The Fable of the Bees

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.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• David Wootton 16 episodes
  Anniversary Professor of History at the University of York
• Helen Paul 8 episodes
  Lecturer in Economics and Economic History at the University of Southampton
• John Callanan 3 episodes
  Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at King's College London

Reading list

• A History of Economics: The Past as the Present
  John Kenneth Galbraith (Penguin, 1991) Google Books →
• Private Vices, Public Benefits: Bernard Mandeville's Social and Political Thought
  M. M. Goldsmith (Cambridge University Press, 1985) Google Books →
• The Social Thought of Bernard Mandeville: Virtue and Commerce in Eighteenth Century England
  Thomas A. Horne (Columbia University Press, 1978) Google Books →
• The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph
  Albert O. Hirschman (Princeton University Press, 2013) Google Books →
• The Enlightenment's Fable: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society
  E. J. Hundert (Cambridge University Press, 2008) Google Books →
• The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain, 1700-1850
  Joel Mokyr (Yale University Press, 2012) Google Books →
• Bernard Mandeville's "A Modest Defence of Publick Stews": Prostitution and Its Discontents in Early Georgian England
  Irwin Primer (ed.) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) Google Books →
• Power, Pleasure, and Profit: Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to Madison
  David Wootton (Harvard University Press, 2018) Google Books →

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Programme ID: m0000t3y

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0000t3y

Auto-category: 330 (Economics)