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Mandeville and the Spirit of Capitalism*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2014

M. M. Goldsmith
M. M. Goldsmith*
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
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Extract

Greed, avarice, rapacity, the quest for filthy lucre, are none of them traits peculiar to western Europeans of the last few hundred years — the capitalist epoch. Eastern potentates, feudal lords, magnates of the church, humble peasants, noble Romans, cultured Greeks and many others have been infected with the love of gold. The desire for wealth is not confined to capitalism; wealth for high living, conspicuous display or hoarding are all non-capitalist. Mediaeval and Renaissance monarchs shared with a number of ‘primitive’ tribes a taste for extravagant display. The hoarding of treasure typical of French peasants (at least until quite recently) is strikingly similar to the practices of wealthy Romans described by M. I. Finley.

None of these people are capitalists in any strict sense of the word. Some of them own some means of production — although this would not necessarily be true of churchmen or princes who were the beneficiaries of systems forcibly expropriating a surplus from the producers. But even those who, like some peasants, own means of production, do not necessarily live in a capitalist system in a capitalist manner. They do not reinvest in order to procure further income; they merely exchange commodities for money, which is then exchanged for other commodities or hoarded (not ‘saved’ or invested, merely hoarded). Capitalism, on Marx's account, involves a different process — money is exchanged for commodities which are exchanged for money once more: M-C-M rather than C-M-C. In Capital Marx describes hoarding as a petrification of money; it exists in a naive form in traditional societies producing for a limited circle of wants.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , Fall 1977 , pp. 63 - 81
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1977

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Footnotes

*

This essay was originally read to the 1974 meeting of the Conference for the Study of Political Thought at York University, Toronto.

References

1. See Finley, M. I., The Ancient Economy (London, 1973)Google Scholar.

2. Marx, Karl, Capital (Moscow, 1954), Vol. I, Ch. 3, sect. 3a, 130–34Google Scholar; and Ch. 4, 151-53.

3. See Macpherson, C. B., The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford, 1962), pp. 53–61Google Scholar for the characteristics of a possessive market society.

4. Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London, 1970), see esp. pp. 17, 47–71Google Scholar.

5. For these developments, see Dickson, P. G. M., The Financial Revolution (London, 1967), pp. 39–75Google Scholar.

6. Ibid., pp. 516-18; and for stock dealing in general, see pp. 486-520.

7. The Spectator is quoted from the edition of D. F. Bond (5 vols.; Oxford, 1965). I shall cite it and other eighteenth-century periodicals by number and date in the text.

In discussion, J. G. A. Pocock pointed out the illusionary, unreal, or fantastic character of capital to eighteenth-century men, a characteristic illustrated by Addison's vision. See also Pocock, 's The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, 1975), esp. pp. 423–61Google Scholar.

8. Whereas Addison here connects trade with the moneyed interest, Swift kept them distinct, initially defining the moneyed interest as “consisting of Generah or Colonels, or of such whose Fortunes lie in Funds and Stocks.” Examiner, 5 (2 November 1710)Google Scholar. See Pocock, , Machiavellian Moment, pp. 446–53Google Scholar.

9. See also Steele's defence of the merchant put into Sir Andrew Freeport's mouth, Spectator, 174 (19 September 1711)Google Scholar. It is perhaps worth noting that Sir Andrew defends foreign trade.

10. See McInnis, A., Robert Harley, Puritan Politician (London, 1970), pp. 125–29Google Scholar. Holmes, G., Politics in the Age of Anne (London, 1967), pp. 148–82Google Scholar, anatomizes the relation between the parties and the ‘interests.’ He shows that the Tories had quite good city connections and that their hostility was mainly directed at stock-jobbers, speculators, and war contractors rather than the mercantile interest in general.

11. A succinct account is given by Gunn, J. A. W., “Mandeville: Poverty, Luxury and the Whig Theory of Government” in Political Theory and Political Economy, papers from the annual meeting of the Conference for the Study of Political Thought (1974, unpublished)Google Scholar.

This ideology was ubiquitous: Swift exploited it in 1701 to defend the Whig Junto in A Discourse of the Contests and Dissensions between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome (Oxford, 1970)Google Scholar; Addison used it to deprecate Tory enthusiasm for Charles the Martyr and to praise liberty and mixed government in Spectator, 287 (29 January 1712)Google Scholar.

12. See for example London Journal (8-15 October 1720) and Weekly Journal (4 March 1721), cited by Dickson, , Financial Revolution, p. 156Google Scholar.

13. Dickson, , Financial Revolution, pp. 167–76Google Scholar.

14. See Kramnick, I., Bolingbroke and his Circle (Cambridge, Mass., 1968)Google Scholar and Gunn, “Mandeville.”

15. Mandeville, Bernard, Fable of the Bees, ed. Kaye, F. B. (2 vols.; Oxford, 1924; reprinted 1957), I, 356–58Google Scholar.

16. Ibid., I, 85. 81, 12, 61-63.

17. Ibid, I, 37, 85, 107-09, 124-26, 169-72.

18. Mandeville's authorship of the Female Tatler was first recognised in 1935 by Anderson, P. B., “Splendour out of Scandal: the Lucinda-Artesia Papers in the Female Tatler,” Philological Quarterly, XV (1935), 286–300Google Scholar. The identification is confirmed by Vichert, G. S., “Some Recent Mandeville Attributions,” Philological Quarterly, XLV (1966), 459–63Google Scholar. See also my introduction to Mandeville, 's An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour (London, 1971)Google Scholar and my “Public Virtue and Private Vices: Bernard Mandeville and English Political Ideologies in the Early Eighteenth Century,” Eighteenth Century Studies, IX (1976), 477–510Google Scholar.

Until very recently scholarly discussion of Mandeville has been carried on without reference to the Female Tatler, not because the attribution has been rejected, but rather because the Female Tatler was not known to F. B. Kaye when he prepared a bibliography for his edition of the Fable (1924).

19. The compliment to Steele occurs in “An Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue,” Fable of the Bees, I, 52Google Scholar. Moreover Steele was the only author Mandeville identified as holding the view opposed to his own (i.e., praising human nature to encourage virtue). Steele only becomes an obvious adversary of Mandeville in the light of the Female Tatler.

20. Female Tatlers after Number 88 are misnumbered. The true number is indicated in square brackets. All quotations conform to the original in spelling and capitalization.

21. The motto of Female Tatler, 105 and 107 is here translated from Juvenal, Satires, XII, lines 50-51:

‘Non propter vitam faciunt Patrimonia quidam

Sed vitio caeci propiter Patrimonia vivunt.’

22. Treatise (2nd ed.; London, 1715Google Scholar, a reissue of the edition of 1711).

23. See the revised version of the Treatise (London, 1730), pp. 351–52Google Scholar.