 Nov., 

1709). 

This is the counter-balance that Mandeville proclaimed as his paradox of 

"private vices, publick benefits." National prosperity depended on what 

orthodox opinion viewed as individual depravity. In this way, Mandeville 

extended a paradox previously identified by La Rochefoucauld: "Thus in the 

same way that poisons, properly mixed, can help make up medicine, the vices of 

1 Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century, p. 69. 



38 

men can help make up their virtues."1 Mandeville's contemporaries were 

neither ready nor willing to swallow the medicine he prescribed for them. 

While the increased trade and commerce brought about by the consumption of 

luxury goods conspicuously benefited the state by increasing its power, and 

everyone from the king to the clergy, tradesmen to soldiers, revelled in their 

own display of finery and equipment, popular opinion still denounced luxury as 

evil in itself and corrupting in its effects.2 

1 Maxime No. 83, quoted in Home, The Social Thought of Bernard Mandeville. p. 24. See also 
Lovejoy's transl. of maxim #182 in Reflections On Human Nature, p. 40. Hirschman argues that 
La Rochefoucauld dissolved the passions and almost all virtues into self-interest. Hirschman, 
The Passions and the Interests, p. 42 and p. 11. 

2 The Fable I, pp. xcvi/vii. 



39 

C H A P T E R II 

PRIDE A N D T H E CIVILIZING PROCESS 

The study of the passions is central to Mandeville's analysis of mankind 

and society. For Mandeville, the well-spring for men's actions and, indeed, 

society itself can be traced directly to what Lovejoy calls men's emotive and 

appetitive, as distinct from their intellectual and cognitive, side.1 Mandeville 

argues, a posteriori, that from self-liking, the primary passion, all of the other 

passions may be accounted for (U: 175/6). Distinguishing between self-liking, the 

primary passion, and self-love, the passion in which all other passions are 

centered, he claims that the latter is given to all for self-preservation,2 while the 

former, since one cannot love what one does not like, ensures it (II: 129-136). 

Together, these two passions lead one to act always from self-interest. Self-love 

is "the Law of Nature" (I: 200); self-liking, innate in "Human Nature" (II: p.91), is 

the source of pride (U: 131). 

In his analysis of the passions, Mandeville concentrates upon a 

commonly-addressed theme. His rejection of the traditional Christian view that 

a good society requires morally virtuous individuals, and his acceptance of 

approbativeness or pride as the primary cause, not only of materially wealthy 

societies, but of society itself, is similar to that of his acknowledged intellectual 

predecessors, the French 'moralists' of the seventeenth century, who questioned 

the belief that society resulted from anything other than the manipulation of 

1 Lovejoy, Reflections on Human Nature, p. 144. 
2 The quality identified as self-love by Mandeville in Part I of The Fable acts o n u s because "we 

are all Lovers of Self Preservation and would naturally avoid whatever we think troublesome 
or hurtful." Self-liking, identified in Part II of The Fable acts as a balance to self-love. 
Because we are all great admirers of praise and desire to be thought well of by others, we 
temper our otherwise socially harmful tendencies. The Female Tatler, 6 Jan., 1710. 



40 

men's passions.1 Almost obsessively, these analysts of human nature tried "to 

reduce most of the other 'passions' to one or another of the forms of 'pride' to 

show it to be the true explanation of actions which those who performed them 

supposed to spring from quite other motives, to trace its workings in the most 

various situations of social life, and to exhibit it as the force which keeps every 

vocation going, except those which serve the primary physical needs of food and 

shelter."2 The desire for praise, that craving for admiration or applause, came 

widely to be accepted as men's primary motive in social conduct, and the only 

prompt for behaviour necessary for the good order of society and the progress of 

mankind. 3 

A keen observer of the stratagems employed by men, "not only to deny the 

high Value they have for themselves, but likewise, to pretend that they had 

greater Value for others, than they have for themselves" (II: 145, 150), 

Mandeville suspected their sincerity (II: 16). He was intent on showing that 

benevolence, humanity and other "social virtues" at the heart of orthodox moral 

reasoning in fact are the products of 'Pride' or 'Vain-glory' (II: 65), rather than 

any innate, other-regarding sentiments of mankind for one another.4 

Mandeville delights in pointing out what he calls men's "Contrarieties" (II: 136), 

and demonstrating that everything attributed to virtue can in fact be reduced to 

the workings of 'Pride', "that one predominant Passion" (II: 75). It is 'Pride', 

innate and unalterable in "human Nature" (II: 91/2), that fosters rich and 

flourishing societies (V., 136; F.T., 30 Nov. 1709). Increased and influenced by a 

1 Home, The Social Thought of Bernard Mandeville, pp. 22/3. 
2 Lovejoy, Reflections on Human Nature, p. 141. 
3 See Lovejoy, Ibid., p. 157. 
4 Mandeville illustrates how pride simulates "Love of our Species, and natural Affections": The  

Fable II, p. 183. He satirizes Shaftesbury's 'lovely System' of social virtues in the first 
dialogue of Part II of The Fable, p. 44. 



41 

"refin'd Education" (II: 91), managed and concealed by an "artful" one (II: 79), 

pride is the means whereby men are taught to "play the Passion against itself" (II: 

125), thus appearing to place public good over private interests. 

In The Virgin Unmask'd. The Female Tatler and The Fable of the Bees, 

Mandeville illustrates, in increasingly detailed ways, how pride, "a Passion, that 

is not to be gratify'd without being conceal'd, and never enjoy'd with greater 

Ecstasy than when we are most fully persuaded, that it is well hid" (II: 99), fosters 

society by its very contrarieness.1 Posing the question of whether rich and 

flourishing societies can arise from "that Instinct of real Affection...without 

Ambition or the Love of Glory," rather than from "a staunch Principle of Pride 

and Selfishness, acting under Pretence to, and assuming the Resemblance of, that 

Affection" (II: 259),2 he argues that they can not. If genuine affection existed in 

the world, it would destroy pride and selfishness, and thus have "prevented the 

very Existence of that Pomp and Glory, to which human Societies have been, and 

are still raised by worldly Wisdom" (II: 260). In The Female Tatler, the Oxford 

gentleman, Mandeville's spokesman, explains his position on the development 

of society. 

As to the saying, that 'Man is a Sociable Creature', it is very true, but 
generally misunderstood, for it means not that Human Creatures by 
some good Quality or innate Virtue peculiar to themselves, Esteem 
their own kind and love one another's Company more than other 
Animals; for in that Sense it is utterly false, but it signifies, that by 
multiplicity of their Wants as well as Appetites...the vast Love 
every one of them has for himself...they are of all Animals the only 
Species, of which even the greatest Numbers may be made 

1 Mandeville gives a detailed description of pride's contrarieness and the ways in which it 
benefits society. Mandeville, The Virgin Unmask'd, pp. 174-80. In his first contribution to The  
Female Tatler. he discusses the necessity for pride and honour in civil society. The Female  
Tatler. 2 Nov., 1709. 

2 Mandeville argues that man pretends to act from "Principles of Social Virtue." The Fable II, 
109/110. 



42 

Subservient to one another, and by Skilful Management, compose a 
lasting Society (F.T., 25 November, 1709). 

Not only are private virtues the result of sheer self-interest, but so too are 

civic virtues such as honour and courage, selflessness and love of country. 

Honour, beholden to our frailties, is"the tye of Society" (I: 218).1 Mandeville 

argues that there is no virtue, at least that he is acquainted with, "that has been 

half so instrument to the civilizing of Mankind" as honour (I: 218). Together 

with wisdom and fortitude, sublime qualities of man, honour, "separated by Art 

from the Dregs of Nature," has been "exhalt'd and refin'd into a Spiritual 

essence" by "the fire of Glory" (I: 105).2 In The Female Tatler. Mandeville, using 

a technique he often employs to demolish an argument, has the brave Colonel 

Worthy, "newly return'd from Flanders...a Man of undaunted courage," (F.T., 2 

Nov., 1709)3 lay out the civic humanist position on the need for virtuous citizens 

in a state (F.T., 6 Jan., 1710). Worthy commends himself to the company in the 

room as "a M a n of Honour," who says nothing but "what is of an 

unquestionable Truth." He holds forth about the glory of martial men and states 

with the conviction that nowhere can a man distinguish himself better than in 

the service of his country, where "his maintaining himself there Voluntarily 

upon his own Charge, bespeakes him to be Brave, to hate Idleness and to love his 

own Country" (F.T., 6 Jan., 1710). With characteristic Mandevillian irony, the 

brave Worthy, not wanting to hear his adversary's counter argument, flees the 

1 Mandeville used this metaphor previously in The Female Tatler. referring to honour as "the tie 
of Civility." The Female Tatler. 2 Nov., 1709. 

2 Hirschman argues that spokesmen for the chivalric, aristocratic ideal made this striving for 
glory and honour into the touchstone of men's glory and greatness. During the Renaissance, he 
claims, the striving for honour achieved the status of a dominant ideology. La Rochefoucauld 
challenged this ideology and showed all the heroic virtues to be forms of self-love. Albert O. 
Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its  
Triumph, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 10/11. 

3 Goldsmith points out that courage is a virtue particularly appropriate to landed gentlemen. 
Goldsmith, Private Vices, Public Benefits, p. 134. 



43 

scene before the Oxford Gentleman can reply with a succinct summary of 

Mandeville's theory of the role of the passions as socializing agents. "Mankind 

is a strange Compound," he explains, "made up of Qualities that contradict each 

other" (F.T., 6 Jan., 1710). The need for praise and the desire to be well thought of 

by others counterbalances the harmful effects of mindlessly pursuing one's own 

self-interest to the detriment of society. By showing that it is not selflessness or 

concern for public welfare that is innate to man, but rather self-interest, 

Mandeville here begins the construction of a theory of civil society whose motor 

force is the desired ends of self-interested individuals.1 

How can self-interested individuals, who, like planets, are little worlds 

unto themselves, concerned only with their own happiness and with avoiding 

whatever they think troublesome or hurtful (I: 178), be made to subdue their 

own self-interest? How can men who, of all species of animals, "without the 

Curb of Government" are "less capable of agreeing long together in Multitudes" 

(I: 41), be brought together in societies, where they need to substitute for their 

own self-interested acts those beneficial to the community? As Lovejoy frames 

the question, "how, by means of what political device, could you bring creatures 

whose wills were always moved by irrational and "depraved" passions to behave 

in ways which would not be inconsistent with common good?"2 The device 

Mandeville selected to account for self-interested individuals cooperating for the 

good of society, Lovejoy argues, was "counterpoise", the balancing of one passion 

by another, while Albert O. Hirschman argues instead that Mandeville spoke of 

1 Hundert argues that for Mandeville, the "motives of purely self-interested actors are a 
necessary feature of any satisfactory account of social organization." Hundert, "Bernard 
Mandeville and the Rhetoric of Social Science," p. 311. 

2 Lovejoy, Reflections on Human Nature, p. 41. 



44 

"harnessing" the passions, transforming them through the civilizing medium of 

"society".1 

Regardless of whether we understand Mandeville's solution to the 

problem of controlling the passions to be the notion of "counterpoise" or that of 

"harnessing", for at different times he argues each view, 2 Mandeville's 

conception of this dilemma directly bears upon a long line of moral argument.3 

The notion of one passion counteracting another derives from Augustine (354-

430 A.D), who denounced three principal sins of fallen man: lust for money and 

possessions, lust for power, and sexual lust.4 The only one of the three for which 

Augustine found any extenuating circumstances was lust for power. Augustine 

cautiously endorses the possibility that lust for power, combined with a strong 

desire for praise and glory, could create "civil virtue",5 and here he conceives "of 

the possibility that one vice may check another."6 

Lovejoy has shown that the general revival of Augustinian theology, 

particularly in seventeenth-century France, and importantly in Bayle's work, was 

1 Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests,, p. 16. Hirschman identifies three different 
solutions which emerged for restraining men's destructive passions in the interests of the state: 
repressing and harnessing the passions were two solutions suggested; the third, the concept of 
the countervailing passions, anticipated utilizing one set of comparatively innocuous passions 
to countervail another more dangerous and destructive set or, perhaps, to weaken and tame the 
passions in internecine fights. Ibid., pp. 14-20. 

2 In The Virgin Unmask'd. Mandeville uses the countervailing solution, arguing that only a 
stronger passion can counteract another. The Virgin Unmask'd, p. 83. However, I would agree 
with Hirschman that his theory of how men can be brought to subdue their self-interest in the 
interest of society did not so rely on the passions being pitted one against another, thus 
neutralizing them, as on their being transformed or channeled into something else. Hirschman, 
The Passions and the Interests, pp. 16-18. For examples, see Mandeville, The Fable II, p. 125; 
and I, p. 140-146; 200-206; 55. 

3 Lovejoy, Reflections on Human Nature, p. 41. Lovejoy argues that the framers of the American 
Constitution believed that one could use the method of counterpoise as a political device to 
bring creatures whose wills were always moved by irrational and "depraved" passions to 
behave in ways which would not be inconsistent with the "common good". 

4 Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests, p. 9. 
5 Ibid., p. 10. 
6 Ibid. 



45 

Mandeville's point of entry into this tradition, whose most influential 

eighteenth-century exponent he became.1 Like Bayle, Mandeville argues that 

neither the might of government nor the fear of the hereafter are sufficient to 

cause men to restrain their destructive passions for the benefit of society. This is 

the crucial insight upon which Mandeville develops his argument. In his 

introduction to Part I of The Fable, Mandeville explains that he believes 

"Man...to be a compound of various Passions, [and] that all of them, as they are 

provoked and come uppermost, govern him by turns, whether he will or no" (I: 

39). Later, he gives an example of how this works in his discussion of the 

transformation of "the Passion...call'd Fear" (I: 200), "the only useful Passion.that 

Man is possess'd of toward the Peace and Quiet of a Society" (I: 206), into courage, 

when displaced by anger (I: 205). Mankind, Mandeville argues, brings nothing 

with him into this world but his passions. Just as his courage derives from fear, 

so too does his "Tendency to Religion" (I: 55). "Fear" is the passion that first 

gives men an inkling of an invisible power (I: 55). In the same way that men are 

taught by governors to harness their passions to counterfeit social and civic 

virtues, so too are they taught to counterfeit moral and religious virtues: 

hypocrisy passes for religion; avarice for frugality; pity for charity (I: 254/5).2 

Mandeville uses the example of that "darling Passion, Lust" (I: 145), to illustrate 

how politicians, "the Artful Moralists", by flattering men's pride and increasing 

their self-esteem on the one hand, and inspiring them "with a superlative Dread 

and mortal Aversion against Shame" one the other, contribute to the civilizing 

1 See Lovejoy, Reflections On Human Nature, pp. 170 &179; and E.D. James, "Faith, Sincerity and 
Morality: Mandeville and Bayle," Mandeville Studies, Primer, ed., pp. 43-65. 

2 The social virtues are the only ones Mandeville categorizes specifically. The lines of division 
between the others are fuzzy. Bayle argues, in Pensees sur la Comete that a society of atheists 
can be just as moral as a society of Christians. 



46 

process by teaching men the arts of concealment and disguise. Neither religion 

nor superstition, traditionally held to be the bulwarks of moral behaviour, 

put Man upon crossing His Appetites and Subduing his dearest 
Inclination, but the skilful Management of wary Politicians; and the 
nearer we search into human Nature, the more we shall be 
convinced, that the Moral Virtues are the Political offspring which 
Flattery begot upon Pride (I: 51). 

