The Philosophy Club: Mandeville
Articles of Interest - Avery Trufelman
In 'The Philosophy Club: Mandeville,' Avery Trufelman and guest Derek Guy explore Bernard Mandeville's 1705 pamphlet *The Fable of the Bees*, a radical 18th-century text arguing that societal flourishing depends not on v
Key takeaways
- Mandeville argued that society thrives not on virtue but on 'private vices' like vanity, greed, and fraud—e.g., luxury consumption fuels economic growth.
Transcript preview
Speaker 1 (0:00) First of all, we should introduce what we're doing. Yes. So can I ask you to introduce yourself? Yes. My name is Derek I. I work as a menswear writer. I read a blog called Di Workwear. I would call you a friend of the show and you've been on articles of interest multiple times. I knew you back when you only had 20,000 Twitter followers. And now you're like the man, the myth, the legend, the Twitter menswear guy. I saw someone on the subway looking at your profile. I see that all the time. No way. Yeah. Yeah. You're like everywhere. So as much as you feel comfortable, what is this podcast? What is this project we're doing? Avery approached me a few months ago about doing a podcast about fashion essays that are kind of canonical to the subject that we've never read and thought about having a podcast where we read these fashion essays and discuss them and then share them with an audience that's interested in clothes, but also the kind of intellectual underpinnings of why we've been. buy what we buy and why we wear what we wear. And I would clarify that these are kind of obscure things. Like what kinds of essays are these? They stretch back to maybe about the 17th or 18th century. A lot of them will be well known to people that have read anything about clothes. Many of the ideas, I think, will be familiar to people, the idea of signaling status or luxury or identity. But sometimes the details of the people that thought. of these ideas many hundreds of years ago, some of those are sometimes lost. And what we're interested in is getting into the details and just picking them apart and also sometimes finding quotes that may be useful to listeners. We're basing this loosely off of this book, if any listeners want to get like a sneak preview of the kinds of works we're going to read. We're basing it off of this academic reader called The Rise of Fashion, a reader, edited and with an introduction by Daniel Leonhard Purdy. We're going to go in and like read the whole book. So it could be, you could treat it like a book club or like Spark Notes, whichever one you want. Exactly. I hope that each episode is something that gives you a little bit more insight or depth into some of the chapters and excerpts in that book. And then also pick them apart a little bit as we'll get into with this first episode. And we'll get started after the break. This is Tanya Mosley, co-host of Fresh Air. You'll see your favorite actors, directors, and comedians on late night. TV shows or YouTube. But what you get with Fresh Air is a deep dive. Spend some quality time with people like Billy Elish, Questlove, Ariana Grande, Stephen Colbert, and so many more. We ask questions you won't hear asked anywhere else. Listen to the Fresh Air podcast from NPR and W.HYY. Yeah, okay. So what's our first book? So we, for our first episode, we read Bernard Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees. It was written in, I think it was the 1700s. So it's in a language that may be harder to parse today. Can I just read you some of the background about Mandeville? Yeah. Okay. So he was born in Rotterdam in 1670. He was a doctor who specialized in hypochondriac and hysteric passions. And he learned English, and he married an English woman. And he started working as a translator. And to earn supplementary money as he was starting his practice, he would translate fables. And so he was like, I'm going to make a fable. So he wrote this like sing-songy little fable. And then he wrote this pamphlet in 1705 called The Fable of the Bees or Private Vices Public Benefits, which I love that name. And it was this little moral fable, a poem about the folly of mankind. Yes. And it is like a poem poem. Like I don't know if listeners will understand that it like rhymes and shit. Like it really is just a poem. It's actually a really good poem. And the poem is basically he talks about the beehive. The beehive is flourishing when it's full of ice. You know, he has that line in there. Thus, every part was full of ice, yet the whole mass of paradise. And then once you get rid of ice, the whole beehive dies. Yeah, it talks about this flourishing beehive, and everyone's addicted to fraud and luxury and pride, and everyone is trying to get theirs. The lesson is, in his words, only fools strive to make great an honest hive. And many people saw this as a subversive text. because he was putting forward the idea that society is not run by virtue but run by vice, or that it's most flourishing when the leaders of that society correctly channeled our natural propensity for vice. And so many Christian thinkers at the time thought that it was a scandalous text because they felt that was promoting vice and looking down on virtue. And the people who pretend to be full of virtue are actually just as, you know, he listed all of these, kind of characters on the fringes of society like thieves and swindlers. And he said, The pickpocket. Yeah, pickpocketers. He said, the people that you think are full of vice and criminals and all those people, the elites are just as criminal as them. They just cover it up better. Mandiville says that by channeling vice, we get a more flourishing society. And his work really had amazing resonance, obviously even to today. Yeah, I mean, it is really interesting because it had all of these echoes of like, greed is good and trickle-down economics. Mandiville's idea of self-interest propelling society in some way is, I think, key to how many people start to think of human beings afterwards. You know, Adam Smith, for example, references Manderville in the theory of moral sentiments, which he wrote before the wealth of nations. And so this is like just a super deeply clarified, like this is before capitalism. It's like mercantilism. Yes, mercantilism. England's ruled by a king. There's like a priestly class. People are obsessed with divine virtues and Christian values. So he's putting forward at the time a pretty radical idea to kind of think of how society works in a more secular way, I suppose. It was so outrageous at the time. In July of 1723, it was presented as a public nuisance by the grand jury of middle sex. And he was attacked in sermons and pastoral letters and lots of different opinion pages. or the equivalent of opinion pages and papers, an anonymous 18th century poet mocked, and if God, man, vice to abolish came, who vice commends, man-devil be his name. It was pretty good. Such a good line. Very twittery. All of it is so twittery to me. It's very, very twittery. Mandevil is like very, it's a very kind of quote tweet and then dunk. Oh, yeah, this edition in the book, that was from 1724. He just kept putting out new editions of the pamphlet surrounded with more writing and more defenses of his argument. Like every essay, he's sort of clapping back and being like, no, that's not what I meant. You all got it totally wrong. And he spent the rest of his life defending this weird take. Exactly. And it's really funny to see this in an era like before capitalism, before the internet. He's like, no, no, no. Like, why is everyone mad at me? You clearly didn't read it. Yes, exactly. He made a troll post. And at a certain point, I wanted him to stop. Exactly. It did feel like he just put out like a troll post, got piled on. And then got really serious and was like, no, this is what I meant. Exactly, exactly. And then, like, as the essays go on, he gets, like, increasingly more pedantic and uptight. It's like, bro, like, walk away. You really don't have to engage with this. It's so, it's so funny. And it's something, like, really reassuring. It's like, oh, we're just built this way. Yes. And it was so funny in the beginning. I don't know which edition you had, but I was reading the Penguin edition. And in the beginning, it was like, no book