2 - Self-love and the civilizing process

Summary

Mandeville's commitment to a developmental perspective on the “anatomy of the human frame” had immediate consequences. Most important was the realization during the 1720s that his initial understanding of contemporary European civility and opulence depended for its force not only upon the naturalistic analysis of sociability for which he first became notorious but upon an historically plausible reconstruction of the progress of pride as the human race matured from its primitive beginnings over the course of social time. All forms of social life, Mandeville had claimed in The Fable's Preface of 1723, were in fact nothing more than various structures within which the “symptoms” and “symbols” of instinct were politically regulated in the interests of peace and security. But this challenge to morally grounded conceptions of society was exceptionally difficult to argue convincingly in the absence of an evolutionary consideration of morals and justice; the more difficult since, by Mandeville's own testimony, “all the symbols of [pride] are not easily discovered; they are manifold and vary according to age, humour, circumstances, and often constitution, of the people” (1, 138). Having adopted that aggressively evolutionary stance which characterized his writing in the wake of The Fable's stormy reception after 1723, Mandeville explored this problem for the ten remaining years of his working life.