Part 1

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Transcriber's Note: The Introduction, by Jacob Viner, was first published without a copyright notice and, therefore, is in the public domain.

The Augustan Reprint Society

BERNARD MANDEVILLE

A Letter to Dion

(1732)

With an Introduction by Jacob Viner

Publication Number 41

Los Angeles William Andrews Clark Memorial Library University of California 1953

GENERAL EDITORS

H. RICHARD ARCHER, Clark Memorial Library RICHARD C. BOYS, University of Michigan RALPH COHEN, University of California, Los Angeles VINTON A. DEARING, University of California, Los Angeles

ASSISTANT EDITOR

W. EARL BRITTON, University of Michigan

ADVISORY EDITORS

EMMETT L. AVERY, State College of Washington BENJAMIN BOYCE, Duke University LOUIS BREDVOLD, University of Michigan JOHN BUTT, King's College, University of Durham JAMES L. CLIFFORD, Columbia University ARTHUR FRIEDMAN, University of Chicago EDWARD NILES HOOKER, University of California, Los Angeles LOUIS A. LANDA, Princeton University SAMUEL H. MONK, University of Minnesota EARNEST MOSSNER, University of Texas JAMES SUTHERLAND, University College, London H. T. SWEDENBERG, JR., University of California, Los Angeles

CORRESPONDING SECRETARY

EDNA C. DAVIS, Clark Memorial Library

INTRODUCTION

The Letter to Dion, Mandeville's last publication, was, in form, a reply to Bishop Berkeley's Alciphron: or, the Minute Philosopher. In Alciphron, a series of dialogues directed against "free thinkers" in general, Dion is the presiding host and Alciphron and Lysicles are the expositors of objectionable doctrines. Mandeville's Fable of the Bees is attacked in the Second Dialogue, where Lysicles expounds some Mandevillian views but is theologically an atheist, politically a revolutionary, and socially a leveller. In the Letter to Dion, however, Mandeville assumes that Berkeley is charging him with all of these views, and accuses Berkeley of unfairness and misrepresentation.

Neither Alciphron nor the Letter to Dion caused much of a stir. The Letter never had a second edition, and is now exceedingly scarce. The significance of the Letter would be minor if it were confined to its role in the exchange between Berkeley and Mandeville. Berkeley had more sinners in mind than Mandeville, and Mandeville more critics than Berkeley. Berkeley, however, mere than any other critic seems to have gotten under Mandeville's skin, perhaps because Berkeley alone made effective use against him of his own weapons of satire and ridicule.

In its only foreign language translation, the Letter, somewhat abbreviated, is appended to the German translation of The Fable of the Bees by Otto Bobertag, Mandevilles Bienenfabel, Munich, 1914, pp. 349-398.

Berkeley again criticized Mandeville in A Discourse Addressed to Magistrates, , Works, A. C. Fraser ed., Oxford, 1871, III. 424.

A Vindication of the Reverend D---- B--y, London, 1734, applies to Alciphron the comment of Shaftesbury that reverend authors who resort to dialogue form may "perhaps, find means to laugh gentlemen into their religion, who have unfortunately been laughed out of it." See Alfred Owen Aldridge, "Shaftesbury and the Deist Manifesto," Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, XLI (1951), Part 2, p. 358.

Berkeley came to closest grips with The Fable of the Bees when he rejected Mandeville's grim picture of human nature, and when he met Mandeville's eulogy of luxury by the argument that expenditures on luxuries were no better support of employment than equivalent spending on charity to the poor or than the more lasting life which would result from avoidance of luxury.

Francis Hutcheson, a fellow-townsman of Berkeley, had previously made these points against Mandeville's treatment of luxury in letters to the Dublin Journal in 1726, (reprinted in Hutcheson, Reflections upon Laughter, and Remarks upon the Fable of the Bees, Glasgow, 1750, pp. 61-63, and in James Arbuckle, Hibernicus' Letters, London, 1729, Letter 46). In The Fable of the Bees, Mandeville concedes that gifts to charity would support employment as much as would equivalent expenditures on luxuries, but argues that in practice the gifts would not be made.

Of the few contemporary notices of the Letter to Dion, the most important was by John, Lord Hervey. Hervey charged both Berkeley and Mandeville with unfairness, but aimed most of his criticism at Berkeley. He claimed that Alciphron displayed the weaknesses of argument in dialogue form, that it tended either to state the opponent's case so strongly that it became difficult afterwards to refute it or so weakly that it was not worth answering. He found fault with Berkeley for denying that Mandeville had told a great many disagreeable truths--presumably about human nature and its mode of operation in society--and with Mandeville for having told them in public. He held, I believe rightly, that Mandeville, in associating vice with prosperity, deliberately blurred the distinction between vice as an incidental consequence of prosperity and vice as its cause: vice, said Hervey, "is the child of Prosperity, but not the Parent; and ... the Vices which grow upon a flourishing People, are not the Means by which they become so."

T. E. Jessop, in his introduction to his edition of Alciphron, characterizes Berkeley's account of the argument of The Fable of the Bees as "not unfair," and says: "I can see no reason for whitewashing Mandeville. The content and manner of his writing invite retort rather than argument. Berkeley gives both, in the most sparkling of his dialogues. Mandeville wrote a feeble reply, A Letter to Dion." F. B. Kaye, on the other hand, says of the exchange between Berkeley and Mandeville that "men like ... Berkeley, who may be termed the religious-minded ... in their anguish, threw logic to the winds, and criticized him [i.e., Mandeville] for the most inconsistent reasons."

Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher, T. E. Jessop, ed., in The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne. Edited by A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop. London, etc., III. (1950), 9-10.