SOURCE: Hundert, E. G. “A World of Goods.” In The Enlightenment's Fable: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society, pp. 175-218. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Hundert examines Mandeville's “unsettling observation” throughout his satires “that the technical operations of the market could be seen to govern even the most intimate aspects of civilized living.”

When, early in his literary career, Mandeville wrote The Grumbling Hive, he satirized his contemporaries for trumpeting their commitment to classical or Christian ideals of virtue while glorying in recent English prosperity. Employing the beehive as a symbol of productive activity for his own satiric purposes, he divided the poem into two parts. The first part stresses the economic benefits that follow when a society can accommodate a certain amount of (relatively unselfconscious) moral corruption amongst its members. In the second part, Mandeville contrasts this public felicity with an imagined society...