J. Martin Stafford (Ed.): Private Vices, Publick Benefits? - Ismeron

Few books have provoked such an outcry as the 1723 edition of  The Fable of the Bees. Shortly after its publication, it was presented by the Grand Jury and denounced in a sermon preached before the Lord Mayor of London. (This was published as a fourpenny pamphlet unknown to F. B. Kaye, who prepared the standard edition of the Fable in the early 1920s.) The first four months of  1724 saw the publication of three more substantial works, by William Law, Richard Fiddes, and John Dennis. Within a decade there had appeared  more than a dozen articles,  pamphlets, and longer books, most of which were printed only once and are therefore scarce and  inaccessible. This volume brings together for the first time all the major works and many of the less important ones published between 1723 and 1732. Mandeville’s Vindication and A Letter to Dion (his reply to Bishop Berkeley) are also included, as are important pieces by David Hume and Adam Smith. They range in length from newspaper articles to George Bluet’s Enquiry, which is almost 65,000 words long. The texts are reset but not modernized, with facsimiles of original title pages. Twelve of the sixteen items are preceded  by an editorial introduction. There is also a general introduction, which outlines the main issues and suggests that the criticism to  which the Fable was subjected  prompted  Mandeville to shift from a conspiratorial account of the establishment of society and the origin of morality to the evolutionary account which he later expounded in Part II of the Fable.  Numerous footnotes provide further commentary, explications of uncommon words and obscure allusions, and translations of  all phrases and quotations in foreign languages.

Contents: