Skip to main content Skip to Search Box

Mandeville, Bernard (1670-1733)

From Encyclopedia of Consumer Culture
Born in the environs of Rotterdam in 1670, Bernard Mandeville obtained a medical degree from the University of Leiden in 1691. After settling in London, he began working as a physician treating nervous disorders while pursuing a modest literary career. In 1723, however, following several attempts to censor his chef d'oeuvre (masterpiece), The Fable of the Bees; Or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits , Mandeville unexpectedly became early eighteenth-century London's most infamous observer of changing societal and economic realities. The Fable , which insists that the motive force driving the increasingly liberal market economy was self-interest rather than a benevolent civic humanism, generated a scandal that lasted throughout the eighteenth century, eliciting replies from some of the most significant Enlightenment figures, including Francis Hutcheson, Bishop Berkeley, David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Adam Smith, and Immanuel Kant. Until his death from influenza in 1733, …
33 results

Full text Article Mandeville, Bernard [de]

From Continuum Encyclopedia of British Literature
After studying philosophy and medicine at the University of Leyden and practicing briefly in Holland, Mandeville traveled to England to learn the language. By 1699, he had married an English woman, settled in London, and specialized in nervous and gastric disorders. Mandeville published a medical…
| 668 words
Key concepts:
Dutch-born Bernard Mandeville followed in his father’s footsteps when he completed his medical degree in 1691 at the University of Leyden. He had a modest medical practice and is best known for his satirical social commentaries, notably The Fable of Bees, Or Private Vices, Public Benefits. Little is…
| 773 words
Key concepts:
Born in Holland, Mandeville settled in London during the 1690s, where he practiced medicine and wrote, usually in a satirical mode, on the issues of the day. Of his many works, the best-known are “The Grumbling Hive, or Knaves turn'd Honest” (1705), a moral tale in verse, and The Fable of the Bees, …
| 1,308 words
Key concepts:

Full text Article Mandeville, Bernard, 1670-1733

From Routledge Dictionary of Economics
Dutch doctor of medicine and essayist who, after acquiring a doctorate in medicine at the University of Leiden in 1691, settled in London. In a series of poems and essays compiled as The Fable of the Bees (1714, 1724) he demonstrated that private vices such as vanity, fraud and theft promote the…
| 110 words
Key concepts:
Dutch-born English satirist. After obtaining an MD degree from Leiden in 1691 he practised as a physician in London. He was widely denounced for encouraging immorality through his principle ‘private vices are public benefits’. The root of Evil, Avarice That damn’d ill-natur’d, baneful Vice, …
| 118 words
Key concepts:

Full text Article Mandeville, Bernard de (c. 1670–1733)

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide
English philosopher and satirist, of Dutch origin. He came to England in 1691, and is best known for his Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Public Benefits (1705). It was primarily written as a political satire on the state of England in 1705. He was born in Dordrecht, Holland, the son of a…
| 172 words
Key concepts:

Full text Article BERNARD MANDEVILLE c.1670-1733

From Big Ideas Simply Explained: The Philosophy Book
Bernard Mandeville was a Dutch philosopher, satirist, and physician, who made his home in London. His best-known work, The Fable of Bees (1729) concerns a hive of industrious bees which, when suddenly made virtuous, stop working and go and live quietly in a nearby tree. Its central argument is that…
| 117 words
Key concepts:

Full text Article REFLEXIVITY AS THE IRONY OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

From Dictionary of Visual Discourse: A Dialectical Lexicon of Terms
Perhaps the most memorable instance is Bernard Mandeville's (1670-1733) irony that began life in the poem, The Fable of the Bees , and ended up condensed into the maxim ‘Private Vices, Public Virtues’ - that is, the pursuit of things thought to be antithetical to virtue actually generates public…
| 254 words
Key concepts:

Full text Article DIRECTORY

From Big Ideas Simply Explained: The Philosophy Book
DIRECTORY
Though the ideas already presented in this book show the broad range of philosophical thought expressed by some of history's best minds, there are many more people who have helped to shape the story of philosophy. Some of these thinkers—such as Empedocles, Plotinus, or William of Ockham—have had…
| 292 words , 1 image
Key concepts:

Full text Article Hutcheson, Francis (1694–1746),

From Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy
Scottish philosopher who was the chief exponent of the early modern moral sense theory and of a similar theory postulating a sense of beauty. He was born in Drumalig, Ireland, and completed his theological training in 1717 at the University of Glasgow, where he later taught moral philosophy. He was…
| 777 words
Key concepts:
Mind Map

Stack overflow
More Library Resources