If men, proud, lustful and self-seeking by nature, do not cohere from 

"some good Quality, or innate Virtue peculiar to themselves," (25 Nov., 1709) and 

yet are able to live together in civil societies, then there needs to be some means 

of channeling their behaviour to society's "great Ends" (JJ: 46): mutual happiness 

and a more comfortable condition of life. Mandeville's moral relativism is at the 

heart of his theory of civil society, a term he is one of the first to use.1 He argues 

that men are taught to value certain characteristics, labelled and lauded as virtues: 

selflessness, self-sacrifice and love for fellow-men, honour, courage and fortitude; 

and to condemn others, labelled and reviled as vices: selfishness, self-interest, 

pride, lust, and prodigality. Mandeville employs the ancient Lucretian device of 

the skilful politician or "Lawgiver"2 to illustrate the means whereby men might 

have come, by slow degrees, from a state of nature, where "it is inconsistent with 

the Nature of Human Creatures that any number of them should live together in 

tolerable Concord without Laws or Government" (II: 309), to their present, 

civilized state. 

The use of the metaphor of the skilful politician or lawgiver enables 

Mandeville to animate a theory which explains how "that marvelous 

1 The whole thrust of Mandeville's work is to explain how "civil Society", which "consists in 
great Multitudes of both Sexes, that widely differing from each other in Age, Constitution, 
Strength, Temper, Wisdom and Possessions, all help to make up our Body Politick," came to be. 
The Fable II, p. 46. 

2 See Hundert, "Mandeville to Rousseau and Back," pp. 173-77. 



47 

metamorphosis of destructive 'passions' into 'virtues'" might actually have 

taken place. 1 Recognizing the evils of the purely natural state, "Lawgivers and 

other wise men" (I: 42), slowly and through the ages, "by Skilful Management 

compose a lasting Society" (F.T., 25 Nov., 1709).2 But to do this, they had to 

"make the People they were to govern, believe, that it was more beneficial for 

every Body to conquer than indulge his Appetites, and much better to mind the 

Publick than what seem'd his private interest" (I: 42).3 Thus 'lawgivers' must 

consider two main points, "what things will procure Happiness to the Society 

under their Care" and, "what Passions and Properties there are in Man's Nature, 

that may either promote or obstruct this Happiness" (II: 275). What they found, 

Mandeville argues, when they examined the motives behind mankind's actions, 

is that self-interest is the governing human property, and pride is the primary 

human passion, "the hidden Spring, that gives Life and Motion to all his 

Actions" (II: 79). Men must be taught to practice "the Golden Rule,"4 that all-

encompassing maxim of morality and, by experience and imitation, learn to 

"conceal the high Value they have for themselves" (II: 145). They do this by 

conversing with one another. In this way, they learn the "many useful Cautions, 

1 Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests, p. 17. 
2 Ibid., p. 18. In a note, Hirschman points out that it has been convincingly argued by Rosenberg 

that by "Dextrous" (or "Skilful") management, Mandeville did not mean detailed day-to-day 
intervention and regulation but rather the slow elaboration and evolution, by trial and error, of 
an appropriate legal and institutional framework. Rosenberg, "Mandeville and Laissez-
Faire," pp. 183-196. 

3 For an elaboration of Mandeville's theory of the role of the "Lawgiver", see Lovejoy, 
Reflections on Human Nature, p. 172. Lovejoy argues that Mandeville used this feature of his 
account of the genesis of moral virtues merely as a literary artifice and that there was a long 
tradition behind its use. Mandeville's more frequent emphasis, Lovejoy claims, is upon the 
desire to be admired and praised by others, but because Mandeville regards being admired and 
praised as an insubstantial, and unreal, value, he tends to use his account of the method of 
moral education as a further means of satirizing his race and of representing man to himself as 
an irrational, ridiculous, and self-deceiving creature. Ibid., p. 177 Malcolm Jack, citing 
Lovejoy, says that the invention of the lawgivers' must be read allegorically and not 
literally. Jack, "Progress and Corruption in the Eighteenth Century," p. 372. 

4 As Mandeville explains, men "naturally will not do, as [they] would be done by." The Fable II, 
p. 271. 



48 

Shifts, and Stratagems" (II: 139) that enable them to behave more tolerably to one 

another (II: 145).1 

The subtlety of Mandeville's argument about how self-interested 

individuals can be manipulated to live together in harmony, each conquering 

his appetites and subduing his own private interest for the public good, involves 

a little known feature of his thought, his interest in language "as a vehicle of 

socialization".2 In his discussion of the importance of rhetoric in Mandeville's 

social and moral theories, E . J. Hundert draws attention to Mandeville's 

argument that it is through public speech "that a very considerable, if not the 

greatest part of the attribute (of sociability) is acquired" (II: 189 )3. If individuals 

are to be manipulated into "crossing [their] Appetites and Subduing [their] 

dearest Inclinations," they must be convinced that they will receive greater 

reward by doing so than they would by indulging their natural inclinations. The 

reward offered in exchange for "the Violence, which by so doing they of necessity 

must commit upon themselves," is public approbation in the form of "Praise", 

through the "bewitching engine" of "Flattery" (I: 42: II, 92). By exploiting the 

desire for esteem, both one's own and that of others,4 "wise Men" and 

"Lawgivers", through the seduction of speech, make men believe that praise is a 

worthy substitute for other more tangible rewards.5 

1 See The Fable II. pp. 139; 189; 191; 211. 
2 Hundert, "Mandeville to Rousseau and Back," p. 170. 
3 Ibid., pp. 170-172. Hundert argues that Mandeville's location of the origin of language in men's 

need to express their wants and their will did not arise from any serious epistemological 
interests on his part, but rather as a supplement to his interest in the development of social 
relationships. 

4 By pride, Lovejoy argues, Mandeville meant two things, a craving to be able to think well of 
oneself; and a craving to be well thought of, chiefly as an aid to the former. Lovejoy, 
Reflections on Human Nature, pp. 180/81. 

5 Hundert, "Mandeville to Rousseau and Back," p. 173. Hundert also develops this idea in 
"Bernard Mandeville and the Rhetoric of Social Science." 



49 

Contrary to common understanding, Mandeville argues, individuals, 

following the "Rules of good Sense", cannot govern themselves with either ease 

or readiness (1:323). Fortunately, however, egoism, the corollary of pride, can be 

used to manipulate them into behaving in socially acceptable ways: "So silly a 

Creature is Man, as that, intoxicated with the Fumes of Vanity, he can Feast on 

the thoughts of the Praises that shall be paid his Memory in future Ages" 

(1:213/4). Three months after becoming a contributor to The Female Tatler, 

Mandeville explains "the Intent and Usefulness" of Tatlers. The "great Aim 

which the old Philosophers and all Moralists, both antient and modern, have 

ever had in view, is the Happiness of Society." They accomplish this, he claims, 

"by teaching every body to govern his own Affections," and in this way "they 

[make] all the Members tollerable one to the other, and consequently serviceable 

to the whole Body" (F.T. 17 Feb., 1710). If it is the business of philosophers and 

moralists "to reduce great numbers into a Society,"1 it is the business of Tatlers, 

similar to that of the ancient stage, "to make them a Civilis'd and Polite Society" 

(F.T., 17 Feb., 1710),2 to polish what the philosophers and moralists cut out 

roughly (Ibid.). 

Mandeville identified men's love of flattery or praise, proceeding not 

from any principle of virtue but from the vice of pride, as the quality in their 

nature by which they can be taught to behave in a way that fosters social 

harmony (F.T., 6 Jan., 1710). How this works is one of his more complex 

psychological arguments. The love of praise, which derives directly from self-

liking, is innate to all, but, paradoxically, acts which seem to be motivated by self-

1 See also The Fable II, pp. 128/9. 
2 Steele, on the other hand, claims that the theater should play a role similar to that of the 

philosophers and moralists. "It is not the business of a good play to make every man a hero," 
he observes, "but it certainly gives him a livelier sense of virtue and merit than he had when 
he entered the theatre." The Tatler. no. 99, (26 Nov., 1709). 



50 

interest, regardless of whether prompted by self-preservation, self-esteem or by 

the desire to gain the esteem of others, will not be praised. Only those acts which 

seem to originate from selfless motives will be deemed to be praiseworthy. Thus 

the only sure way to earn praise is to "take such uncommon Pains for some 

Publick Good, that no body can reasonably think the purchase of all the Praise in 

the World to be worth the trouble" (FT., 6 Jan., 1710). Only by acting in ways that 

belie their self-interest can men gain the praise of others; only those seemingly 

"virtuous" acts, which appear to stem from other-regarding sentiments or 

motives will earn the esteem of one's fellows. 

Here we encounter another of Mandeville's 'contrarieties'. Because pride 

is innate, the visible signs of it, either in countenance, mien or speech, are easily 

recognized by all; because men have been taught to take pride in counterfeiting 

good behavior in public (F.T. 2 Nov., 1709), subduing their own self-interested 

acts for those which appear to be in the public interest, acts that might betray self-

interest have been strictly prohibited, by common sense, in all societies (II: 125-

126). This 'contrarietie' causes men to go to extraordinary lengths to convince 

others that their acts are other-regarding. The effect of mankind's desire for 

approbation is integral to Mandeville's social theory. Pride, this "Principle of 

Self-Esteem" (II: 92), ensures that men will want to be well regarded by others (II: 

133) and to be able to think well of themselves; it makes them susceptible to 

manipulation by "Lawgivers and other wise Men" who, offering the proper 

rewards, "by skilful management compose a lasting Society" (25 Nov., 1709). As 

Hundert points out, "flattery was thus the 'bewitching Engine' used to tame men 

by encouraging within them a conception of self which has as part of its content 

the opinions of others. Once the arts of flattery 'insinuated themselves into the 

Hearts of Men,' and they were instructed in the rhetoric of honour and shame, 



51 

in the ideals of public service and the symbolic rewards of praise,"1 men would 

go to extraordinary lengths to convince others that their actions were not 

motivated by self-interest: 

He that would be praised, must at least seemingly recede from that 
first Principle, so as to make others believe that his own Benefit is 
not the only thing he aims at. This is the great Point where we are 
all cheat and are cheated by one another; if the most publick spirited 
Man in the Universe will be pleased strictly to examine himself, he 
will find that he has never committed any Action deliberately but 
for his own sake (F.T., 6 Jan., 1710). 

Left to its own devices, pride is either inconsequential or destructive to the 

harmony of society; but dexterously managed, it can be manipulated to make 

men solicitous of the welfare of others, placing the public over their private 

interests. Experience has taught us, Mandeville argues, that "tho' Pride was not 

to be destroy'd by Force, it might be govern'd by Stratagem" (I: 78\9). A n d the 

best stratagem for doing this is to play the passion against itself by teaching 

individuals to exult secretly in their ability to conceal their pride. Only this can 

compensate for the sacrifice of restraining compelling emotions (U: 125; 127/28). 

Horatio comments on the contrary nature of pride, musing that "it is very 

strange; that to encourage and industriously encrease Pride in a refined 

Education, should be the most proper means to make Men sollicitous in 

concealing the Outward appearances of it" (I: 125). Cleomenes, always the 

psychologist, explains that it would be impossible for "mortal strength" to 

endure the restraint "if Men could not be taught to play the Passion against itself, 

and were not allow'd to change the natural Home-bred Symptoms of it, for 

artificial Foreign ones" (U: 125). What Mandeville means by playing the passion 

against itself, is "placing a secret Pride in concealing the barefac'd Signs of it" (II: 

1 Hundert, "Mandeville to Rousseau and Back," p. 173. 



52 

125). The more the outward signs of pride are concealed, the more pride is 

heightened, and in this way 'Pride', "often most superlative, where it is most 

conceal'd" (II: 91), is encouraged, increased and influenced (II: 79, 91,125). 

One of the tenets of Mandeville's argument is that the civilizing process, 

by which "great Multitudes of both Sexes, that widely differing from each other 

in Age, Constitution, Strength, Temper, Wisdom and Possessions" (II: 46) are 

brought to live together in "civil Society" is dependant on "good Manners or 

Politeness" (II: 128). The origin of the "Art of good Manners...a Science that is 

ever built on the same steady Principle in our Nature" (U: 146), like the origin of 

all arts and sciences, Mandeville claims, is self-liking. Like all other arts, pride, 

working on human nature, makes improvements in good manners (II: 146). 

The importance that Mandeville places on politeness and good manners can be 

gleaned from the number of times he refers to it in his index in Part II of The  

Fable. 1 By allowing the display of those "Symptoms of Pride," which are 

offensive to one another if not camouflaged (II: 131), politeness provides men 

with an outlet through which they can express and gratify their pride in 

warrantable ways (II: 127). Since good manners have no other end than to "make 

ourselves acceptable to others, with as little Prejudice to ourselves as is possible" 

(II: 147), for the good order of society, and because those in whom pride has been 

most encouraged will be most likely to offend and be offended, men of politeness 

and good breeding learn at a very early age to conceal the objectionable signs of 

pride in themselves, while stoking the pride of others. The doctrine of good 

manners thus teaches individuals to substitute for offensive signs of pride, easily 

1 Politeness is not only discussed under its own listing, under headings such as "exposed", "the use 
of it," "seeds lodged in self-love and self-liking," "how it is produced from pride" and 
"philosophical reason for it"; but is listed under at least ten other subject headings in 
Mandeville's own index in Part II of The Fable. This point has been ignored by virtually all of 
Mandeville's commentators. 



53 

recognizable in language, looks, or gestures, other, more socially acceptable, signs 

which can be denied for being what they really are. A n d to reinforce the charade 

further, good manners and politeness not only forbid that the game be 

mentioned in polite company, but, more insidiously, combine with men's pride 

to deceive them into believing the masquerade. 

Men are born with the capacity to reason and think, Mandeville argues, but 

this capacity will not develop spontaneously in those who have not had time for 

leisurely reflection (V., 32; U: 190). Just as morals and society evolve slowly and by 

degrees, so too do thinking and reasoning. Thus, "those that have not been used 

themselves to thinking, but just on their present Necessities, make poor Work of 

it" (II: 190). Left uninstructed in rude nature, individuals are stupid and ignorant, 

but, in close association with one another, by conversing with others wiser than 

themselves, they learn to think abstractly (II: 211). For this reason, in cities and 

towns, "a Nursery which the Country People know nothing of" (F.T., 20 Jan., 

1710), men are better able to deduce abstract principles from concrete events than 

are those in more remote, less inhabited parts of a country (II: 190). But the 

preparation for this must begin in the nursery. Affection prompts mothers to 

feed and protect their children, but when people are poor and women have no 

leisure to play with their children, the children grow up to be stupid and ignorant 

(II: 189). 

Particularly aware as he is of the role and influence of language as a vehicle 

of socialization, Mandeville argues that conversation not only teaches men to 

think abstractly, but, more importantly for society,1 it persuades them to be polite 

1 Mandeville argues that the inventions and technologies that benefit society do not come from 
abstract reasoning and speculation but from practical application perfected through time: 
"They are very seldom the same Sort of People, those that invent Arts, and Improvements in 
them, and those that enquire into the Reason of Things." The Fable II, p. 144. 



54 

and well-mannered (II: 189). Since it is a universal characteristic of self-liking that 

"all untaught men will ever be hateful to one another in Conversation, where 

neither Interest nor Superiority are consider'd...because without a Mixture of Art 

and Trouble, the outward Symptoms of that Passion are not to be stifled" (II: 138), 

good breeding and good manners are necessary to inculcate in them the habit of 

flattering the pride of others while concealing their own. Once joined together in 

society, through conversing with one another, men learn to hide the "barefac'd 

Pride" which otherwise causes them to be so hateful to one another (II: 138). Only 

in this way do they learn to be sociable creatures (11:139; 189; 191; 211). Through 

the civilizing effect of speech and the joint experience of many ages, men learn to 

live together in societies, eventually coming to the rich and flourishing condition 

of contemporary commercial states (II: 139; 141). By everyone behaving in ways 

acceptable to all, "every individual Person is rendered more happy...in the 

Fruition of all the good Things he can purchase" (II: 147). Without the 

ameliorating influence provided by politeness and good manners, men would 

not be able to live long together without warring with one another. Although 

pride, through proper education, works to the benefit of society, when surpressed 

it turns to envy and malice, and becomes "the Cause of Cruelty" seen in mobs (II: 

131/32). Politeness and manners, by allowing an acceptable outlet for pride, 

enable men to live together in civil societies.1 

Mandeville is not arguing that politeness and manners are for everyone. 

His audience is not "the rude and unpolish'd Multitudes" (I: 136), who perform 

"the Drudgery of hard and dirty Labour (II: 259), but rather the "beau monde" or 

1 Mandeville's argument in defence of duelling is premised on the assumption that without the 
restraining effect of duelling, men would feel free to offend one another and to insult women. 
Thus, he argues, duelling contributes to polite society. The Fable II. p. 102; The Female Tatler, 
2 Nov., 1709. 



55 

"fashionable part of Mankind" (U: 259): ladies and gentlemen whose "chief Study 

and greatest Sollicitude, to outward Appearance, have ever been directed to 

obtain Happiness in this World" (II: 147; 16). Not interested in turning the 

whole population into "a Civilis'd and Polite Society," Mandeville directs his 

efforts towards those who, in his opinion, stand most in need of good manners 

and politeness, "the voluptuous Men of Parts, that will joyn worldly Prudence to 

Sensuality, and make it their chief Study to refine upon Pleasure" (II: 127). None 

benefit society more, because, he claims, it is their "Fickleness, and...restless 

desire after Changes and Novelty," that is the cause of "earthly Greatness" (II: 

260). Their contribution to society is civil society itself. 



56 

CHAPTER m 

THE ROLE OF WOMEN IN MANDEVILLE'S WORK 

1. The Inheritance 

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, ideas of women as lusty 

whores, scolding wives, trembling virgins, and nurturing and compassionate 

mothers competed with one another for prominence. The polarity between the 

traditional view of women as sexually and economically aggressive and self-

seeking, inherited from such widely divergent sources as Aristotle, the Bible and 

Juvenal's satires,1 and the Puritan view of women as companions and help 

meets to men,2 equal before God, resulted in an increasingly idealized view of 

women and marriage amongst Mandeville's contemporaries. At the same time, 

they retained the traditional misogynist mistrust of them.3 Dryden's translation 

of Juvenal's Sixth Satire on women, published in 1692, "the most sweeping of 

1 Mandeville was acquainted with Juvenal's Satires, quoting from Juvenal in The Fable II, p.277, 
n.l. Regina James divides "the traditional satires with their familiar Juvenalian topics -
feminine infidelity, luxury, vanity, pedantry, promiscuity, masculinity, and shrewdishness; 
and the serious writings on education and marriage meant to fit women to be better companions 
to their husband and mothers to their children." Regina James, "Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary, 
or, Mary Astell and Mary Wolstencroft Compared," Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture. 
Volume 5, ed. by Ronald C. Rosbottom, (The University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), pp. 121-139. 

2 Edmund Leites argues that the Puritans maintained a certain egalitarianism with respect to 
the relation between man and wife in moral matters; women were expected to concern 
themselves with their husband's moral and spiritual state. However, in all other matters, men 
and women were placed in a hierarchy: males to rule, females to follow. Edmund Leites, The  
Puritan Conscience and Modern Sexuality. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 15. 
Felicity Nussbaum claims that the effect of Puritanism on the status of English women defies 
easy clarification. It both improved the status of the sex and increased male authority over 
the family. Felicity Nussbaum, The Brink of All We Hate: Satires on Women, 1660-1750, 
(Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1984),pp. 12/3. 

3 Nussbaum argues that the period from the Restoration to the mid-eighteenth century in 
England witnessed a burgeoning of satires against women: "it may be that by the mid-
eighteenth century, the image of the ideal woman, virtuous and chaste, largely replaced the 
satiric myth of whore, infidel, and Amazon in literature. Such a paragon constitutes a new 
myth, one of a desexualized upholder of the social, domestic and religious order." Nussbaum, 
The Brink of All We Hate.p. 136. Marlene LeGates argues that although the emphasis shifts 
to the ideal of a virtuous woman, women are still perceived as inherently dangerous and 
disorderly. Marlene LeGates, "The Cult of Womanhood in Eighteenth-Century Thought", 
Eighteenth-Century Studies. 10,(1976), pp. 21-39. 



57 

classical anti-feminist satires,"1 like others of its time, kept alive an especially 

virulent legacy of anti-feminist assumptions and traditions, "the stereotypes of 

the vain coquette, the affected learned lady, the Amazonian imitator of men."2 

Heirs to an intellectual tradition that equated women with both extreme 

carnality and rigourous chastity, they had a wealth of literary, scholastic and 

religious material, both written and oral, to draw on. 3 

The view of women as carnal, vain and envious by nature came from 

several different traditions: philosophical, physiological, medical and religious. 

Ian Maclean, writing on the effect of the religious tradition on the Renaissance 

notion of women, explains that "in the metaphorical and allegorical 

understanding of biblical texts woman is often identified with sensuality. Once 

Adam's eyes have been opened (Gen. 3:7), woman in her person, became an 

incitation to lust and concupiscence."4 Women, revered and reviled, "holy-

threatening, passive-active, A V E - E V A , " 5 are a symbol for both virtue and sin. 

This legacy of alternating eulogy and vituperation, derived from the Bible, 

certain Fathers of the Church, and moralistic writings of the Middle Ages and the 

Renaissance,6 is mirrored in another notion which, Maclean claims, can be 

1 Nussbaum, The Brink of All We Hate, p. 77. 
2 Ibid., p. 92. 
3 A study made of the ideas about women, expressed in the writings of Mandeville's and Steele's 

contemporaries, has been summarized into three categories by Richmond Bond. Bond identifies 
the first group as the conservative writers who held to the traditional doctrine that in morals, 
body and intellect women are weaker than men and therefore need to cultivate the passive 
virtues; the second group are the men of wit and gallantry who praised and satirized women in 
works that might be cynical, extravagant, or conventional; the third group, identified as the 
rational reformers, are those who promoted an enlightened equality in education, legal rights 
and individual opportunities. Bond, The Tatler: The Making of a Literary journal, p. 84. 

4 Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman. (London: Cambridge University Press, 1978),p. 
16. 

5 Sekora, Luxury, The Concept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollett. (Baltimore: The John 
Hopkins University Press, 1977), p. 59. 

6 Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman, p. 7. 



58 

found from the earliest times and in the most far-flung cultures:1 that of the 

female opposed to the male. This notion of the male opposed to the female is 

found in Aristotle's tendency to produce dualities in which one element is 

superior and the other inferior. The duality of male/female in Aristotle's 

philosophy is paralleled by the dualities of active/passive, perfect/imperfect, 

complete/incomplete.2 The female, according to Aristotle, differs from the male 

in her make-up. She possesses fewer mental faculties and is passive, material 

and deprived. In contrast, the male is courageous, honest and imbued with 

moral strength.3 Naturally more robust and active, more rational and less 

subject to extremes of emotion, the male by nature is the head of the state, the 

home and the female herself. Because the male is active and the female passive, 

and activity is associated with virtue, Maclean argues that the female is excluded 

from moral behaviour "unless she obtains entrance through...virtues deemed as 

imperfect as she is."4 Excluded from the civic virtues of courage, selflessness and 

love of country, she is left with the meaner virtue of chastity. 

Women's imperfection, resulting as it does from her physical 

characteristics, is thus natural and unchangeable. By the end of the sixteenth and 

the beginning of the seventeenth century, however, many doctors at least were 

writing eloquently against what they regarded as the wrong done to the honour 

of women by Aristotle. "It is possible to argue" Maclean claims, "that there is a 

feminist movement in medical spheres, where in theology there is little 

evidence of one."5 In spite of this, however, the belief persisted that the effects 

of the uterus on the mind weakened rationality and increased the violence of the 

1 Ibid., p. 2. 
2 Ibid- p. 8. 
3 Ibid- pp. 8 & 32. 
4 Ibid- p. 51. 
5 Ibid., p. 33. 



59 

passions in women. 1 The malevolent effects of the female's uterus are 

considered to be the cause of a number of maladies, including lovesickness, 

melancholia, listlessness and irrational behaviour.2 Thus it was commonly 

accepted that women, like children and the mad, were meant by nature to be 

governed. The commonplace notion of women as less rational and more 

passionate is satirized by the novelist and essayist Mary As tell, who, in 1696, 

addressing the relationship between man and wife in A n Essay in defence of the  

female sex, scorns the tyrannical husband, arguing on behalf of the wife that 

"Since her Reason is suppos'd to be less, and her Passions stronger than his...he 

sho'd not play the little Master so much."3 

In the eighteenth century the popular myth of the disorderly, rapacious 

female began to be replaced by a new and equally debilitating one, that of the 

chaste maiden and the obedient wife.4 Chastity, modesty and long-suffering, 

closely identified with the female sex even by Stoic writers,5 and a commonplace 

in traditional conduct book literature,6 did not emerge as the "language of use"7 

for talking about women nor the mode of thought for thinking about them until 

the 1740's and 50's.8 Pocock argues that around the late seventeenth century the 

1 Mandeville, with his medical speciality in the 'hypondriack and hysteric passions', imputes 
certain physical and emotional impairments to the effect of the uterus but does not argue that it 
causes any mental or moral impairment. A Treatise of the Hypocondriack and Hysteric  
Diseases. (London, 1711), p. 172; quoted in John Mullan, "Hypocondria and Hysteria: 
Sensibility and the Physicians," The Eighteenth Century. Theory and Interpretation, vol. 25, 
no. 2, (Spring, 1984), G. S. Rousseau, ed., pp. 141-174, p. 160. 

2 Ibid-, p- 44. 
3 Mary Astell, An Essay in defence of the female sex. (London,1696), [Goldsmith, Kress 

Collection], p. 42. 
4 See Marlene LeGates, "The Cult of Womanhood in Eighteenth-Century Thought", p. 23; and 

Felicity Nussbaum, The Brink of All We Hate, p. 136. 
5 Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman, p. 51. 
6 LeGates, "The Cult of Womanhood in Eighteenth-Century Thought," p. 26. 
7 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, p. 405. The phrase is used by Pocock in a different context. 
8 See Regina James, "Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary," p. 134. 



60 

notion of women's 'virtue' acquired a specifically sexist meaning.1 At the 

beginning of the eighteenth century, writers such as Steele and Addison confined 

women's virtue to chastity and compliant domesticity, holding up the image of 

the companionable woman and 'help meet' wife as the ideal, all the while 

employing stereotypic language to describe contemporary women.2 If chaste and 

docile females and 'help meet' wives were the ideal, "termagant wives...and 

women who pretend to the conduct of such affairs as are only within the 

province of men" were too often the reality, Steele complains.3 "Sweetness of 

Temper, and Simplicity of Manners are the only lasting Charms of Woman,"4 he 

argues, but then notes that "there is an outrageous Species of the Fair Sex which 

is distinguished by the Term Scolds."5 Timidity and fear, even though, but more 

especially because, they make women weak, are attractive and excellent qualities 

in them.6 

If we were to form an Image of Dignity in a Man...we should give 
him Wisdom and Valour, as being essential to the Character of 
Manhood. In like manner if you describe a right Woman in a 
laudable Sense, she should have gentle Softness, tender Fear, and 
all those parts of Life, which distinguish her from the other sex, 

1 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, p. 405. Pocock notes that the notion of women's "virtue" 
acquired as specifically sexist a meaning as that of her "fortune" which, during the late 
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries "came to bear the predominantly monetary 
meanings of inheritance, acquisition, or dowry." 

2 In an ironic twist, Mandeville compares Steele's "artful Encomiums" on the sublimity of the 
human species to tricks used by women to teach children manners. The Fable I, p.53. 

3 The Tatler, Bond., ed.. No. 36, 2 July, 1709, p. 355. 
4 Steele, The Tatler, no. 61,2:82, quoted in Edmund Leites, "Good Humor at Home, Good Humor 

Abroad: The Intimacies of Marriage and the Civilities of Social Life in the Ethic of Richard 
Steele," Educating the Audience:Addison, Steele, and Eighteenth-Century Culture. Edward & 
Lillian Bloom, eds., (Pasadena: The Castle Press, 1984), pp. 51-89, p. 60. 

5 The Tatler, no. 217,4:157, quoted in Leites, "Good Humor at Home, Good Humor Abroad," p. 60. 
Scolding, Mandeville argues, serves a socially useful purpose as a vent for anger. It is only a 
custom, he claims, when "Language is arrived to great Perfection, and Society is carried to some 
degree of Politeness," The Fable U, p. 295. Interestingly, Mandeville discusses the practice of 
scolding primarily in relation to men. 

6 Leites argues that Steele attacked extreme states of feelings in his campaign to establish good 
humour as the temperament and mood appropriate to social life and marriage. Leites, "Good 
Humor at Home, Good Humor Abroad", p. 51. 



61 

with some Subordination to it, but such an Inferiority that make 
her still more lovely.1 

Puritan teachings on the importance of spiritual compatibility between 

man and wife, taken up as well by non-Puritan writers who stressed the 

importance of love as attraction before marriage and friendship afterwards,2 

appear to have been honoured more in the breach than in the observance. Mary 

Astell, vehemently attacking those who would blacken the image of marriage by 

satirizing it, writes that if men are not happy in the 'Married State', 

tis their own fault....The wise institutor of Matrimony never did 
any thing in vain; we are the Sots and Fools if what he design'd for 
our Good, be to us an occasion of falling. For Marriage, not 
withstanding all the loose talk of the Town, the Satyrs of Ancient or 
Modern pretenders to Wit, will never lose its due praise from 
judicious Persons....Marriage in general is too sacred to be treated 
with Disrespect, too venerable to be the subject of Raillery and 
Buffoonery.3 

Leites credits prominent seventeenth century Puritan theologians, who 

held that neither sex was more lusty than the other, with changing the medieval 

and Renaissance belief that women were the more rapacious of the two. This 

change in attitudes toward the relative strength of sexuality in men and women, 

he argues, "may be attributed to changes in both the conception and the 

treatment of the moral capacities of women."4 When treated with less moral 

respect, women "will be regarded as more subject to the demands of sexuality. In 

the medieval world generally, they were regarded as inferior moral creatures and 

1 Richard Steele, Spectator, no. 144,2:70, quoted in Leites, "Good Humor at Home, Good Humor 
Abroad", p. 63. 

2 LeGates, "The Cult of Womanhood in Eighteenth-Century Thought", p. 24. LeGates argues 
that the changes in the literary representation of marriage neither reflected nor followed 
societal changes in practice or attitude, but rather preceded or anticipated them. 

3 Mary Astell, Reflections Upon Marriage, 3rd ed., (London, 1706), [Goldsmith, Kress Collection], 
p. 8. 

4 Leites, The Puritan Conscience and Modern Sexuality, p. 120. 



62 

therefore, treated as the more lusty of the two sexes."1 Less moralized than men 

because they had less access to "moralizing institutions" such as universities and 

other conscience-forming bodies,2 Hilda Smith argues that women could not 

pursue the goals idealized within civic humanism because they could hold 

neither public office nor professional positions within either the university or 

church.3 

2. Passions, Sexuality and Marriage. 

Mandeville was ambivalent in his attitudes towards women, but for 

different reasons than most. Unlike many of his contemporaries who accepted 

either the traditional or the idealized view of women, and justified it on the 

principle that men and women have entirely different characteristics,4 

Mandeville began his theorizing with the claim that all persons bring nothing 

into the world with them but their passions (U: 207), and that "the same appetites 

were given to all" for the same purpose (V., 31).5 He thus rejects out of hand the 

traditional view of Eve's inconstancy as a curse on women. In The V i r g i n  

Unmask'd, Lucinda sarcastically lashes out at men who, "derive our inconstancy, 

from Eve our Mother" (V., 128), and believe of a women: 

Yet, as a Husband, she could leave him there, 
In hopes to meet with other Joys elsewhere; 
A n d once got out of Sight, she prov'd so frail, 

1 Ibid. 
2 Ibid., p. 120. Both Leites and Hilda Smith agree that women were excluded from moralizing 

institutions. Hilda Smith, Reason's Disciples. Seventeenth-Century English Feminists, 
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977). 

