In 1714, doctor, philosopher and writer Bernard Mandeville published The Fable of the Bees, a humorous 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鈥檚 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鈥攖hat vice was essential to the economic flourishing of any society鈥攆ormed part of Mandeville鈥檚 overall theory of human nature. Mandeville, Callanan argues, was perfectly suited to analyze and satirize the emerging phenomenon of modern society鈥攁nd reveal the gap between its self-image and its reality.
Callanan shows that Mandeville鈥檚 thinking was informed by his medical training and his innovative approach to the treatment of illness with both physiological and psychological components. Through incisive and controversial analyses of sexual mores, gender inequality, economic structures, and political ideology, Mandeville sought to provide a naturalistic account of human behavior鈥攐ne that put humans in close continuity with animals. Aware that his fellow human beings might find this offensive, he cloaked his theories in fables, poems, anecdotes, and humorous stories. Mandeville mastered irony precisely for the purpose of making us aware of uncomfortable aspects of our deepest natures鈥�aspects that we still struggle to acknowledge today.
Awards and Recognition
- An Engelsberg Ideas Book of the Year
"Entertaining. . . .[Callanan] has convinced me that exposing Mandeville and his writings to a new generation of readers is indeed worthwhile."鈥擧oward Davies, Literary Review
"John Callanan’s Man-Devil: The Mind and Times of Bernard Mandeville, the Wickedest Man in Europe (快色直播) is by far the best discussion we have of this paradoxical, and immensely influential thinker, and everyone interested in the history of moral, social, or economic theorising should read it."鈥擠avid Wootton, Engelsberg Ideas
"[A] superb book."鈥擩oseph Hone, History Today
"Callanan, a philosopher at King’s College, London, has produced an engaging, expansive and effortlessly erudite study of a man who today too few people know. Man-Devil is a fascinating and welcome corrective, not least because Bernard Mandeville was amongst the first to argue that we don’t really know ourselves."鈥擯eter West, The Critic
"A book-length exploration of the man’s ‘life and mind’ has the potential to shed useful light on his ideas and their place in intellectual history, and Callanan’s book delivers."鈥擱obert Rich, Montreal Review
"The ambition of Callanan’s book is to take Mandeville seriously as a thinker. Notwithstanding all his satire and jokes, the book claims that Mandeville put forward a unified worldview, one that we ignore at our peril. . . . Man-Devil does an excellent job of situating Mandeville in his cultural milieu."鈥擬ax Skj枚nsberg, Law & Liberty
"Callanan . . . adds detail and nuance to the typically surface-level treatment of Mandeville’s intellectual contributions and influence. The book masterfully retells the timeline of Mandeville’s personal and professional life, surveys Mandeville’s complex ideas across his full body of written and published works, and, lastly, contextualizes Mandeville as not only a formidable intellectual in his time, but among the most pioneering thinkers of economics and social philosophy. In short, Mandeville’s thought is far more systematically consistent and applicable than common historic treatments today recognize or give credit."鈥擠aniel J. D鈥橝mico, The Independent Review
"Man-Devil is exceptionally pleasant to read. Mandeville is allowed to speak, often at some length, and he makes excellent company – Callanan evidently has affection for his subject, though affection that does not preclude him, or us, being puzzled or occasionally disappointed by Mandeville. The book is a model of the sympathetic reconstruction of a philosophical system as a whole, one that is all the more compelling given that compiling a systematic treatise is a project Mandeville would himself have disavowed. The rich and varied chapters. . . stay close to Mandeville’s texts and arguments. The reader is perched just above his shoulder in his study, looking down at the words on the page, glancing up occasionally to catch glimpses out the window of his great muse, the sprawling urban environment beyond."鈥擩onathan Egid, Times Literary Supplement
“Bernard Mandeville was one of the most controversial writers of early eighteenth-century England, famed for coining the paradox ‘private vices, publick benefits’ as the subtitle to his major work, The Fable of the Bees. While John Callanan never loses sight of this satirical, even mischievous, bent, he convincingly shows the reader why Mandeville became such an influential figure in eighteenth-century thought, taken up by David Hume and Adam Smith among others. Well-researched and original in its approach, his book is highly recommended.”—Malcolm Jack, historian and Mandeville scholar
“Mandeville is the first great social theorist, and everyone who comes after him—Rousseau, Smith, Marx, Hayek—is deeply in his debt. But he is slippery and paradoxical. John Callanan at last makes Mandeville’s core doctrine clear and brings out his continuing importance for understanding human beings as sociable animals. This is an important, long-needed book.”—David Wootton, author of Power, Pleasure, and Profit: Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to Madison
“Callanan sensibly and sensitively places the infamous Fable of the Bees in the wider context of Mandeville’s other writings and intellectual context and, thereby, illuminates him as a diagnostician of human self-concealment and satirist of human pride. He reveals the Dutch physician with a successful London medical practice as an original pilferer of other people’s useful ideas and with a relish for the urbane. And for those who recognize a good bargain when they are offered one, this book also instructs in the art of living, even points the way to the path of wisdom.”—Eric Schliesser, author of Adam Smith: Systematic Philosopher and Public Thinker
“John Callanan's enjoyable account of Mandeville explains clearly both why the author of The Fable of the Bees was notorious in his own day and why major figures such as Hume, Rousseau, and Smith felt the need to engage with him so closely. It tells the reader what we know about Mandeville's life, and explores the full range of Mandeville's writings. Mandeville's ideas are put in context, but are also brought to philosophical life. This is the best account in English of Mandeville’s thought as a whole.”—James Harris, University of St Andrews
“This is the book on Mandeville I’ve long hoped for, and it is even better than I could have hoped. It is beautifully and engagingly written, as befitting a book on a great, extremely funny—not a common virtue of philosophers—and often scurrilous prose stylist. The Mandeville which emerges in Callanan’s book is provocative and subtle, a humane exponent of Terence’s dictum “nothing human is alien to me” but also a sharp-witted critic of hypocrisy possessing a medical remove from which to examine our paradoxical species.”—Aaron Garrett, Boston University
“John Callanan’s Man-Devil strikes a balance between a ‘forensic’ investigation of Mandeville's engagement with reactions to his ideas in his own time and an examination of the Mandevillean tendency to cross disciplinary boundaries and enrich contemporary controversies in human and social sciences. ‘Nothing human is alien’ to Mandeville, including the human animal’s wondrous potential of being in denial about its own bottomless self-deception.”—Spyridon Tegos, University of Crete
