Man-Devil – The Mind and Times of Bernard Mandeville, the Wickedest Man in Europe

Bernard Mandeville was a notorious doctor, philosopher and satirist who in 1714 published an enormously influential book, The Fable of Bees, which scandalised his contemporaries by characterising human beings as animals - ‘greedy, self-interested, lazy, and deceiving, living our lives according to mere rules of convenience.’ In the story, the transformation of the hive full of greedy and licentious bees to a virtuous community brings about its economic collapse, a storyline guaranteed to upset but also to engage people on the question of human nature, including Smith, Rousseau and Hume. The author of this acclaimed book situates Mandeville in a tradition of sceptical humanism with reverberations into our own time.