3 Hilda Smith, Reason's Disciples, p. 40. Leites argues, in opposition to Smith, that by the 
eighteenth century the relative balance of repression in the middle classes had changed. 
Women were now subject to more internal restraints than were men he argues. Leites, The  
Puritan Conscience and Modern Sexuality, p. 120. 

4 Bridget Hill, Eighteenth-Century Women: An Anthology. (London: George Allen & Unwin, 
1984), p. 10. 

5 Mandeville uses passions and appetites interchangeably: "a Man need not conquer his 
Passions...good Breeding only requires we should hide our Appetites." The Fable I, p. 72. 



63 

That she would listen to a Serpent's Tale, 
A n d rather enter with the Dev'l in Chat, 
Than be a Woman, and not be Coquet (V., 130). 

Mandeville holds that all notions of virtue and standards of moral conduct are 

the result of social conditioning rather than religion or nature. Addressing his 

male contemporaries, he argues that since women's "immortal substance is 

without doubt the same with ours,"1 differences between the sexes are mainly 

the result of education and upbringing. 

The consequences of this argument for social understanding are profound. 

If women's immortal substance is the same as men's and there are no significant 

appetitive differences between the sexes, arguments concerning women's innate 

incapacity for rational thought, a necessary prerequisite for virtue, cannot be 

based on natural law. If this is so, then to what can women's subordinate role be 

attributed? What is it that motivates men to argue that women have different 

virtues than men? A n d if common beliefs concerning female virtues are just an 

elaborate fiction, does this not imply that so too are notions about all virtues? 

Mandeville argues that it does. Beginning with the premise that individuals are 

motivated solely by their passions, he claims that "moral virtues'" are nothing 

more than those qualities which skilful politicians and moralists, using the siren 

call of pride, have lured men into believing. By persuading individuals to 

subdue their own self-interested passions, law makers have rendered them more 

tractable, and thus are better able to "reap the more Benefit from, and govern 

vasts Numbers of them with greater Ease and Security" (1:47). Through his 

arguments and insights about women, Mandeville seeks to explode some of the 

prominent myths that surround them and demonstrates that moral virtues, "the 

1 Mandeville, Hypocondriack and Hvsterick Passions, p. 174; quoted in E. D. James, "Faith, 
Sincerity and Morality: Mandeville and Bayle", Primer, ed., p. 50. 



64 

Political offspring which Flattery begot upon Pride," are not absolute, objective 

standards, but relative, self-serving ones. 

Throughout his work, Mandeville is as interested in interpreting motives 

as he is in exposing hypocrisy. Many of the most important arguments that 

Mandeville makes precisely and in detail in The Fable, including the arguments 

designed to show that private vices result in public benefits, and those concerned 

with the development of moral virtues,1 are first made in The Virgin Unmask'd, 

his reflection on the female sex. In this early work, Mandeville illustrates how 

actions ascribed to virtuous motives are almost always derived from self-

interested passions, and he uses marriage, considered by his contemporaries to be 

both the ideal and the natural state for women, to illustrate his point.2 

It is very significant that Mandeville uses The Virgin Unmask'd, his first 

prose work in English, and an examination of marriage, to argue his thesis about 

the social origins of virtue, and that he uses a woman as the medium by which 

to do it, exposing the motives and the hypocrisy of his contemporaries at the 

same time. Mandeville reveals his prejudices concerning women's capabilities 

very early in the book. Though his satirical manner sometimes makes it difficult 

to know whether he is serious or not, the consistency with which he makes the 

same claims about women's intellectual capabilities in other works lends 

credence to accepting Lucinda's stated opinions concerning herself as a true 

reflection of Mandeville's own. The antithesis of the popular image of a female, 

Lucinda is no giddy-brained thing incapable of controlling her own passions. 

1 The Virgin Unmask'd. p. 73; Chapter 8. 
2 See Maclean, Renaissance Notions of Woman, pp, 26/7; p. 57. Maclean claims that the belief 

that women cannot be considered except in relation to marriage is reinforced by the ethical and 
medical vision of marriage as a natural state. See also Roy Porter, "Mixed Feelings: the 
Enlightenment and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century  
Britain, ed., Paul-Gabriel Bouce, New Jersey: Barnes & Noble Books, 1982). 



65 

Employing the rhetoric of civic humanism, she describes herself as "a Rational 

and Unconcerned Stander-by," (V. 34), and says of herself, "I was always so 

Unnatural, as to deny my Appetite, what my Reason told me would hurt me, 

tho' my Inclination was never so strong" (V., 125).1 Lucinda, in turn, examines 

the comparative merits of the married and single states. In a series of short, 

gossipy stories, she demonstrates that it is neither virtue nor reason which 

motivates women to marry, but rather, that "unaccountable Passion," love (V., 

75)2 

Mandeville was much more sympathetic to the view that held women to 

be sexually rapacious by nature than he was to the view that held them to be 

chaste and timorous. Unlike contemporaries who claimed that love is a virtue 

which transcends the demands of the flesh and, for women at least, the only true 

basis for marriage, in The Virgin Unmask'd Lucinda argues on Mandeville's 

behalf that the force which drives women to marry is nothing more than their 

natural sexual appetite (V., 124), an urge so strong that against all that is 

reasonable, men, using it, have "Enslaved our Sex." "In Paradise", she claims, as 

Artesia does later in The Female Tatler, "Man and Woman were upon an even 

foot; see what they have made of us since: is not every Woman that is Married, a 

Slave to her Husband" (V., 127).3 What human beings call love, Mandeville 

1 Bridget H i l l argues that spinsters were treated with scorn a n d derision. Chastity, to w h i c h so 
m u c h importance was attached, becomes a frozen asset i n a spinster. H i l l , Eighteenth-Centu ry  
W o m e n , p. 12 

2 B y "Love", M a n d e v i l l e means "a strong Inclination, i n its N a t u r e distinct from all other 
Affections of F r i e n d s h i p , Gratitude, a n d Consanguinity, that Persons of different Sexes, after 
l i k i n g , bear to one another: It is i n this Signification that L o v e enters into the C o m p o u n d of 
Jealousy, a n d is the Effect as well as the h a p p y Disguise of that Passion that prompts us to 
labour for the Preservation of our Species". T h e Fable II, p. 142. 

3 M a n d e v i l l e makes a strikingly similar argument in T h e Female Tatler. 20 Jan., 1710. See also 
T h e Female Tatler. 25 Jan., 1710, where M a n d e v i l l e attributes the lack of eminent w o m e n i n 
history to the fact that "Since M e n have enslav'd us, the greatest part of the W o r l d have 
always debar'd o u r Sex from G o v e r n i n g , w h i c h is the Reason that the L i v e s of W o m e n have so 
seldom been described i n History". 



66 

argues, is nothing more than "the Effect as well as happy Disguise of that Passion 

that prompts us to labour for the Preservation of our Species" (I: 142). Lucinda 

scorns romantics who view marriage as the natural and ideal state for women 

and a cure-all for everything that ails them.1 She argues that "Married Women 

are infinitely more exposed to Accidents, that may occasion Trouble, Grief, and 

Misery, than Maids" (V., 119, 124). From their personal suffering over the 

calamities that may befall their husbands and children, to the physical hardships 

of pregnancy and childbirth, married women's lot in life is one of pain and 

tribulation (V., 119-24). "Old Maids", on the other hand, "as soon as that 

troublesome Itch is over, rejoice at having kept their Liberty, and agree 

unanimously in the Comforts of a Single Life" (V., 32).2. 

Mandeville ridicules these mores which draw an absolute line between 

virtuous and immoral sexual conduct in women, with men the wooers and 

women the wooed. Such conventions, he argues, are not rooted in natural law. 

Quite the contrary, in savage societies men and women copulate at will, without 

giving any more thought to what they are doing than do animals. Not only are 

these conventions not natural, Mandeville claims, they are also unreasonable.3 

As Lucinda scornfully tells her niece, "What your Opinion of Wooing may be, I 

cann't tell, but I always thought it very ridiculous (V., 30). The absurdity of this 

situation is that women, using all their charms to attract men, play at being 

1 Ilza Veith argues that it was a commonly accepted opinion that hysterical women needed only 
to be married to be cured. Mandeville, for the first time in medical literature, Veith claims, 
argued that women should not be married off just to cure them. Women should either be cured of 
hysteria first, or else remain single and not inflict their infirmity on their husbands and 
children. Ilza Veith, Hysteria, The History of a Disease. (Chicago: The University of 
Chicago Press, 1965), pp. 153/4.. 

2 See also pp. 21 and 32 of The Virgin Unmask'd for the advantages of spinsterhood over 
marriage. 

3 In Modest Defense of Publick Stews. Mandeville argues that one of the advantages of 
whorehouses would be to relieve males of having to distract their attention away from business 
and devote it to wooing women, just so they can satisfy their sexual urges. 



67 

distant and aloof, and seem to disdain the very advances they have invited. 

Men, in turn, first prostrate themselves at the feet of women, proclaim 

themselves slaves for life, and then, once married become tyrants. A l l this is 

necessary, Mandeville argues, so that women can be married and spend the rest 

of their lives in bondage to the very men who enticed them into giving up their 

freedom (V., 30). 

The rules of religion, law and social convention are so pervasive that it is 

necessary to arm and fortify both sexes, but women in particular, against their 

natural sexual impulses. "The Appetite it self, and all the Symptoms of it, tho' 

they are plainly felt and understood," Mandeville argues, "are to be stifled with 

Care and Severity, and in Women flatly disown'd" (I: 143). Although natural 

and necessary for the continuance of the human race, lust, left unrestrained, is so 

destructive to the order of society that, in Mandeville's words, "the Peace and 

Happiness of the Civil Society requires that this should be kept a Secret, never to 

be talk'd of in Publick." Not only is it taboo in polite society to talk about lust, 

but the prohibitions against it are so strong that it is considered a depraved 

appetite; (V., 124) men and women no longer even recognize it for what it is (I: 

145). "The very Name of the Appetite...is become odious, and the proper 

Epithets commonly join'd to Lust are Filthy and Abominable" (I: 143). By 

illustrating how ridiculous social conventions look when subjected to the 

scrutiny of a rational observer and demonstrating that the impetus for marriage, 

the most sacred of all social institutions, is filthy and abominable lust, not lofty 

and unsullied virtue, Mandeville makes a strong case for his thesis that social 

institutions, like rich and flourishing societies themselves, depend not on men's 

virtues but on their vices. 



68 

The hypocrisy of contemporary attitudes towards women, nicely summed 

up by Patricia Meyer Spack's argument that "one may claim that men love 

women for their virtue, but everyone knows better,"1 was not lost on 

Mandeville. Nor, he argues, was it lost on women: "A young Lady of refin'd 

Education keeps a strict Guard over her Looks, as well as Actions, and in her Eyes 

we may read a Consciousness that She has a Treasure about her, not out of 

Danger of being lost, and which yet she is resolved not to part with at any Terms" 

(I: 70). In a very clever ploy, Mandeville makes two points, both important to his 

argument. He demonstrates that standards of morality, like standards of dress, 

are only what society determines them to be and have no intrinsic value in and 

of themselves. He also exposes the hypocrisy in the attitudes of his 

contemporaries, ridiculing their contrariety which encourages "the very Virgins, 

that should be the temples of Modesty, [to] go with their Bodies half naked" (V., 

3/4), in order to invite male attention, while at the same time demanding that 

they preserve their virginity.2 Loved by men for their sexual attractiveness, 

women must "fly to Art and additional Ornament" (II: 133) to make themselves 

more agreeable to men. Having done so, they then must fortify themselves 

against the inevitable outcome, never giving in to their natural appetites nor 

men's seductive charms until they are safely married. 

1 Patricia Meyer Spacks, "Ev'ry Woman is at Heart a Rake", Eighteenth-Century Studies: An  
Interdisciplinarian journal, vol. 8,1974-5, no. 1, (Fall 1974), pp. 27-46. p. 40. 

2 Important to Mandeville's thesis is his argument that modesty in women depends on social 
convention. He devotes the first chapter of The Virgin Unmask'd to illustrating how rules of 
convention, like rules of dress, depend solely on taste and public opinion. "Nothing is immodest 
in Dressing", he claims, "but when People shew those Parts, which the Custom of the Country 
bids 'em hide: In some Countries Women's Petticoats reach but a little lower than their Knees; 
yet if here a Woman...should pluck up her Coats half Way the Calf of her Leg, Everybody 
would call her immodest." The Virgin Unmask'd, p. 6. And the parts which are considered 
acceptable to show, even if they make a women half naked in the process, he argues, are those 
that men find most attractive. 



69 

Women are caught in a double bind according to Mandeville. Limited to a 

very narrow range of moral behaviour where morality is equated with sexual 

innocence, they are forced by the weight of the social and political structure to be 

chaste and modest. Exhorted to behave virtuously, the expectation is that, 

because their reason is weaker and their passions stronger, they cannot unless 

strictly policed. The dictates of modesty and the force of honour will not allow 

women, particularly "the middle Rank of Womankind" (M.D., 45) who have 

their interest and fortune depending on their reputation, to indulge that 

"Inclination which nature has given us to propagate our Species" (I: 69) outside 

marriage, without risking ruin and lasting shame. This is the reason why "all 

young Women have strong Notions of Honour carefully inculcated into them 

from Infancy" (M. 42).1 Because "Interest, indeed, is inseparable from Female 

Honour; nay it is the very Foundation of it" (M.D., 45), it is necessary to 

counterbalance women's violent sexual desire by honing their pride to heighten 

their shame. For "do but increase Man's Pride," Mandeville claims, "and his fear 

of Shame will ever be proportion'd to it" (I: 209). It is women's fear of shame,2 

their concern for what others, particularly men, will think of them, and not their 

love of virtue, that protects their chastity until such time as they are married.3 

1 Mandeville divides men into two classes: one which consists of abject, low-minded people who 
are incapable of self-denial;, the other class, and the one to which he directs his work, consists 
of those who have a sufficient stock of pride to be manipulated into subduing their passions. 
The Fable I. pp. 42/3. 

2 Mandeville allows only two causes of chastity, "Religion and the Fear of Shame," and argues 
that the former is seldom effective. Bernard Mandeville, An Enquiry Into The Origins of  
Honour And The Usefulness of Christianity in War. (London, 1732), p. 56. In both The Virgin  
Unmask'd and The Fable Mandeville discusses the physiology and psychology of blushing, 
which, he claims, results when women in particular feel shame at the discovery, or even the 
possible knowledge by someone else, of some forbidden act or thought, particularly of a sexual 
nature. The Virgin Unmask'd, pp. 7 & 19; The Fable I, pp. 65/6. 

3 See also The Female Tatler, 11 Nov., 1709. 



70 

Mandeville appropriately employs the language of the battlefield to 

discuss women's virtue; their "glorious Field of Mars" is their own sexual 

nature, their honour their chastity.1 In direct opposition to those who claim that 

there is no higher virtue for women than chastity, nor for men than courage, 

Mandeville argues that neither is praiseworthy and, more important to his 

argument, that neither has any foundation in reason or religion. He compares 

female virtue to garrisons under attack, laid siege to from without by men and 

betrayed from within by their own secret wishes (V., 28) and uses Lucinda to 

satirize the common wisdom that reason, religion and a modest way of life can 

be antidotes against natural appetites, particularly lust.2 Lucinda explains to 

Antonia the stratagems she used to reinforce Antonia's honour: "to allay the 

Heat of your Blood; I often persuaded you to Fasting...I advised you to frequent 

Prayers, and the Reading of Pious Books" (V., p.20). However, Lucinda is a 

prudent woman who does not fully trust in these remedies to curb "wild 

Nature." In a further effort to heighten Antonia's dread of shame and fear of 

dishonour, and thus safeguard her against "this Provocation of Nature" (V., 31), 

she admits, "I told ye Five Hundred Stories about Rapes of my own Invention" 

V., 22). Once she had done this, Lucinda confides to Antonia, "Your Vertue and 

Modesty I was persuaded of...I never fear'd any Thing base" (V. 22). The reason 

for this lack of concern, Lucinda says, was because "I knew you had Pride enough 

to secure your Honour" (V., 22). 

Lucinda's argument that Antonia's virtue is neither natural, nor god-

given, but the result of the fear of shame instilled in her through custom and 

education, is similar to Mandeville's later argument in The Fable, that pride and 

1 Mandeville, An Enquiry Into The Origins of Honour, p. 53. 
2 Mandeville uses the same comparison several times in his Modest Defense of Publick Stews, pp. 

42/3,50,58. 



71 

its reverse passion, shame, are the "two passions, in which the seeds of most 

virtues are contained":(I: 65)1 

for tho' the Good and Evil of Honour and Dishonour are 
imaginary, yet there is a Reality in Shame, as it signifies a Passion, 
that has its proper Symptoms, over-rules our Reason, and requires 
as much Labour and Self-denial to be subdued, as any of the rest; 
and since the most important Actions of Life often are regulated 
according to the Influence this Passion has upon us, a thorough 
Understanding of it must help to illustrate the Notions the World 
has of Honour and Ignominy (I: 64). 

The psychology of shame and its application to women in particular is a 

necessary feature of Mandeville's social thesis. His training as a doctor and his 

interest in the relationship between emotions and actions made him a perceptive 

observer of human nature and social institutions. Perhaps sparked by his study of 

the "hypochondriack and hysteric diseases", he turned his observations of the 

physical changes undergone by women who have been taught to feel shame at 

even the thought of sex, into a comprehensive theory of society and morality. 

Mandeville argues that shame, a learned response, is a powerful deterrent against 

socially harmful acts. Beginning with The Virgin Unmask'd, he analyses the 

psychological and physiological relationship of shame and demonstrates how it is 

used to control individuals so that they will behave in socially desirable ways (I: 

145). When women learn to regard their natural sexual feelings as immodest and 

disgusting, then, thereafter, every time they feel this taboo urge, they will blush 

from shame just from imagining that others will know what they are feeling or 

1 Kaye points out that Mandeville, in 1732, recanted this statement that pride and shame are 
two distinct passions. He claimed instead that they are different affections of one and the 
same passion. The Fable I, p. 67, n.l. 



72 

thinking. Honour without shame is not possible Mandeville claims and 

therefore women must be trained to feel the latter to guard the former.1 

It is the needs of civil society that tie female chastity so securely to female 

honour. For if the security of the state rests on the courage, born of pride and 

honour, of its male citizens, and upon their willingness to fight to death for the 

state, so too does the orderly succession of property, that other bastion of 

citizenship, depend on the chastity of females. The sexual fidelity of wives was 

considered essential to prevent bastards who would bring confusion to family 

property and inheritance.2 In some areas in England, free bench, the practice of 

granting a widow a portion of her deceased husbands estate, was conditional 

upon chaste living and no remarriage.3 Without the assurance that one's heirs 

are one's own, succession of property is confounded. 

Mandeville's problem is to demonstrate to his contemporaries, who 

believe that "the Fundamentals of Natural and Moral Justice and Decorum, are 

laid down, and clearly stated, from Scripture and Reason",4 that, in fact, moral 

virtues, like moral vices and social institutions, are the result of custom and 

education, the cumulative experience of generations propelled by and acting on 

mankind's self-love and self-liking. By exposing the self-seeking motives behind 

1 For a discussion of the effects and power of shame in shaping honour, see Remark C in Part I of 
the The Fable and the second dialogue in The Virgin Unmask'd. 

2 Roy Porter, "Mixed Feelings: the Enlightenment and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain," 
p. 16. 

3 E.P. Thompson, "The Grid of Inheritance: a comment," Family Inheritance: Rural Society in  
Western Europe. 1200-1800, Jack Goody, Joan Thirsk, E. P. Thompson, eds., (Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 328-360, p. 350-355. In some counties, hapless widows 
who had been so imprudent as to violate their chastity could, for the price of a public 
humiliation, regain their property. To do so, they were required to ride astride a ram and 
recite a poem acknowledging their shame. Ibid. 

4 The Female Tatler ran an advertisement for The Doctrine of Morality: Wherein the  
Fundamentals of Natural and Moral Justice and Decorum, are laid down, and clearly stated,  
from Scripture and Reason., The Female Tatler, 8 Nov., 1709. 



73 

commonly-held notions about marriage and women, notions believed to be 

sanctified by religious precept and traditional wisdom, Mandeville calls into 

question all notions about virtue and thus about the foundations of society itself. 

Vichert points out that Mandeville uses Lucinda to demonstrate the hardships 

married women suffer. He graphically details their use as pawns in the marriage 

market 1 , bartered by parents and in-laws for financial gain; he points to the 

physical hardships they suffer bearing children and the emotional hardships they 

endure when they lose them; he is sensitive to their vulnerability to the vagaries 

of fortune should their husbands die or squander their marriage portions. 

Mandeville had more extensive purposes then these, however. Throughout his 

career, Mandeville sought to expose the self-deception inherent in the 

moralizing cant of his contemporaries about relations between the sexes. Using a 

literary device he later employs in both The Female Tatler and Part II of The  

Fable, Mandeville's two interlocutors demonstrate reason's impotence as a first 

cause in directing the actions, not only of women, but of all mankind. First we 

act and then we reason, he argues, and it is only after our passions are spent or 

where "all equally Mutinous, none could predominate enough to make a great 

impression" (V., 85/6; 131), that reason comes to the fore (V., 88). In The Virgin  

Unmask'd, Lucinda demonstrates the difficulty in judging the merits or virtues 

of individuals unless "the Principle from which they acted, and the Motive that 

first edg'd them on, were thoroughly known" (V., 73). Because she wants 

Antonia to judge everything according to its own merits, she is brutally frank 

1 W.A. Speck argues that the shift in the pattern of landownership which was going on at this 
time is attributable to a variety of long-term economic tendencies, including the ability of the 
large landowners to comer the more attractive bargains in the marriage market, as well as to 
engross the more lucrative posts in the administration and invest their surplus capital in the 
profitable public funds and private companies." W. A. Speck, "Conflict in Society", p. 138. See 
also pp. 145-7. 



74 

with her, thus leaving her no alternative but to "think on the Cause," both of 

her own and other's behaviour (V., 130). 

The Virgin U n m a s k ' d gives a powerful demonstration, both of the 

inefficacy of reason and virtue and of the power of passion as the motivating 

force in society and of the hypocrisy of Mandeville's contemporaries who argued 

that the subordination of women, like other fundamentals of natural and thus 

moral justice, derives its legitimacy from scripture and reason. Contrary to 

contemporary beliefs about marriage, the motives which prompt women to 

marry derive from no moral sources. If marriage is a rational institution, then 

an objective evaluation of the married state should reveal its advantages, for 

women and as well as men. Mandeville shows, however, that if the merits of 

both the married and single state for women are examined, it becomes obvious 

that the unmarried state holds at least as many advantages for them as does the 

married, and that marriage, as an institution, is no more natural than society 

itself. Each is the result of human intervention and political manipulation; both 

are the result of mankind's vices rather than virtues. The notion that women 

are motivated to marry by virtue is nothing more than a chimera. Left to their 

own natural devices, women would surely choose to remain single, "Mistress[es] 

of [their] own Choice" (V., 33). It is only women's libidinous urges, coupled with 

social standards which tie their self-interest to their chastity, that force them, 

against all that is natural and reasonable, into marriage. 

3. Women and the Critique of 'Virtue' 

A more apt title for The Virgin Unmask'd is "Virtue Unmask'd". The 

object of Mandeville's satire is not to unmask Lucinda's arid rationality,1 but to 

1 Cook, Bernard Mandeville. p. 59. 



75 

use it to unmask virtue and a society that refuses to recognize its hypocrisy.1 Just 

as social and civic virtues are the product of mankind's manipulation of one 

another, so too are moral virtues. Chastity, decreed by all the powers, civil, 

religious, and political, to be inviolate in women, derives from mankind's vices 

and is no more a law of nature than is any other virtue. Having exposed the 

myths behind female virtue and laid bare the fallacy that virtue is either natural 

or absolute, Mandeville successfully satirizes his contemporaries who subscribe 

to the civic humanist tradition in which virtue is seen as the moral as well as 

material foundation of social and personal life.2 

Mankind's capacity for self-deception is so great, and the effects of a 

learned education so persuasive, that, contrary to common belief, learned men, 

far from having the greatest understanding of human nature, usually have the 

least.3 This being so, and egoism, the consequence of mankind's self-liking, 

being as it is, a powerful incentive to men to conceal their motives from 

themselves, as well as from others, how then can men be brought to a state of 

self-awareness? In a digression on painting in Part II of The Fable. Cleomenes, 

Horatio and Fulvia, the only female character in the book, argue the merits of 

two paintings, one a charming but faithful copy of nature, the other a grander, 

but false representation. Fulvia, with unfashionable straightforwardness, argues 

in the Epicurean tradition for a real representation of nature over an idealized 

1 Mandeville argues that "real Virtue requires a conquest over untaught Nature." The Fable II, 
p. 127; and cautions that the "imaginary Notions that Men may be Virtuous without Self-
Denial are a vast Inlet to Hypocrisy" The Fable I, p. 331 .Mandeville's paradox, Kaye argues, 
turns on his definition of virtue in which virtue was either a transcending of the demands of 
corrupt human nature, or a conquest of self. The Fable I, p. xlvii. Thus, if women only remain 
chaste in order to catch a husband, and only marry in order to indulge their lust, then even the 
purest virgin cannot claim any virtue for her chastity. 

2 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, p. 446. 
3 See The Female Tatler. 9 Jan., 1710; 20 Jan., 1710; 16 Nov., 1709; and The Virgin Unmask'd, pp. 

134/5. 



76 

and sublime one. She explains that "a picture then pleases me best when the Art 

in such a Manner deceives my Eye, that without making any Allowances, I can 

imagine I see the Things in reality which the Painter has endeavour'd to 

represent" (II: 32/3). In reply, Horatio, an adherent of Shaftesbury's "lovely 

System",1 arguing for an exalted representation of nature, protests against "Filth 

and Nastiness, or vile abject Things not fit to be seen, at least not capable of 

entertaining Persons of Quality" (11:34). At this point, Cleomenes, in a tactic 

Mandeville often uses to point up the absurdity of the position he is mocking, 

adjudicates the argument, explaining that "Great Masters don't paint for the 

common People, but for Persons of refin'd Understanding" (II: 35). Great artists, 

he continues ironically, unlike Michel Angelo , Demetrius, Dionysius and 

Lysippus, who have all been criticized for their too natural portrayals, should use 

artifice when portraying men, painting only what men wish to see rather than 

what is natural. After further discussion, Fulvia, still holding fast to her 

position, states: "I prefer any thing that informs my Understanding beyond all 

the Recreations which either my Eyes or my Ears can be regal'd with"2. 

Fulvia's role in this exchange is an interesting one. The sentiments she 

expresses represent an argument used by Mandeville in The Virgin Unmask'd 

and The Female Tatler, one in which he attacks the pretensions of learned men 

who entertain exalted notions of their intellectual and moral capabilities and 

whose "Pride makes 'em such Fools as to fancy they shall persuade the World, 

1 Shaftesbury argues that there is a close connection between taste and morality and that they 
are psychologically dependent on one another. See Walter Jackson Bate , "The Sympathetic 
Imagination in Eighteenth-Century English Criticism", English Literary History. (June, 1945), 
xii, p. 146. See also Horne, The Social Thought of Bernard Mandeville, chapter 3, for a 
discussion of Shaftesbury's philosophy. 

2 Kaye argues that in this satire on the conventions forbidding realism in the arts, Mandeville 
may have been not only indirectly preparing the defence of his psychological and moral 
realism, but vindicating the realistic homeliness of his style, which had been attacked. Kaye, 
ed. The Fable II, p. 38, n.l. 



77 

that they know every Thing (V., 135). Women, because they are not esteemed for 

their learning, and are thus not compelled by pride to appear more learned than 

they really are, or corrupted by sophistical arguments, are not caught in this trap. 

In The Female Tatler, for example, Lucinda discusses the difficulty of 

understanding pedantic writing and suggests that it can be understood "by the 

help of the Females", much in the same way that 

The Tame Female 
Of Elephants inveigles the Male. 

(F.T., 9 Jan., 1710). 

Mandeville deliberately uses women to present his views. In introducing 

Fulvia, he explains that he does so because he has some things to say about 

painting and opera that he thought with her could "be brought in more 

naturally, and with less Trouble, than they could have been without her" (11:19). 

Women are in a rather unique position, treated almost as 'idiots savants'; they 

are at the same time acknowledged to have special insights often denied to men. 

Their more delicate constitution and emotional sensitivity were believed to 

heighten their sensibilities, endowing them with extraordinary intuitive 

powers.1 As Jenny Bickerstaff, Steele's female persona in The Tatler explains, 

"truth and simplicity...we may more justly pretend to beyond the other sex."2 

In both The Female Tatler and The Virgin Unmask'd, Mandeville takes 

pains to point out that women's wit and understanding are equal to men's. Any 

differences between them, he argues, stem from differences in education (F.T., 20 

Jan., 1710; V., 27/8). Because sound judgment is no more than the labour of the 

brain joined to experience (II: 172), women have as much capacity for it as do 

1 For a discussion of this theme see G.S. Rousseau, Nerves, Spirits and Fibres: Towards Defining 
the Origins of Sensibility; with a Postscript, 1976, The Blue Guitar. II, (1976). 

2 The Tatler. 2 July, 1709. 



78 

men.1 Their superior capacity for sound judgment, joined with the fact that they 

are not blinded by pride in their ability to reason (F.T., 20 Jan. 1710), makes 

women privy to insights not available to men.2 Although his contemporaries 

assumed that women's frailer bodies implied mental and emotional weakness,3 

which justified their reduced status and exclusion from political life, Mandeville 

did not.4 In The Female Tatler, Mandeville uses the insights provided by 

women to point out the absurdity and hypocrisy of rules of honour which result 

in the glorification of war, and the flouting of both civil and religious laws in 

order to assuage one's honour through duelling (F.T., 2 Nov., 1709; 16 Jan., 1710). 

Women's natural capabilities, combined with their lack of sophistry and 

intellectual pretension, makes them privy to insights lost to men. 

Mandeville may have chosen to give women a place of prominence in his 

work, often using them as his spokesmen, for no other reason than that, in his 

role as "universal gadfly", he was "chiefly bent upon annoying everybody".5 It is 

more likely, however, that he did so because the image of women was the most 

effective satirical device by which to prick the civic humanist pretensions of his 

contemporaries and to demonstrate the fallacies underlying contemporary 

1 A clear indication of Mandeville's position on women's versus men's intellectual capacities can 
be found in his index where, under the heading of "Brain", he notes "The Brain [is] more 
accurate in Women than it is in Men." The Fable II, p. 361. Under the heading of "women", 
Mandeville lists as a subject, "are equal to Men in the Faculty of Thinking, 188. Excell them in 
the Structure of the Brain, 189." The Fable II, p. 377. 

2 In Mandeville's account of the psychology of human beings, it is mankind's ego that gets in the 
way of his natural ability to perceive the truth. Men believe themselves to be superior to 
animals because they have the capacity to reason; they also believe themselves to be superior 
to one another for the same reason. With their natural ability to perceive the world as it 
really is corrupted by reason, they are blind to their own nature. Enamoured with their own 
intellectual powers, they refuse to admit what they do not know. 

3 Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Women, pp. 43/4. 
4 Contemporary Galenist physicians still maintained the belief that women were inferior to men 

for physiological reasons. Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Women, p. 35. While not 
commenting on this in particular, in The Virgin Unmask'd, Mandeville disdains their medical 
practices. The Virgin Unmask'd, p. 161. 

