When he returned to France from England in 1728, Voltaire joined a consortium to buy the French government’s lottery, which made him serious money. He used some of it to restore a chateau belonging to the complaisant husband of his new mistress, Emilie du Châtelet. Emilie was herself a considerable intellect, and Voltaire introduced her to the work of Bernard Mandeville, which he had encountered in London.

Emilie went on to translate Mandeville’s most celebrated work, The Fable of the Bees, a philosophical treatise centred on a lengthy poem. ‘Poem’ is perhaps a courtesy title. It is 433 lines of competent doggerel, but doggerel nonetheless, written by a self-taught Dutch exile, which begins:

A Spacious Hive well stockt with Bees,
That liv’d in Luxury and Ease…
Vast numbers throng’d the fruitful Hive:
Yet those vast Numbers made ’em thrive;
Millions endeavouring to supply
Each other’s Lust and Vanity

Published in London in 1714, The Fable of the Bees was anathemised in the Weekly Journal as ‘a Composition of Dulness and Wickedness, as even this extraordinary Age has not produced before’. In France, it was ordered to be burned by the public hangman, while the Catholic Church placed the book on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Madame du Châtelet’s own efforts with the text were not crowned with commercial success. But she turned her labours to her advantage later. Her Discours sur le Bonheur was a reworking of some of Mandeville’s propositions in a more acceptable style.

Man-Devil is an entertaining exploration of Mandeville’s ideas, which he set out in The Fable of the Bees and other works. Callanan does not pretend that it is a full-scale biography of Mandeville. Indeed his life story, as far as we know it, could be told in a couple of pages. From a relatively prosperous Rotterdam family, educated in medicine at Leiden University, Mandeville was forced into exile in 1693 as a result of the family’s involvement in the Costerman riots, a protest against the activities of tax farmers, private citizens who collected revenue for the government in return for a large cut. He spent the rest of his life in London, working as a kind of psychiatrist with a particular interest in hypochondria. He died there in 1733.

Other than what we can learn from his writings, that is pretty much all we know about him. There is only one personal testimony relating to him, curiously enough written by Benjamin Franklin, who met him in a pub (he was, wrote Franklin, ‘a most facetious, entertaining companion’). But his subsequent reception has been remarkable for a man so obscure. Adam Smith, Darwin, Marx, Hayek, Keynes and many others drew explicitly on his work, though the books of Mandeville, an early advocate of free trade, are probably not to be found in the no doubt extensive library at Mar-a-Lago.

Why has a piece of apian doggerel attracted so much attention, and provoked such hostility? Mandeville’s core proposition can be simply outlined. As we have seen, his hive is busy and prosperous. But, as in human societies, there are problems. There is fraud, corruption and much bad behaviour. Many of the residents complain, loudly, about their co-workers and their greed. Eventually the Good Lord tires of their constant buzzing and decides to intervene. He makes all the bees honest, worthy and content with their lot, creating, in effect, an entire hive of Boy Scouts doing good deeds every day.

The outcome is disastrous. Jobs are destroyed across the economy. There is no demand for luxury goods with which to impress your fellow bee. Locksmiths are quickly made redundant, as no one considers theft any more. Economic activity grinds to a halt more dramatically than in the aftermath of a Rachel Reeves budget. Even the hive’s Starmers are affected: ‘The Bar was silent from that Day;/For now the willing Debtors pay.’

The lesson is obvious, and uncomfortable. The Fable of the Bees can be seen as a precursor of Adam Smith’s ideas, except that here the invisible hand is driven by greed. Gordon Gekko is the hero. Mandeville starts from the premise that human beings are flawed. The consequences, however, may be relatively benign, so long as we don’t try to make people behave better. That way madness lies. We should harness the desires people have to impress their fellows and to overconsume. 

The Fable of the Bees was provocative enough, but Mandeville was not done. In subsequent writings, he inveighed against charity schools, on the grounds that it was a mistake, for society as a whole, to educate the underclass for jobs they were highly unlikely to get. The economy depends on the existence of a large class of poorly paid workers. Later, he carried his analysis into other areas, recommending, for example, public brothels.

One can easily see that there was something in his work to annoy – and worse – almost everyone during his lifetime. And his style of writing, which I am sure was not described as ‘over the top’ in the 18th century, did not help him to win friends. The fact that he was a blunt Dutchman with an astonishing facility for the English language did not do anything to endear him to London readers. But it is equally easy to see how his provocative ideas have influenced subsequent generations.

Dr Johnson was one of the first to recognise his debt to Mandeville, declaring that his work ‘opened his views into real life very much’. That would have pleased Mandeville, as he regularly argued that his analysis proceeded from observation, not theory. Marx described him as ‘an honest man with a clear mind’ who explained why a capitalist economy depends on a poor underclass kept at subsistence level. Keynes was influenced by The Fable of the Bees in developing his notion of the paradox of thrift – the intuition that demand is as crucial as supply, and that individually rational decisions to save may produce a collectively disastrous outcome.

Callanan explores these connections and more. He gives full weight to the subtlety of Mandeville’s arguments. He is particularly interesting about the concept of self-conscious self-liking – the idea that we are fully aware of our need to convince others to believe that we are as valuable and worthy as we think we are. And he has convinced me that exposing Mandeville and his writings to a new generation of readers is indeed worthwhile.