The Reinterpretation of Chance, Failure, Evil, and the Destruction of the Individual in the Service of the Development of the Whole

Someone who reads Bernard de Mandeville's famous fable of the bees first published in 1705 (the fable is famous as it established Mandeville as one of the earliest radical advocates of amoral egotism) will understandably read the description of the dissolute rogues who only seek their own advantage and nonetheless succeed in creating a prosperous whole with greater pleasure and assent than the description of how an overenthusiastic moralist transforms the gay life of the bees into a life of good, decent, upright, and abstemious citizens, whose community nonetheless regresses to a state of prehistoric primitivity.

One of the main reasons for this unambiguous division of our assent lies without doubt in the fact that we see that the “rogues” really want what they do because it pleases them (and Mandeville does his bit to add to the reader's hilarity at their lives), while the good citizens lead a life devoid of pleasure, following duty rather than their own drives. Ultimately, Mandeville's arguments, too, draw their power of conviction from what he rejects. In this misinterpretation of the Aristotelian and Scholastic ethics, he has merely shuffled the sides. The dull life of the good citizens is supposed to embody morality. But, according to Aristotle, such a life would be a pure construction that could never become “real.”