5 Lovejoy, Reflections on Human Nature, p. 171. 



79 

notions of virtue.1 A natural corollary of the Aristotelian belief that men and 

women have different and opposing attributes, with men possessed of those 

qualities and characteristics which are necessary for a virtuous citizenry, is the 

idea that women must behave differently from and subordinate to men. It is 

men's nature to be strong and courageous, it is women's nature to be weak and 

fearful; it is men's nature to command and lead, it is women's nature to obey 

and follow. Women are admonished to be modest, silent, patient in suffering 

and complying, those who aren't are labeled scolds or shrews. Mandeville 

unequivocally rejects this view of the order of nature and society whereby "the 

greatest Encomium a Man can give his Wife is to tell the World that she is 

Obedient" (F.T. 25 Jan., 1710). He attacks contemporary notions of female virtue 

which limit women to lesser moral standards, suitable only to domestic, not 

public life, and argues that "Patience, Chastity, Conjugal Love, and other Female 

Virtues," are no more women's lot by nature than "Magnanimity, Courage, or 

any of the Heroick Qualities, by which Men have made themselves Famous" 

(F.T., 25 Jan., 1710) are men's. Rather, Mandeville claims, all virtues are the 

result of custom and design and women are as capable of virtue as men are. 

Because the hierarchy of the family, like the hierarchy of society, is believed to be 

established in nature, aberrations which might undermine the authority of 

either are viewed by Mandeville's contemporaries as an affront to nature and 

ultimately to order and stability. Thus, women who affect "everything that's 

Masculine," including "Manly Reason, without the least Womanish Check" 

1 Goldsmith argues that Mandeville uses women to subvert the prevalent hierarchy of values 
which excluded women from the pursuit of virtues appropriate to landed gentlemen and the 
aristocratic ideals of honour. Goldsmith, Private Vices, Public Benefits, p. 163. 



80 

(F.T. 22 July & 15 Aug., 1709),1 are considered both an outrage and a threat to 

society and therefore strongly criticized.2 

In The Virgin Unmask'd and The Female Tatler, Mandeville's female 

characters are the very antithesis of the "natural" and ideal female. Well-

educated, unmarried and of independent means, the two Lucindas and Artesia 

possess all of the traditional "manly" characteristics considered taboo for women 

but essential for virtuous, hence male, citizens. The prevalent attitude towards 

women who are so unnatural as to deny their femininity is put forward in The  

Female Tatler by an old gentleman who ridicules Lucinda and Artesia for their 

learning and independence. He warns them that 

no Prudent Man will ever take a Wife that knows more than 
himself: Every body loves Women that are Gay and Witty, but 
Solidity and Learning are no more becoming them than Breeches, 
and Latin is as ungenteel a Furniture for the inside of a Woman's 
Head, as a Beard is for the outside (F.T., 17 Feb., 1710). 

"Young Women" should not behave in such an unbecoming and unnatural 

way, he admonishes, but "shou'd only Study how to get Husbands" (F.T., 17 Feb., 

1710). Mandeville presents women who contrast sharply with this portrayal: 

learned, knowledgeable about world affairs and financially independent, they are 

as capable of rational thought and as possessed of the heroic virtues as men.3 In 

The Virgin Unmask'd Lucinda is not only a spinster, a learned lady and a 

woman of substantial means with a personal income of £ 3 0 , 0 0 0 , 4 but, to add 

1 Mandeville was not yet a contributor to The Female Tatler. 
2 Bridget Hill claims that spinsters and learned ladies were scorned because chastity, to which 

so much importance was attached, was considered a "frozen" asset in a spinster, while learned 
ladies were considered to be "desexed." Hill, Eighteenth-Century Women, p. 12. 

3 See The Virgin Unmask'd, p. 151; The Female Tatler, Dec. 9 & 14,1709; Jan. 20,25,30; Feb., 3 & 
8,1710. 

4 A fortune of fifty thousand pounds was considered a substantial achievement for a rich London 
merchant. Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle, p. 50. See also Lorna Weatherill, Consumer  
Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain, 1660-1760, (New York: Routledge, 1988). 



81 

insult to injury, she is also one of the new financial entrepreneurs, holding a 

mortgage on land in exchange for a loan (V., 113) and able to talk with authority 

about government bonds and securities.1 Not content to argue that "the highest 

Degrees of Virtues are all the same," Mandeville even goes so far as to develop a 

"Table of Fame" for women in The Female Tatler (F.T., 9 Dec, 1709; 20 & 30 Jan., 

1710), in opposition to the "Table of Fame" for men, published by Steele in The  

Tatler.2 He fills his table with women who have demonstrated wisdom, courage 

and love of country equal to that of any man. Because the lack of women 

honoured for heroic deeds in the history books is cited as justification in The  

Tatler for not giving women a table of fame of their own, Mandeville's heroines 

argue that the only reason women have been conspicuously absent from the 

annals of history is because men have engrossed the writing of history to 

themselves. They 

have always been so careful to pick out the most remarkable 
Subjects, never endeavouring to render any Name Immortal, 
whose Greatness was not able to perpetuate their Own. From what I 
have said it is evident, that the Women, unless they had enjoy'd an 
equal Share of Power and Greatness with the Men, will not be 
found upon Record for their Excellencies so much as the latter, tho' 
they had exceeded them in every Virtue (F.T., 25 Jan., 1710). 

Artesia reiterates the complaint, made in both The Virgin Unmask'd, and The  

Female Tatler, that "since Men have enslav'd us," women have been debarred 

1 Bridget Hill argues that "the main principles behind the accepted theory of the role of women 
were that men and women have entirely different characteristics and capacities." Hill, 
Eighteenth-Century Women, p. 12. Mandeville does not subscribe to this idea and in his last 
edition of The Female Tatler, has Lucinda argue, as she did in The Virgin Unmask'd that 
"Letters were denied us, lest we shou'd see and claim our great Prerogative and Equality with 
haughty Man, to whom we were created Friends not Servants, and design'd to advise and assist 
them in the Government of the Earth." The Female Tatler, 29 March, 1710. 

2 Steele's Squire Bickerstaff promised a table of fame for the women but never put one together. 
In one edition of The Tatler. however, he wrote that "Sweetness of Temper and Simplicity of 
Manners" are the only lasting charms of women. The Tatler, no, 61., quoted in Leites, "Good 
Humour at Home, Good Humour Abroad," p. 60. 



82 

from governing, "which is the Reason that the Lives of Women have seldom 

been described in History" (25 Jan., 1710).1 

The question of why men have enslaved women is, moreover, central to 

Mandeville's larger argument about the evolution and development of civil 

societies. The contrivance of chastity as the chief virtue for women has a very 

practical explanation, Mandeville argues. It removes a constant source of 

contention that would always be present if men could not lay ownership to 

women. As well, it satisfies men's need for dominance, meets the needs of civil 

society by ensuring an orderly succession of property rights and provides for a 

constant supply of cheap labour, thus enabling society to be divided into classes, a 

necessary prerequisite for rich and flourishing nations (F.T., 30 Nov., 1709; V., 

116). When Mandeville turns his attention to the question of how, and by what 

means, savages, driven by their appetites, can be civilized, he begins with the 

assumption that, in a state of nature, men will satisfy their two primary needs, 

lust and hunger, vying with one another for women and food. So powerful is 

the sexual urge, Mandeville argues, and so disastrous for civil society the 

consequences of an unbalance in the number of males and females, that nature 

has contrived to keep the numbers of adult males and females in equal balance. 

Nature compensates for the number of men that are invariably killed by war2 

and the vagaries of life by producing more male than female babies (II: 256/7).3 

Otherwise, the "perpetual Scarcity of Women, and Superfluity of Men, would 

1 See The Virgin Unmask'd, pp. 127/8; The Female Tatler, 20 Jan., 1710,25 Jan., 1710, and 17 Feb., 
1710. 

2 By war Mandeville means civil, foreign, massacres, private murders, poison, swords and all 
other hostile acts men use to kill one another. The Fable II, pp. 254/5. 

3 Kaye notes that Mandeville is referring to Natural and Political Observations...upon the Bills  
of Mortality. The Observations claim that although more men die than women because of their 
more hazardous life, the fact that their birth rate exceeds females by about a thirteenth part 
preserves the balance between the sexes. The Fable II, p. 257, n. 1. 



83 

make great Uneasiness in all Societies...the Price of Women, would be so 

enhanced by it, that none but Men in tolerable good Circumstances would be able 

to purchase them" (U: 258/9). 

4. Female Chastity 

Mandeville's hypothetical account of how societies might have developed 

also has, as an important component, an explanation of the evolution of chastity. 

His argument that female chastity is not natural, but a product of pride and social 

conditioning, derives from the tradition of Bayle, but breaks with that tradition 

in a very important way. In his Pensees Diverses Sur La Comete, Bayle explains 

his mistrust of female virtue, saying: 

je ne voi pas qu'on doive trouver etrange, que je soupcpnne de 
faussete la plus-part des vertus humaines, et la chastete des femmes 
nommement. Si celles qui ont fait leur devoir de ce cote-la, 
s'examinent a la rigueur, elles trouverent, je m'assure, que la peur 
du qu'en dira-t-on, y a plus contribue que toute autre chose.1 

While Mandeville believes with Bayle that "les femmes s'y piqueroient de 

pudicite, parce qu'infailliblement cela leur acquerroit l'amour et l'estime des 

hommes,"2 he does not, like Bayle, lay special blame on women for being more 

lustful than men because of a defect in their constitution. 

C'est qu'elles sont retenues par la dure loi de l'honneur, qui les 
expose a l'infamie, quand elles succombent au penchant de la 
nature. II est certain que si les hommes n'eussent point attache 
l'honneur et la gloire des femmes a la chastete, les femmes seroient 
aussi generalement plongees dans les pechez de la chair, que les 
hommes; il ya a meme beaucoup d'apparence qu'elles s'y 

-\ 

1 Bayle, Pensees Diverses Sur La Comete II. p. 82. 
2 Ibid., p. 103. 



84 

porteroient avec plus d'ardeur, parce qu'il est fort apparent que cette 
passion est plus violente dans les femmes que dans les hommes.1 

Indeed, there is an intricate relationship in Mandeville's argument between the 

physiology of the sexes and the psychology that must be employed with women. 

Because women mature earlier sexually than do men (II: 123)2, they must be 

flattered more and from an earlier age to secure them against their own nature. 

Again Mandeville disagrees with Bayle's low opinion of women, particularly 

his argument that, by nature, women are more lustful than men. O n the 

contrary, he argues, the sexual urge is stronger in men than it is in women (I: 

71).3 For this reason, not only must a woman be secured against her own nature, 

but she must also be secured against the wiles of "a Seducer of uncommon 

Address and resistless Charms," who "may court her to what Nature prompts 

and sollicites her to do" (II: 123). 

One of Mandeville's major tenets is that if virtue, moral, social or 

religious, is innate in mankind, then men would not behave as they do. Striking 

evidence of this, he claims, can be found in an examination of female chastity. It 

is only 'good' women who are driven to murder their unborn children in order 

to protect their self-interest. Whores, who could be expected to be without either 

1 Ibid., pp. 79/80. Home argues that Bayle's low opinion of women helps explain why the 
chastity of women is one of his favourite examples of the way in which pride works. Home, 
The Social Thought of Bernard Mandeville, p. 30. Not only were women more lustful than men 
by nature, according to Bayle, but "des vices qui flattent extremement notre vanite, notre envie, 
notre avarice et notre haine...generalement parlant, les femmes sont fort vaines et fort 
envieuses; si bien que pour les entretenir agreablement, it ne suffit pas de savoir mentir en les 
loiiant, il faut encore savoir mentir en blamant les autres femmes, et sur tout celles qui sont en 
concurrence de beaute, ou d'esprit, ou de credit, ou de rang avec celles qu'on entretient. Bayle, 
Pensees Diverses Sur La Comete, pp. 91/2. 

2 Mandeville argues that men are not usually ready for sex until they are about fourteen, whereas 
women are ready by about twelve. The Fable II, p. 201. 

3 Mandeville is somewhat ambivalent concerning male and female sexuality, arguing that 
although sexual desire is slower to be aroused in women, once raised to the critical height, it is 
absolutely irresistible. Mandeville, Modest Defense of Publick Stews, p 52. 



85 

conscience or morality, seldom are guilty of this crime (I: 75). 'Good' women 

may be persuaded to give in to their sexual urges in private but, because their 

honour, "ally'd and clearly annex'd to worldly Interest," (M.D., 46) demands that 

they remain chaste until married,1 if their private acts can be publicly discovered, 

they will risk all, even murdering their bastard children, to escape public 

disgrace. 2 Neither love of virtue nor hatred of vice keeps women chaste, 

Mandeville claims. Only pride, in the guise of shame, is powerful enough to do 

that. "Honour routed never rallies, nay, the least Breach in female Reputation is 

irreparable" (M.D., 44): threat of gaol and fear of god will not persuade women 

above a certain class to suffer the shame of dishonour and the public ignominy 

and loss of opportunity that inevitably follows such a disclosure. 

If moral virtues are not absolute and inviolate, rooted neither in natural 

or divine law, then what explains the ferocity with which society proclaims 

chastity to be the chief, if not the only, virtue of any consequence for women and 

the relentless pursuit of hapless women who are so unfortunate as to besmirch 

theirs? Mandeville argues that the explanation is to be found in men's 

domineering spirit. In the early stages of the development of societies, he claims, 

mankind's natural propensity to dominate, coupled with self-love and self-

liking, will cause men to strive for superiority over one another: Because "every 

Man is born with this domineering Spirit," once his needs for food and sexual 

1 Mandeville claims that "all marry'd Women are above the World, in so far as they are out of 
the Reach of any Suspicions or Surmises, or even a Probability of Incontinence; and since they 
are not liable to be detected by Pregnancy, there's no other Sort of Conviction able to prejudice 
them." Mandeville, Modest Defence of Publick Stews, p. 46. 

2 The Fable I, pp. 75/6; The Fable II. p. 124; The Female Tatler, 11 Nov., 1709.For examples of 
the treatment that women who murdered their bastard children received, see Hill, 
Eighteenth-Century Women, pp. 138-49. 



86 

gratification are satisfied, "a Desire of Superiority, and grasping to himself"1 will 

make him look for ways to gain ascendancy over others. For this reason, in a 

state of nature men will value themselves for their strength and prowress, 

whereas women "will always prize themselves for what they see Men admire in 

them" (II: 133).2 It is this human tendency for mankind to value themselves, 

either for what others think of them, or, more perversely, what they imagine 

others think of them,3 that results in the contrivance of chastity as "the chief 

Virtue of the Women" (F.T., 20 Jan., 1710), as well as all other moral virtues.4 As 

Lucinda explains, women do not behave modestly because they value modest 

behaviour, but only because they are afraid men will despise and hate them if 

they behave otherwise (V. 10). Lust, "that Passion that prompts mankind to 

labour for the Preservation of our Species" (I: 142),5 is so strong a force in human 

beings that, in savage societies, men and women will satisfy their sexual urge 

without any thought or understanding of what it is they are doing. 6 Thus, 

without some strong incentive for restraint, "tho' we agree not to take away, and 

1 This "Thirst of Dominion" plays an important role in Mandeville's theory of society. Without 
it, he argues, men "could never have been form'd into Societies." The "Desire of Dominion", he 
claims, "is a never-failing Consequence" of men's pride. The Fable II, pp. 204/5. 

2 Although Mandeville gives a reasoned argument for why men will value themselves for 
strength and prowress, he does not give a similar argument for why it is that women value 
themselves for what men prize in them. 

3 See The Fable I, p. 217, for Mandeville's argument on how this trait in men can be used to the 
benefit of society. 

4 "Patience, Chastity, Conjugal Love, and other Female Virtues", are considered important, but 
the consensus of The Female Tatler's contributors is that chastity is the most important female 
virtue. Male virtues are "Magnanimity, Courage, or any of the Heroic Qualities, by which Men 
have made themselves Famous." The Female Tatler, 25 Jan. 1710. The Oxford Gentleman, 
however, explodes the myth that there are different virtues for men and women, arguing that 
there is a single standard and that all virtuous acts proceed from self-interested motives. The  
Female Tatler, 6 Jan., 1710. Goldsmith argues that Mandeville "in a number of his works both 
directly and indirectly undermined the conviction that there was a single standard of ethical 
value-a standard embodied in the eighteenth-century conception of the landed patriotic 
gentleman citizen." Goldsmith, Private Vices, Public Benefits, p. 158. 

