The Fable of the Bees

In Our Time: Philosophy

BBC

History

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 25 October 2018

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733) and his critique of the economy as he found it in London, where private vices were condemned without acknowledging their public benefit. In his poem The Grumbling Hive (1705), he presented an allegory in which the economy collapsed once knavish bees turned honest. When republished with a commentary, The Fable of the Bees was seen as a scandalous attack on Christian values and Mandeville was recommended for prosecution for his tendency to corrupt all morals. He kept writing, and his ideas went on to influence David Hume and Adam Smith, as well as Keynes and Hayek. With David Wootton Anniversary Professor of History at the University of York Helen Paul Lecturer in Economics and Economic History at the University of Southampton And John Callanan Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at King’s College London Producer: Simon Tillotson

Transcript

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0:47.0	Hello Bernard Mandeville 1670 to 1733
0:51.0	scandalized the British establishment with his book
0:54.0	Fable of the Bees in which he argued that private vices were essential to a healthy economy.
0:59.7	Those who strive to make the world virtuous would make it poor he said
1:03.4	dishonesty supports lawyers who then support their tailors and their cooks
1:07.2	gambling diverse money from those who don't know its value to those who do and
1:11.2	can invest it wisely.
1:13.0	Many of our virtues, he wrote, are in fact disguised vices.
1:17.0	Mandeville was one of the first to emphasize the role of the consumer in the economy rather than the state,
1:22.0	and it was to influence ideas from Adam Smith in the 18th century to Keynes and Hayak in the 20th.
1:28.0	Widmede to discuss the paper of the Bazaa, David Wooden,
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