Public Virtue and Private Vices: Bernard Mandeville and English Political Ideologies in the Early Eighteenth Century

1976 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 477 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. M. Goldsmith
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Bernard Mandeville

Commercial Society and Christian Virtue: The Mandeville-Law Dispute

1989 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 581-610 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russell Nieli
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
Moral Virtues ◽  
The Common ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Desire ◽  
Bernard Mandeville ◽  
Material Progress

From earliest apostolic and patristic times, Christian writers have generally been suspicious of the common human desire to improve one's economic status. In Britain, however, by the end of the seventeenth century, this suspicion had all but vanished as most Christians began to accommodate themselves to the exigencies of an increasingly dynamic commercial society. This article takes up the early eighteenth-century controversy over the compatibility of traditional Christian moral virtues with the demands of economic and material progress as reflected in the writings of the two most important antagonists in the controversy, Bernard Mandeville and William Law. Although both Mandeville and Law spoke the language of Christian rigorism and perfectionism, and proclaimed attachment to the full austerity of the Christian Gospels, Mandeville, it is explained, was really a hedonist in disguise who feigned attachment to traditional Christian and Stoic ascetic principles merely to be able to discredit those principles. Law, it is explained, was a man of uncommon piety and devoutness who was shocked by the increasing secularism and materialism of his age, and who sought to recall his contemporaries to a life of true Christian holiness. The article concludes with an evaluation of the relative merits of the positions of each of the two thinkers.

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