5 Preservation of the species is the result, not the cause, of lust Mandeville argues. See An 
Enquiry into the Origins of Honour, pp. 28/9. 

6 Mandeville tells a wonderful story about a cherry tree to illustrate this point. The Fable II, 
pp. 224/5. 



87 

rob a Man of the Woman that is his own, it is yet to be fear'd, that if we like her, 

this innate Principle, that bids us gratify every Appetite, will advise us to make 

Use of her, as if she was our own; tho' our Neighbour is at the Charge of 

maintaining her, and all the Children she brings forth" (II: 273).1 Compelled as 

he is by the conceit of egoism to imagine that everything he can get his hands on 

is his own, the savage "will look upon his Children as his Property" (II: 200-204).2 

This is the original motive, Mandeville argues, that prompts men to value 

chastity in women above all else. To be certain that their children are their own, 

men have contrived to make chastity the primary female virtue. But if women 

are to be restrained from satisfying a passion as compelling as lust, there has to be 

an even more compelling passion substituted in its place. By tying women's 

honour solely to their chastity, pride, the "Principle of Self-esteem" (II: 92), 

ensures that women, because they want to be well thought of by men, will 

endeavour to restrain their "darling Passion, Lust", giving way to it only within 

the confines of marriage. In this way, men can be reasonably confident that the 

offspring of the union are their own, and that they own the offspring they father. 

Mandeville gives preeminence in his theory of "Pride" to women. 

Convinced that the differing degrees of pride are owing to circumstances and 

education (II: 122), he argues that women, while not having "more Pride from 

Nature than Men....have a great deal more from Education" (II: 122/3).3 

1 Mandeville argues this theme at length in his Modest Defense of Publick Stews. 
2 It is not just savages that are prompted by these motives, Mandeville claims. Love is not the 

cause of marriage, but the effect of lust. Men do not marry out of any noble sentiments, but out of 
pride and a desire to secure their possessions: "a rich Man may, with great Impatience, wish 
for a Son, to inherit his Name and his Estate; perhaps, he may marry from no other Motive, 
and for no other Purpose; but all the Satisfaction he seems to receive, from the flattering 
Prospect of a happy Posterity, can only arise from a pleasing Reflection on himself, as the 
Cause of those Descendants" The Fable II: 228. 

3 Mandeville does concede that individuals bom with the finest parts have the greatest 
aptitude to be proud, and that "the workmanship in the Make of Women seems to be more 
elegant, and better finish'd....There is no Reason to imagine, that Nature should have been 



88 

Women's pride, refined to a higher pitch than men's because they are flattered 

more, and from an earlier age (II: 123), increases their fear of shame, "the Reverse 

of Pride" (I: 66), thus keeping them mindful of their honour which "has no other 

object than their Chastity"(II: 124). 

The Multitude will hardly believe the excessive Force of Education, 
and in the difference of Modesty between Men and Women ascribe 
that to Nature, which is altogether owing to early Instruction: Miss 
is scarce three Years old, but she is spoke to every Day to hide her 
Leg, and rebuk'd in good Earnest if she shews it; while Little Master 
at the same Age is bid to take up his Coats, and piss like a Man" (I: 
72). 

Mandeville's utilitarian bent is evident in this argument that the 

standards of virtue are different for men than for women. If the standards are 

absolute and apply equally to both sexes, he argues, then neither sex will dare 

make the first advance towards the other and there will be no increase in 

population, particularly among fashionable people (1:71). But because virtue is 

socially determined, and because it is in the interest of politicians to encourage 

large populations, and since lust is stronger in men than in women, society has 

made it acceptable for male modesty to have a less rigourous standard applied to 

it. With male modesty not tied to chastity, as is a female's, all that is required for 

men to be modest, is for them to maintain "a civil Behaviour amongst the Fair 

in Publick and a Deportment, inoffensive both in Words and Actions" (II: 12). 

If it is pride of ownership and lust for dominion that prompts all men in 

rude and savage states to value chastity as the prime virtue in women, it is the 

need for large populations that makes matrimony politically desirable in 

more neglectful of them out of Sight, than she has where we can trace her; and not have taken 
the same Care of them in the Formation of the Brain, as to the Nicety of the Structure, and the 
superior Accuracy in the Fabric..." The Fable II, p. 173 



89 

societies with more complex social structures. Once men no longer live in a state 

of nature, Mandeville claims, "but form'd into several Societies independent of 

one another, and these Societies again [are] divided into several Ranks and 

Degrees of Men, distinguished by their Titles and Possessions, which descend 

fmm Father to Son" (M.D., 27), marriage becomes absolutely necessary. Not only 

is marriage necessary "for the regular Propagation of the Species, and their 

careful Education, but likewise for preserving that Distinction of Rank among 

Mankind, which otherwise would be utterly lost and confounded by doubtful 

Successions" (M.D. 27). The impetus for marriage may come from men's 

inclination to lewdness (M.D., 29), but the purpose of marriage is to promote 

population growth (M.D. 30/1). By regulating lust to prevent the inevitable strife 

and mischief that results if men and women are free to promiscuously copulate 

and change partners at will, 1 legislators encourage social harmony, peace and 

prosperity. Mandeville argues the mercantilist case2 that the prosperity of any 

country depends "in a great measure, on the Number of its Inhabitants" (M.D. 5). 

For this reason, it is in the interest of the politicians to regulate relations between 

men and women, require less rigourous standards of chastity for males than for 

females and promote large populations by encouraging marriage.3 

5. Fashion and Improvement 

One of Mandeville's most carefully developed positions, and the only vice 

for which he supplies a detailed demonstration of how it could be turned into a 

1 Mandeville, An Enquiry Into The Origins Of Honour pp. 28/9. Mandeville argues that marriage 
was not invented to make men procreate, they already knew how to do that, but rather to 
regulate procreation to prevent mischief. 

2 See T.E. Gregory, "The Economics of Employment in England, 1660-1713", Economica 1:37-51, 
(1921), p. 37. Unlike his contemporaries though, Mandeville argues for the benefits of 
consumption, not just production. 

3 Mandeville argues this theme in The Virgin Unmask'd, p. 116, and The Fable I, pp. 70/1. 



90 

public benefit, Hirschman claims, is the vice traditionally associated with women 

and civic ruin, "the passion for material goods in general and for luxury in 

particular."1 Traditionally thought to be more deeply imbued than men with 

"the trio of vices - ambition, avarice and lechery,"2 women were synonymous 

with luxury and thus with self-indulgent excess of any sort, sexual as well as 

material. 3 Moral prohibitions against luxury and legal prohibitions against 

dressing above one's station had existed in one form or another in many 

societies. Women's desire to ornament themselves and enhance their beauty, a 

persistent theme throughout church history, produced a copious literature of 

admonitions to them about self-ornament long before Mandeville's time.4 

Sumptuary laws, still read from pulpits annually in England, applied to all 

citizens who laboured or were dependent on others, but they applied to women 

in particular.5 The desire to dress above one's rank was seen as a threat to the 

social order, undermining class distinctions, corrupting the morals and 

1 Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests, p. 18. Hirschman overlooks Mandeville's argument 
about how female chastity is derived from men's vices, to the continual benefit of society. 
Mandeville's Fable of the Bees was one of the more important eighteenth-century works on 
luxury. See also Sekora, Luxury. 

2 Ibid., p. 22. Mandeville identifies lust, pride and selfishness as the passions that men must 
hide for the happiness and embellishment of society. The Fable I, pp. 68/9. 

3 With one major exception, virtually all medieval and Renaissance personifications of luxury 
are feminine. The major exception, Sekora says, was Spenser's Faerie Queen. Depicted as a 
beautiful, lustful woman in the windows of Chartes, Notre Dame and Amiens, luxury appears 
carrying the comb and mirror of cupidity and self-love. In some places she holds a scepter to 
mark her omnipotence and sexual domination over men; several medieval and early 
Renaissance depictions carry beneath the name a subtitle: "The Power of Woman". Sekora, 
Luxury, pp. 44/5. 

4 See Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman, pp. 14-16. Jerome, Aquinas and Saint Francis 
all took up the debate. Ibid., p. 15. 

5 See Sekora, Luxury, pp. 58-61. Sekora claims that the Society for the Reformation of Manners 
was formed in 1692 by influential men in London who decided that the sumptuary laws were 
being neglected. Ibid., p. 61. 



91 

discipline of citizens and impoverishing the state by diminishing the aggregate 

wealth of the commonwealth through overspending on luxury goods.1 

Mandeville's intention was to turn the traditional arguments against 

luxury upside down, arguing instead that luxury is as necessary to create rich and 

flourishing societies as his contemporaries believed it to be harmful. Qualities 

customarily held to be advantageous to society such as "Humility, Temperance, 

Contentedness, Frugality, and several other Virtues" are so "very insignificant, 

as to the Publick," Mandeville argues, "and so far from making a Country 

Flourish, that no Nation yet enjoy'd the most ordinary Comforts of Life", if they 

were not "Counter-ballanc'd by the opposite Vices" (F.T., 25 Nov., 1709). Pride, 

passion and prodigality are so essential to the state, "that no Nation can be Great 

without them...[and] to wish for a flourishing Trade and the Decrease of Pride 

and Luxury is as great an Absurdity, as to pray for Rain and Dry Weather at the 

same time" (F.T. 30 Nov., 1709).2 Mankind's emulative nature and women's 

insatiable appetite for fashion provides the incentive for invention and keeps 

tradesmen, craftsmen, shopkeepers and scores of others employed. Indeed, it is 

this reciprocal relationship between the never-ending desires of the prosperous 

classes and the labour of the poor that drives society (I: 355/356). 

This is the reason that Mandeville directs his work to the middle and 

upper classes and argues so vigorously on behalf of the "beau monde". Society is 

beholden for the comforts and splendors of life neither to the lower classes, who 

1 This attitude is discussed in an early edition of The Female Tatler where "the Prodigality of 
inferior classes" and "the Deceitfulness of most Men's Appearances," are criticized because rank 
distinction is "highly necessary for the Oeconomy of the World." The Female Tatler. 12 Aug., 
1709. The necessity for sumptuary laws to prevent harm to English morals and manufactures 
through excessive spending on luxury goods is discussed by an anonymous writer in A Proposal  
for Remeeding our Excessive Luxury. (1700), [Goldsmith, Kress Collection]. 

2 Mandeville repeats this argument in The Fable. "Luxury and Politeness ever grew up together, 
and were never enjoy'd asunder." The Fable II, p. 147. 



92 

are devoid of honour (I: 199) and thus seldom powerfully influenced by pride to 

improve their lot (I: 194), nor to sober-living citizens who manage their money 

prudently. Rather, society is the beneficiary of vain, affected pleasure seekers 

who have wealth and spend it lavishly (F.T., 25 Nov., 1709). One of the first to 

focus attention on consumption as a spur to economic growth,1 Mandeville, 

unlike most of his contemporaries, argues for the benefits deriving to the 

economy from consumption, particularly foreign consumption. His 

contemporaries deplored the frequently changing fashions in food and clothing 

because these items were usually imported. Foreign trade was thought to be 

beneficial to the state only if English goods were sold abroad or imported goods 

were re-exported.2 Mandeville, however, did not agree. If England did not buy 

luxury items such as Indian pepper, tea, coffee, calico and fashion goods from 

other countries, she would not be able to sell her own products to them,3 and not 

only would the economy be undermined but civil society itself would be 

threatened (I: 111). Arts and sciences, trade and commerce, employment, the class 

structure and domestic tranquility are all, he claims, due to the profligate spender 

and the insatiable consumer.4 

These economic features of Mandeville's social theory rest on one primary 

notion, that human beings are egotistical by nature. Passion and self-interest, 

1 F.B. Kaye points out that North had also anticipated Mandeville's attack on National 
Frugality when he wrote: "Countries which have sumptuary Laws, are generally poor....for 
that never thrives better, than when Riches are tost from hand to hand." Sir Dudley North, 
Discourses upon Trade (1691). p. 15; The Fable, I, p. 108. 

2 Joan Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects, (Oxford: Clarendon, Press, 1978), p. 134. The fashion 
craze for Indian cottons, imported silks, French fashion goods and exotic foods was deplored 
because these items were believed to hurt the home economy by draining money from the 
country and fostering lax morals in the people. A Proposal for Remeeding our Excessive Luxury. 

3 Kaye writes that Mandeville was not abandoning the orthodox 'balance of trade' argument, but 
rather arguing for the stimulation of both exports and imports. The Fable I, p. 111. 

4 Mandeville devotes two consecutive papers to this topic. The Female Tatler. 25 Nov., 1709; 30 
Nov., 1709. 



93 

manifest in a desire to be well regarded by others, results in mankind's 

propensity to strive constantly for preeminence over one another. Central to 

Mandeville's theory, and overlooked by scholars, is his description of the effect 

that this need for esteem has on women and the social consequences which flow 

from it. He argues that mankind's need for confirmation from others of his own 

self-worth acts on women, causing them to value themselves for whatever it is 

that men prize in them. A n d what men prize, Mandeville claims, is physical 

attractiveness. Mandeville was acutely aware of what Neil McKendrick calls "the 

biological display function of clothes."1 In a state of nature, he argues, women 

who, naked and unenhanced, are less attractive than others, very quickly 

discover that they can enhance their beauty by the use of artifice and ornament. 

Once other women realize this, they too begin to improve on nature.2 In this 

way, because human beings constantly strive to emulate those whom they feel 

are superior to themselves (I: 330), with time and through custom, by constantly 

competing with one another for men's attention, women are driven to dress 

above their stations (I: 127/8). The direct correlation between pride and luxury 

gives women the foremost role in the development of the fashion industry. 

Their greater pride and their need to be physically attractive to men combine to 

produce in them an almost insatiable desire for fashion goods. 

1 McKendrick, "Commercialization and the Economy," p. 39. 
• 2 This is a topic of considerable discussion in the The Virgin Unmask'd. Lucinda argues that 

women only show those parts of their bodies that men find attractive. Because men find 
women's bosoms attractive, women display them. The reason that women don't show "the 
Lower-parts, for there [they] are Ugly, Ill-shaped, Nasty Creatures," is not out of modesty, 
Lucinda says, but because "they are only afraid Men will despise and hate them for it." The  
Virgin Unmask'd, p. 10. 



94 

The Financial Revolution, begun in the 1690s, had a significant effect on 

women's fortunes and especially upon their power as consumers.1 P . G . M . 

Dickson argues that the creation of new forms of mobile wealth through the 

expansion of commerce into the West Indies and North America, along with 

technical innovations among the merchants and traders of London, resulted in 

the distribution of this wealth to new groups of people.2 Prominent among 

them, controlling both land and money, were women.3 There is evidence to 

suggest that early eighteenth-century demographic conditions "were favourable 

for the production of heiresses."4 By coincidence, at the same time as the 

financial revolution was taking place, a 'quirk' of nature, combined with English 

inheritance laws, provided women with greatly increased access to wealth, both 

in property and investment capital. Since fewer males were being born than 

females, and patrimony was divided equally among sons and daughters, the 

number of heiresses and brides with large portions increased substantially while 

large quantities of land were brought under direct or indirect female control.5 

Inheritance, marriage settlements and widowhood combined to offer women 

increased control of large sums of money, which they then invested in the new 

1 The effect of this revolution on women is an omission in Goldsmith's discussion on women and 
their place in early eighteenth society. Goldsmith argues that few women held or controlled 
landed or commercial property. M.M. Goldsmith, "The Treacherous "Arts of Mankind," p. 96. 

2 P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public  
Credit. 1699-1756. (Toronto: The MacMillan Co., 1967), p. 4 

3 For women as land owners, see H.J. Habakkuk, "English Landownership, 1680-1740," The  
Economic History Review, vol. x, no. 1, (Feb., 1940), pp. 2-17; Lloyd Bonfield, "Marriage 
Settlements and the Rise of Great Estates: The Demographic Aspect," The Economic History  
Review, 2nd series, vol. xxxii, no. 4, (Nov. 1979) pp. 483-493; and Christopher Clay, "Marriage, 
Inheritance and the Rise of Large Estates in England, 1660-1815," The Economic History  
Review. 2nd series, vol. xxi, no. 3, (1968), pp. 503-518. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in 
England, pp. 256; 298. 

4 Lloyd Bonfield, "Marriage Settlements and the Rise of Great Estates," p. 486. Both Bonfield 
and Clay cite Hollingsworth's calculations of male replacement rates for the peerage in 
support of this conclusion. Clay, "Marriage, Inheritance and the Rise of Large Estates in 
England, 1660-1815," p. 510. 

5 Bonfield, "Marriage Settlements and the Rise of Great Estates," p. 486; Clay, "Marriage, 
Inheritance and the Rise of Large Estates In England," p. 504. 



95 

financial institutions. Evidence of this is their importance as speculators, from 

the first establishment of public credit at the end of the seventeenth century, up 

to at least the middle of the next century. Dickson calculates that when the first 

English loan was floated in 1693, women made up 18.6% of the subscribers for 

11.9% of the subscription. As the century wore on, they became increasingly 

important as investors in both government and private shares, holding, by mid-

century, 25.4% of the Bank stock for 18.8% of the total amount, and 22.5% of the 

East India stock for 16.5% of the total.1 What this meant was that women as 

consumers and investors were now an important component of and potent 

market in British civil society.2 

The image of "woman as capricious consumer", a recurrent feature of "the 

rather prominent sexism found in Augustan social criticism," was a target for 

many of Mandeville's contemporaries.3 Steele, for example, attacked women for 

their love of finery, rhapsodizing that they are loveliest when plainly dressed in 

simple, unadorned garments. Mandeville argues for the benefits deriving to 

society from "the Fickle Strumpet that invents new Fashions every Week; the 

haughty Dutchess that in Equipage, Entertainments, and all her Behaviour 

would imitate a Princess" (I: 355). He employs the common image of the woman 

who wants a new gown for thoroughly selfish and whimsical reasons to 

demonstrate the unintended consequences which flow to society from the self-

1 Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England, p. 256. 
2 Women were also an important component in the marriage market and contributed to the 

widening gap between the wealthier and the poorer landowners. Speck claims that the 
wealthy landowners were able to corner the marriage market, thereby increasing their wealth 
and holdings. Because it was socially acceptable for gentlemen (but not for gentlewomen) to 
marry down the social ladder, men were able to make prudent alliances with wealthy 
merchants' daughters. Speck, "Conflict in Society," pp. 138, 145. 

3 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, p. 465. Both Montesquieu and Addison also attacked women 
for their consumerism. 



96 

indulgent woman and the extravagant spender.1 Indeed, the "abominable 

improvement in Female Luxury" does far more to promote the welfare of the 

nation than all the beneficent virtues of a good and contented gentleman, living 

in harmony with his neighbours and coveting nothing, ever could (I: 355/6; 226; 

F.T., 30 Nov., 1709). 

Women, both single and married, gained increasing command of earnings 

of their own 2 and, in luxurious cities like London in particular, access to shops 

and private dealers selling a wide variety of consumer goods.3 Mandeville gives 

a facetious demonstration of the power of emulation amongst all classes of 

women and the effects of their emulative spending on fashion. From "the 

poorest Labourer's Wife in the Parish," who will "half starve her self and her 

Husband to purchase a second-hand Gown and Petticoat" (I: 129), to the 

"Merchant's Lady" who, not bearing to see the women below her in the social 

scale fitted out as well as she is, "flies for refuge to the other End of the Town, 

and scorns to follow any Fashion but what she takes from thence," to the court, 

where "the Women of Quality are frighten'd to see Merchants Wives and 

Daughters dress'd like themselves," women compete with one another, 

emulating those above them and striving to set themselves off from those 

below. A n d all of this acts to benefit society, Mandeville argues, by setting the 

"Mantua-makers" and other assorted tradesmen to work. 

1 Mandeville devotes three editions of The Female Tatler to the benefits of both those who 
devote their time to earning money and those who devote it to spending money, each is 
necessary to the other and both to society. See 13,17 and 22 March, 1710. 

2 McKendrick argues that even women in domestic service received higher money wages as a 
result in the rising competition for labour. McKendrick, "Commercialization and the Economy," 
p. 23. 

3 See E. A. Wrigley, "A Simple Model of London's Importance in Changing English Society and 
Economy, 1650-1750", Past and Present. No. 34, Quly, 1967), pp. 44-70, p. 51. Wrigley argues 
that by Mandeville's time the shop is a normal feature and a most important influence on social 
life. 



97 

To this Emulation and continual striving to out-do one another it is 
owing, that after so many various Shiftings and Changings of 
Modes, in trumping up new ones and renewing of old ones, there is 
still a plus ultra left for the ingenious; it is this, or at least the 
consequence of it, that sets the Poor to Work, adds Spurs to 
Industry, and encourages the skilful Artificer to search after further 
Improvements. (I: 130) 

Commercial societies are the product of the uninhibited and often whimsical 

pursuit of desires which raise production by increasing demand. Thus there is a 

direct relationship between improvements in female luxury and economic 

improvement. Mandeville argues that the desire for luxury materials such as 

brocades and embroideries encourages trade and promotes the welfare of the 

country (I: 125). He scoffs at contemporary suggestions that religion has any 

relevance for the behaviour of individuals and the wealth of nations, and argues 

instead that "the silly and capricious Invention of Hood'd and Quilted Petticoats" 

has done far more to spur trade, employ workers and promote the arts and 

sciences than religion and sober living ever could (I: 356). 

Although unaware of the demographic trend which improved women's 

fortunes, Mandeville was certainly conscious of their emerging role in the 

nation's economic life. Unlike contemporaries such as Steele, he did not deplore 

women's growing economic independence as a threat to marital harmony and 

an aberration of the natural order of society. Instead, he viewed their 

participation in the economic life of the nation as natural, and important for a 

flourishing, commercial nation. Moreover, he understood their importance to 

transcend their power as consumers. As Mandeville points out in The Virgin  

Unmask'd, too often men are able to wheedle women's portions and wealth 

away from them (V., 117/8 ).1 If all that is necessary for a rich and flourishing 

1 Astell expresses a similar complaint against husbands in Reflections Upon Marriage, pp. 13/4 . 



98 

society is that money circulate, then it matters not if women or men are 

spending it. 



99 

C O N C L U S I O N 

The importance of women in Mandeville's social thinking derives from 

what he understood to be the most basic and fundamental facts of human 

association. When Mandeville analyzed society, he did not find magnanimous, 

spiritually lofty individuals who associate together out of a natural desire for 

society and an innate love for one another. Rather, he found a collection of self-

interested individuals. What leads to society, he argues, is their pride and the 

desire for dominion over one another (11:204/5). Self-liking makes individuals 

so fond of the approval and approbation of others that they can be manipulated 

into behaving in socially desirable ways and, through a slow evolutionary 

process, learn to curb and restrain wild nature and assume traits that will allow 

them to live together in stable and harmonious groups. Mandeville's work is 

about pride, a quality in human beings so ineffable, yet so powerful, that, 

properly developed and refined, it can cause women to deny their strongest, 

most basic appetite. Central to Mandeville's social theories and his formulation 

of them are his reflections on women and their role in civil society. Given his 

reliance on the paramountcy of the passions and the socially destructive effects of 

lust coupled with men's selfish and domineering nature (II: 272),1 it is difficult to 

imagine how Mandeville could have formulated his theory in the way he did 

without his speculations on women and their importance for civil society and 

material progress. 

A l l wise laws, Mandeville claims, are crafted to direct the energies of those 

who are meant to obey them. Even laws as sacred as the Ten Commandments 

are merely stronger versions of prohibitions and rules which were in existence 

1 Mandeville returns to this theme again and again. For example: The Fable I, p. 344; II, p. 132, 
270-5, 321. 



100 

amongst the Israelites at the time of Moses. The prohibitions against stealing, 

coveting and adultery all stem from the necessity of regulating relations between 

the sexes so as to foster harmonious relations within the social group (II: 272/3). 

Herein lies the conservative nature of Mandeville's thought, for though he 

credits women with intelligence and ability equal to men's, and rejects the 

notion that moral virtues are divinely determined, he does not reject the double 

standards that society applies to women. 

Mandeville's social theorizing ought to be understood as a radical defense 

of the status quo. He sought to justify the social practices and mental habits of 

commercial societies by employing original and unsettling modes of analysis to 

achieve this end. Mandeville's aim is not to reform society, but rather to 

illuminate it, and his arguments about women are a central feature of this 

enterprise. If men and women are to live together in complex, materially 

prosperous societies, Mandeville insists, then, given human nature, laws and 

prohibitions must exist to restrain their socially destructive tendencies. For this 

reason, female chastity and stable marriage are as necessary to the growth, 

harmony and prosperity of civil societies as are patriotism and wise laws. So 

important is female chastity and so difficult is it to preserve it given the 

compelling nature of the sex drive, that even enforcing chastity with the entire 

weight of the social, religious and political structure will not ensure it. Only 

pride has the power to overcome lust. Only by allying honour with chastity has 

society succeeded in enforcing it upon women. 1 The deceptions and 

manipulations based upon pride, fostered by society and practiced by women, 

result in a functioning and polished social order. 

1 Bayle makes this point in his Pensees. He argues that women "sont retenues par la dure loi de 
1'honneur, qui les expose a rinfamie, quand elles succombent au penchant de la nature." Pensees  
Diverses Sur La Comete, p. 79. 



1 0 1 

Investigation of Mandeville's attitudes towards women and women's 

issues reveals that no discussion of his social, moral or economic thought is 

complete without a consideration of their central role. Beginning with his 

analysis of human psychology in The Virgin Unmask'd, he develops his 

characteristic arguments about the passions, and the civilizing effects of society, 

by satirizing contemporary assumptions about women. He attempts to 

demonstrate the hypocrisy inherent in claims for the absoluteness of 

conventional moral, social and economic standards by exposing the motives 

behind conventional assumptions about women, the roles they were expected to 

play and the moral standards they were obliged to maintain. 

Mandeville discusses associations between the sexes in the context of civil 

society. Throughout his work, he argues that men and women are essentially 

the same in nature and ability, desires and appetites. Thus, in a state of nature, 

when their desires and appetites are unfettered by convention or prescription, 

they will copulate promiscuously and at will. "Tho' Lust in Man is not so raging 

as it is in Bulls and other salacious Creatures, yet nothing provokes Men and 

Women both sooner and more violently to Anger, than what crosses their 

Amours, when they are heartily in Love" (1:204/5). To prevent the mischief 

which this must invariably bring once any number of men and women live 

together in close proximity to one another, Mandeville, adopting the ancient 

Lucretian device of the skilful politician, postulates that "Lawgivers and other 

wise M e n , that have labour'd for the Establishment of Society, have 

endeavour'd...to make the People they were to govern, believe, that it was more 

beneficial for every Body to conquer than indulge his Appetites, and much better 

to mind the Publick than what seem'd his private Interest" (1:42). Thus 



102 

Mandeville shows that it is civil expediency, not religious canon, that demands 

chastity be the primary virtue in women and allies it to their honour to ensure 

its enforcement and prevent civil strife.1 In the same way that chastity has been 

made a moral virtue, marriage has been made a religious and civil institution. 

Mandeville's arguments about marriage, first made in The Virgin Unmask'd, 

remained a constant and important part of his social theorizing. In A n Enquiry  

into the Origin of Honour, published in 1732, the year before his death, 

Mandeville repeats his claim that marriage is an institution designed by 

politicians, not God, and "Instituted to regulate strong Passions and to prevent 

the innumerable Mischiefs that should ensue, if Men and Women should 

converse together promiscuously, and love and leave one another as Caprice and 

their unruly Fancy led them."2 Once the continuity in Mandeville's arguments 

is recognized, it becomes clear that in The Virgin U n m a s k ' d he is not just 

attempting to show the hardships of marriage. Rather, he uses a satirical 

description of marriage to develop comprehensive social and moral arguments. 

Crucial to his famous maxim that private vices bring public benefits are his 

arguments that chastity and marriage (both, he claims, necessary for materially 

prosperous, multi-strata, societies, in which property is passed on from one 

generation to the next), are the result of lust and pride. 

Pride, allied to luxury, creates rich and powerful nations (V. 168; F.T. 30 

Nov., 1709; II: 147). Mandeville's beliefs about the effects of self-interest on 

women's behaviour, and the relationship between the two and luxury, art and 

science, make women as consumers an important component of his economic 

1 See The Fable II, p.21; and I, p. 347 for Mandeville's discussions on the necessity for men to 
behave in ways that are beneficial to the group as a whole. 

2 Mandeville, An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, pp.28/9. 



103 

theorizing. His argument that women's self-esteem is derived from men's good 

opinions of them, which, in turn, depend solely on how physically attractive 

they are, made him a vocal critic of those who argued against luxury spending, 

and maintained that women are most attractive to men when dressed in plain, 

unadorned clothes. Women's need for men's approval, Mandeville claims, 

makes them particularly susceptible to manipulation concerning their 

appearance. For this reason, men like Steele and Addison are, in his eyes, not 

only self-deluded, but also a threat to prosperity and society as it is currently 

enjoyed. It is women's desire for fashion and ornaments which so powerfully 

helps to turn the wheels of trade. It is their competition for men's attention and 

their striving to set themselves off from one another that spurs industry and 

invention. Therefore, convincing women that men find them most attractive 

when they are modestly dressed and plainly ornamented is counterproductive in 

Mandeville's eyes. The wife who goads her husband to earn more so that she 

can dress as lavishly as her betters, and thus distinguish herself from those 

whom she believes to be her inferiors, and the husband who takes pride in his 

wife's appearance, and in his ability to provide her with the means to achieve 

this status, are the contributors to the general well-being and profit of society (I: 

124-34). It is this constant round of desire fuelling acquisition, propelling 

productivity and invention, that pushes society to new and greater heights of 

power and splendor. 

Mandeville's conviction that society derives from mankind's self-

interested passions, particularly pride, is not unique to him. What is unique in 

this regard, and largely unrecognized, is his emphasis on women. Mandeville's 

analyses of women and women's issues and his speculations concerning the 

psychology employed to manipulate them into behaving in socially desirable 



104 

ways are important, both to the development of his economic theory and to the 

development of his larger theory about the origin and evolution of civil society. 

Without his speculations on women, Mandeville might have written his 

famous Fable, but it would not have been quite the same powerful book. 



105 

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AEsop Dress'd: or, a Collection of Fables Writ in Familiar Verse, (London, 
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A n Enquiry Into The Origins of Honour A n d The Usefulness of Christianity  
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Bernardia Mandeville di Medicina Oratio Scholastica. (Rotterdam, 1685). 

Disputatio Medica Inauguralis de Chylosi Vitaita, (Leyden, 1691). 

Disputatio Philosophica de Brutorum Operationibus, (Leyden, 1689). 

Modest Defence of Publick Stews: Or, A n Essay Upon Whoring, as it is now  
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The Fable of the Bees: or. Private Vices, Publick Benefits, F.B. Kaye, ed., 2 
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The Virgin Unmask'd : or. Female Dialogues Betwixt an Elderly Maiden  
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The Grumbling Hive; or. Knaves Turn'd Honest, (London, 1705). 

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Anderson, Paul Bunyan. "Splendor out of Scandal: The Lucinda-Artesia Papers 
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106 

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Bate, Walter Jackson. "The Sympathetic Imagination in Eighteenth-Century 
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