ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: The Dutch background of Bernard Mandeville’s thought: escaping the Procrustean bed of neo-Augustinianism
Author: Verburg Rudi
Among the intellectual sources from which Mandeville drew, most emphasis is given to the French moral tradition, in particular Jansenist philosophy larded with a good measure of skepticism. And sure enough, many of the themes which we find in Mandeville can be traced directly to the French intellectual tradition. Nevertheless, the neo-Augustinian outlook of the French moral tradition should not be turned into a Procrustean bed by depreciating the Dutch background of Mandeville’s thought. This paper advances the argument that the parts discarded to fit the Procrustean bed of (neo) Augustinianism do have a story to tell about the novelty of Mandeville’s thought and that the Dutch background is a neglected part of that story. In the seventeenth century trade and commerce increasingly came to be recognized as the source from which the well-being of the commonwealth sprang, generating the necessary flows of means to pay for government, infrastructure and security. Trade and commerce, however, thrive on the ambitions and desire for gain of individuals. Passions which always had been perceived as unruly now seemed to be an indispensable part of public well-being. The Dutch republicanism of Johan and Pieter De la Court was an attempt to come to terms with commercial society, its opportunities, threats and conditions. Reappraising the role of man’s passions, they emphasized the positive contribution of interest and honour in securing the health and wealth of the commonwealth. This positive theory of interest and the passions, I like to suggest, was an equally necessary foundation of Mandeville’s thought as was the French moral tradition. To this purpose, the paper first deals with the French moral tradition and proceeds with the views of the brothers De la Court in order to bring out the basic logic of both discourses. It is argued next that, going beyond the brothers De la Court, Mandeville built a new ‘logic’ from ideas taken from both discourses, in which the commercial republicanism of Johan and Pieter de la Court presented Mandeville a springboard to negotiate the passage into commercial modernity.
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