3 - Interests and Rights in Bernard Mandeville’s Fable Of the Bees and Trenchard and Gordon’s Cato’s Letters

Summary

A standard reading of the movement of British political thought from the seventeenth century to the eighteenth century is that the main conceptual development in classical liberal political economy arose from the rejection of the somewhat vulgarised version of the English natural rights theories of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke by the luminaries of the Scottish Enlightenment, including David Hume, Frances Hutcheson and Adam Smith. According to this narrative, the crystallisation of the argument for commerce in eighteenth-century Britain presupposed the transformation from a political theory dominated by the discourse of pre-civil individual rights and a rationalist law of nature framework to a new political vernacular that emphasised natural moral sentiments and the concept of economic interests. In this chapter, I propose an amendment to this familiar account, one that re-situates the genesis of the philosophical defence of commerce earlier historically than typically thought, in the context of the polemical responses to the challenges posed both to law and conventional morality by the Financial Revolution in early eighteenth-century England. By recontextualising the origins of modern thought on commerce in the light of the debate about the new financial structures and institutions that transformed English economic life in this period, I hope to illuminate the rich, but often neglected, site of theoretical reflection about the problems and possibilities of commerce afforded most directly by the controversy surrounding the South Sea Bubble of 1720.

My central argument is that it was in response to the challenges posed by the Financial Revolution in England in the opening decades of the eighteenth-century that we witness the first clear mutual appearance of both the familiar natural rights-based version of liberalism as well as a new kind of argument that would in time come to be associated with the ‘harmony of interests’ philosophy. I focus on the pivotal nexus between the interest-based argument for commerce in Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees and the natural rights-based argument in Cato's Letters authored by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon. These controversial works were partners in crime, as it were, sharing a fiery fate condemned to the flames as a public nuisance by the Middlesex Grand Jury in 1723, as well as being arguably the most theoretically sophisticated writings on commerce in England in the first decades of the eighteenth century.