Bernard Mandeville

Born in Rotterdam in November 1670, Bernard Mandeville studied at the University of Leiden and trained as a physician before settling in England, where he spent most of his adult life and wrote mainly in English. He became an Anglo-Dutch man of letters whose work moved easily between medicine, satire, philosophy, and social commentary.

Mandeville is most closely associated with The Fable of the Bees, a work that made him famous—and notorious. In it, he argued in deliberately unsettling ways that behavior often condemned as selfish or vain could still contribute to the prosperity of society. That claim shocked many readers in his own time, but it also made his writing deeply influential in later discussions of moral philosophy, commerce, and early economic thought.

What still makes him interesting is his style as much as his ideas: witty, skeptical, and unafraid to challenge respectable opinion. He died in Hackney, London, on January 21, 1733, but his arguments continued to echo through the Enlightenment and beyond.