A lively and provocative account of Bernard Mandeville and the work that scandalised and appalled his contemporaries-and made him one of the most influential thinkers of the eighteenth centuryIn 1714, doctor, philosopher and writer Bernard Mandeville published The Fable of the Bees, a humourous tale in which a prosperous hive full of greedy and licentious bees trade their vices for virtues and immediately fall into economic and societal collapse. Outrage among the reading public followed; philosophers took up their pens to refute what they saw as the fable-s central assertion. How could it be that an immoral community thrived but the introduction of morality caused it to crash and burn? In Man-Devil, John Callanan examines Mandeville and his famous fable, showing how its contentious claim-that vice was essential to the economic flourishing of any society-formed part of Mandeville-s overall theory of human nature. Mandeville, Callanan argues, was perfectly suited to analyse and satirise
