Mandeville and the “Low"

• In Event: Hume and the "Vulgar": Commercial Citizens in the Global Eighteenth Century

Abstract

Bernard Mandeville is rightly considered a fundamental figure in 18th century discourses surrounding the rise of commercial society. Central to his views on commerce and civil society is his fascination with—and profound respect for—what one might call the “low.” Whether it be his sustained attention to the social and economic habits of the “low” classes, his professional interest in digestive disorders, his “contemptibly low” style, or even his defense of the grimy realism of Dutch genre painting: Mandeville deliberately portrayed himself as a partisan of the “low”—particularly against the high-minded idealism of his principal opponent, Shaftesbury. This approach is more than rhetorical: I argue here that Mandeville is borrowing extensively from a rich continental tradition of “low” humanism found in Erasmus, Rabelais, Scarron, La Rochefoucauld, and others. From these figures, Mandeville extracts a unique appreciation for the interrelated nature of the “low” and the “high”—in particular, a novel and deeply influential theory on how altogether great economic, social, and political formations might derive from otherwise unremarkable (or even contemptible) behavior.

Author

• Brandon Turner, Clemson University