Mandeville, BERNARD DE, English satirical writer, though born of Dutch parents at Dordrecht in Holland in 1670. He graduated in medicine at Leyden, after six years of study, in 1691, and immediately afterwards settled in London to practise his profession; he died in that city in 1733. He is known as the author of a short work in doggerel verse entitled The Fable of the Bees, which, as finally published in 1723, included the fable itself, called The Grumbling Hive, first printed in 1705, Remarks on the Fable, and Inquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue, both added to the 1714 edition, and An Essay on Charity Schools and Search into the Origin of Society, added in 1723. This book was a pothouse fulminant, levelled against the ethical theories of Shaftesbury, who set up as the standard of virtue the ultra-refined tastes of an idealistic aesthete. Mandeville, writing in a vein of extremely coarse and brutal paradox, cynical in its frankness, though frequently of striking acuteness, affirms that 'private vices are public benefits,' and that every species of virtue is at bottom some form of gross selfishness, more or less modified. Thus he over-emphasises the baser elements in human nature, as Shaftesbury does the 'dignified.' The book was condemned by the grand jury of Middlesex as being immoral and pernicious in its teaching. Besides that, it was attacked by Law (q.v.) the nonjuror, by Berkeley, by Brown, Warburton, Hutcheson, and others. Mandeville in his defence states that he wrote in irony for the diversion of people of discernment and knowledge, and his words were not to be taken in literal earnest, as if meant for general readers. Nevertheless, his other works, such as The Virgin Unmasked, Free Thoughts on Religion, &c., detract greatly from the sincerity of this plea. It is worth while observing that his realistic habits of thought bring him in some respects curiously into touch with the exponents of modern scientific methods of inquiry.
See Leslie Stephen, Essays on Freethinking (1873), or the briefer summary in vol. ii. of the same writer's English Thought in the 18th Century (1876).