More about Bernard Mandeville - in my opinion sadly misrepresented in the Wikipedia entry on BM, which is itself largely derived from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica article on the same, written by John Malcolm Mitchell. Mitchell says that "Mandeville's philosophy gave great offence at the time, and has always been stigmatised as false, cynical and degrading." The second part of this remark is simply not true. In his book Pioneer Humanists (1905) J.M. Robertson had already written a lengthy and intelligent defence of Mandeville against attacks from Bishop Berkeley, Hutcheson and others in the religious establishment to the effect that he was an apologist for libertinism and vice in general - and indeed this article is referred to in the notes to the Wikipedia entry. Robertson quotes with approval a passage in Richard Whatley's Introductory Lectures on Political Economy (1831) which make it clear that even as early as the 19th century there were those who understood what he was getting at.

"He was indeed a man of an acute and original, though not very systematic or comprehensive, turn of mind; but his originality was shown chiefly in bringing into juxtaposition notions which, separately, had long been current (and indeed are not yet quite obsolete), but whose inconsistency had escaped detection. It is sufficient to remark, that he is arguing all along on an hypothesis, and on one not framed gratuitously by himself, but furnished him by others; and on that hypothesis, he is certainly triumphant... His argument does not go to show categorically that vice ought to be encouraged, but hypothetically that, if the notions which were afloat were admitted, respecting the character of virtue and vice, and respecting the causes and consequences of wealth, than national virtue and national wealth must be irreconcilable... and consequently, that of two incompatible objects, we must be content to take one or the other..."

This hypothesis is especially relevant in times of credit crunch and banking crisis. Mandeville would have maintained that you cannot have a flourishing stock market or merchant banking sector if you set about extirpating greed and acquisitiveness. He would have argued, no doubt, that it is the business of politicians to harness creatively those powerful forces in a way that benefits society as a whole. It can be done, he says, although the language in which he frames the proposition is so urbanely flippant as to prompt the suspicion that he has his tongue in his cheek, and that he may even be having a dig at facile theodicy - doing in the domain of economics what Voltaire did in a wider sphere, in his celebrated demolition of the view that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

"The short-sighted Vulgar in the Chain of Causes seldom can see further than one Link; but those who can enlarge their View, and will give themselves the Leisure of gazing on the Prospect of concatenated Events, may, in a hundred Places see Good spring up, and pullulate from Evil, as naturally as Chickens do from Eggs.

This Mandeville is certainly one cool dude.