Bernard Mandeville’s critique of Epicurus and the “easie Divines” of the Church of England, 1705–1732
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12903232 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jacob Donald Chatterjee (0000-0003-0336-6385, University of Oxford, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 35 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 657-684 |
| Publication date | 2025-07-16 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Intellectual History Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1749-6977 • E-ISSN: 1749-6985 |
| Publisher | Routledge (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/17496977.2025.2525695 |
| OpenAlex | W4413081970 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 38 |
The Fable of the Bees (1714) by Bernard Mandeville, a Dutch émigré physician and an acerbic satirist, was one of the most controversial works of the eighteenth century. Numerous contemporaries condemned Mandeville for ostensibly arguing that vice is the driving force of modern commercial societies, virtue is an arbitrary invention, and happiness consists in worldly pleasures. This article challenges the historiographical consensus that Mandeville’s account of commercial society depended on his encounters with Epicurean moral and political thought. Instead, it contends that Mandeville deployed a distinctive blend of Augustinian and Hobbist ideas to argue against what he regarded as Epicurus’s unrealistic valorisation of virtue as the way to secure the delights of mental tranquillity. This critique of Epicurus supported a wider polemic against the “easie Divines” of the Church of England, who had appealed to Epicurean maxims to declaim on the pleasures of virtue. To defend this vision of egoistic human nature, Mandeville proposed conjectural histories of the origin of moral virtue, which inverted Lucretius’s depiction of contented primitive humanity in his Epicurean poem De Rerum Natura. The upshot of this reinterpretation is to highlight the creative tensions within the diverse intellectual traditions that constituted the wider neo-Epicurean Enlightenment
Art · Literature · New england · Political science · Politics · Classics · Historical and Literary Studies · Historical Philosophy and Science · History · Law · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity
The Works of John Wilmot Earl of Rochester
Disguised VicesTheories of Virtue in Early Modern French Thought
Epicureans and Atheists in France, 1650–1729
The Enlightenment's Fable
Self-Interest before Adam Smith
The Case for The Enlightenment
Putting On Virtue
Epicureanism
From Moral Theology to Moral Philosophy
Gassendi's Ethics
Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times
Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science
Happiness in a Mechanistic Universe
Politics in Commercial Society
Self-love, Egoism and the Selfish Hypothesis
Reason, Grace and Sentiment
Mandeville's Fable
Mandeville's Paradox as Satire
Mandeville on Governability
One hundred and eighty-two overlooked British comments on Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees , 1724–1800
Celestial Epicurisme”
Du Châtelet, Voltaire, and the Transformation of Mandeville's Fable
Gassendi the atomist
Bernard Mandeville as Moralist and Materialist
The Satiric Purpose of The Fable of the Bees
Mandeville and Hume
Damn'd toSythes andSpades
Pride, hypocrisy and civility in Mandeville's social and historical theory
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |