Bernard Mandeville

Born in Rotterdam in November 1670, Bernard Mandeville studied medicine at the University of Leiden before settling in England, where he spent most of his adult life writing in English. He worked as a physician, but he became far more widely known as an essayist, satirist, and social thinker.

Mandeville’s most famous book, The Fable of the Bees, made him notorious. In it, he argued that a prosperous society can grow out of private desires and faults as well as public virtue, a claim that shocked many readers in his own time. That mix of wit, irony, and uncomfortable honesty helped make him an important early voice in debates about morality, commerce, and human motivation.

Though he died in Hackney, near London, on January 21, 1733, his reputation lasted far beyond his lifetime. Readers still return to him for his lively style and for the unsettling questions he asked about self-interest, hypocrisy, and how society really works.