The enlightened case for being selfish Self-interest, not solidarity, should be our lodestar

First, it is worth considering the difference between the two paradigms. Enacting such a change would not eliminate conflict from public life but radically alter its direction and outlet. It is one thing for there to be sharp divisions structuring political exchange, but conflicts over competing material interests or economic programmes can be hashed out in rational processes of give-and-take; whereas the kind of reductive battles over intangible values — what is known as the culture war — has led to the wrong kind of conflict, one in which humanity’s natural tendencies toward solidarity and communal morality degenerates into rigid, zero-sum stand-offs. The result is stasis and stultification. Compared to this, there can be little doubt that a renewed politics of self-interest would be conducive to more dynamism and material progress: the only question is how do we get to such a place from where we are now?

The England to which Mandeville immigrated from Holland in the 1690s was already one generation removed from the apocalyptic, often theologically motivated bloodshed of the Cromwellian era. It was in the midst of the post-1688 commercial boom and financial revolution, on course to becoming the world’s richest nation.

Yet even as England’s social complexion was changing, the moral outlook of many of its elites (embodied by Lord Bolingbroke and his magazine The Craftsman) remained mired in antiquated notions of virtue held to by the Old Whigs and Commonwealthmen, whose agrarian, puritanical, and civic republican sensibilities derided the new forms of mobile financial wealth and concentrated state power arising under the Court Whig government of the day as harbingers of a plague of “corruption”/ This corruption was attributed to the spirit of avarice encouraged by the new economy; and it was contrasted with the selflessly patriotic and solidaristic ethos of virtue espoused by the anti-Court opposition. It was in this context of conflicting moralities that Mandeville became the centre of national controversy when the 1723 edition of his book led to a presentment before the Grand Jury of Middlesex. He was accused of wishing to “run down Religion and Virtue… and to recommend Luxury, Avarice, Pride, and all vices, as being necessary to Public Welfare… tending to the Destruction of the Constitution,” a line of attack that paralleled opposition polemics against the Court Whig regime, with which Mandeville became identified.

But just what exactly did Mandeville write for such a charge to be levelled against him? The core of his argument was that impulse and ego were the main drivers of human behaviour and that this fact necessitated the construction of a public morality based on self- deception by cunning elites, who had an interest in subduing the unruly passions of men. And while the insight was not new, with antecedents going back to Lucretius and Epicurus, Mandeville’s innovation was to draw out its implications in a modern setting and propose an alternative counter-model of society to that held up by traditional morality.

Mandeville’s vision accepted impulse-driven self-interest as its sole premise and in so doing, radically affirmed the imperatives of the emerging liberal-capitalist system. To illustrate his view, he took the beehive, oft-used symbol of virtue and frugality by the opposition writers, and turned it on its head. In Mandeville’s telling, the bees were not selfless citizens devoted to the public interest but greedy, self-seeking creatures whose competitive appetites made the hive a more prosperous place: “Thus Vice nurs’d Ingenuity / Which join’d with Time and Industry / Had carry’d Life’s Conveniencies, / It’s real Pleasures, Comforts, Ease, / To such a Height, the very Poor Liv’d better than the Rich before / And nothing could be added more.”

And so, it became the duty of wise statesmen to devise ways by which this self-interest could be transmuted into socially productive endeavours: successive Whig ministries were able to do that by sponsoring and regulating the development of complex financial institutions such as the new Bank of England and the growing trade of joint-stock companies, including both the wildly successful East India Company and the ill-fated South Sea Company. The same capitalist superstructure that the opposition denounced as a source of venality and injustice functioned, in the hands of men like Sir Charles Montagu and Sir Robert Walpole, as the instruments by which the greed of England’s magnates (the “bees”) contributed to the growth of its national wealth, power, and prestige. The Whig government achieved this by providing means to concentrate and de-risk large capital investments, enabling the funding for prohibitively costly and otherwise unsustainable ventures, like imperial expansion overseas and economic modernisation at home.

This process of enrichment through doux commerce led to greater refinement, and to England becoming the “polite nation” to which Addison and Steele’s Spectator addressed its lessons on manners and etiquette, a far cry from the violent and brutish ways of the previous century. British history under the Court Whig oligarchy could be understood, then, as firm validation for The Fable of the Bees and in particular, one of Mandeville’s central insights — that “Private Vices by the dextrous Management of a skilful Politician may be turned into Publick Benefits”.

With the triumph of Walpole, the austere, virtue-seeking sensibilities of the men who attacked Mandeville — represented by John Trenchard, Thomas Gordon, and Bolingbroke — would have passed quietly into history had it not been for the strange process of moral transplantation by which their ideas and values migrated across the Atlantic through pamphlets and reprints. For they later formed the intellectual nucleus of the American Revolution, as historian Bernard Bailyn demonstrated in his magnum opus, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967). The editorials of The Craftsman practically served as templates for the Patriot press in its denunciations of the Stamp Act and, later, of the whole British political and economic system, from the King on down: in American eyes, the empire itself had become irredeemably corrupt and had to be severed like gangrene.

Like Bolingbroke, the rebels embraced a classical morality rooted in the example of the ancients, of Cincinatus and Cato, whose willingness to sacrifice all for their country’s liberty inspired the founders to wager their “lives, property and sacred honour”. The American idiom has since been inflected with republican notions of the “common good”, understood differently but present nonetheless on both the the Right and the Left. Even when politicians acknowledge self-interest (or get caught acting on it in embarrassing ways), the moral instinct is always one of deferring back to the same communitarian ethos. (Reagan’s rhetoric was emblematic of this tension, with its praise for both the selfishness of the profit motive and the selflessness of patriots past.)

As Mandeville would argue, however, such ideologies are forms of self-deception that elites employ, whether knowingly or not, to cover up their competing base impulses and egoistic desires. For instance: today, the professional managerial class speak the language of social justice even as they preside over new forms of hierarchy and domination that do little to help the lower classes they claim to represent; while conservative elites in the small-town millionaire class speak the language of “America First” patriotism even as they engage in horribly regressive and exploitative industries that stand in the way of true national development.

The culture war is essentially the moral economy of recognition of these elite classes, where competition is waged between and within the ranks of the two enemy tribes. Solidarity is the symbolic currency of this economy: and their virtue-signalling on behalf of their party’s respective ideological value sets (whether it’s “pronouns and Palestine” or “guns and God”) is an expression of this principle.

What is needed now is an American Walpole who can see beyond the facade, take this impulse toward pride and amour-propre among the elites, and turn it toward something more productive and beneficial in the material (as opposed to the moral) economy. A Mandevillian politics would channel these drives away from the false pursuit of virtue and connect them instead to economic aggrandisement, through which both the elites and the nations they lead can attain new riches and power. In this scheme, politics would become a lot more rational, instrumental, and manageable as it would come down to the brokering of interests (difficult but doable) rather than a contest over values (impassable and never-ending).

Of course, the cultural antagonisms between Americans are still much too great for this change to take place anytime soon, and it may take a few unstable election cycles before America moves from its Cromwellian age of moral absolutism to its next Mandevillian age of enlightened self-interest. But that doesn’t me we shouldn’t start now. Faced with our overbearing embrace of solidarity, a bit of “private vice” wouldn’t go amiss.

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Michael Cuenco is a writer on policy and politics. He is Associate Editor at American Affairs.

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