"He described a vast community of bees - a transparent metaphor for contemporary Britain - and the mechanisms of its wealth. In the hive, each bee works for its own personal gain, every profession has its cheat, and everyone exploits the passions of others. But the welfare of the community is not endangered: Thus every part was full of vice,Yet the whole mass a paradise; ...The worst of all the multitudeDid something for the common good."
"In 1714, and in an enlarged edition in 1723, Mandeville published the prose volume that made him infamous: The Fable of the Bees: Or, Private Vices, Public Benefits. The original poem was reprinted with a series of commentary essays in which Mandeville expanded upon his provocative arguments that human beings are self-interested, governed by their passions rather than their reason, and he offered an explanation of the origin of morality based solely on human sensitivity to praise and fear of shame through a rhapsody of social vignettes. Mandeville confronted his contemporaries with the disturbing fact that passions and habits commonly denounced as vices actually generate the welfare of a society."
An early-eighteenth-century poem and later enlarged prose volume portray a bee community in which individuals pursue private gain, professions harbor cheats, and people exploit one another's passions. Private vices collectively produce public prosperity; even the worst individuals contribute to the common good, and enforced moral reform collapses economic vitality. The prose expansion argues that human beings are governed by passions rather than reason and that moral sentiments arise from sensitivity to praise and fear of shame. The fable links self-interest to social wealth and became an important source for laissez-faire and market theories, later praised by free-market thinkers.
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