Abstract

It would be difficult to imagine two writers so dissimilar as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Bernard Mandeville. The cynical advocate of "private vices, public benefits" and the Socrates redivivus of modern times would seem to dwell in two entirely different universes. Yet, on closer examination, one will discover that Rousseau owes the notorious author of The Fable of the Bees a rather large intellectual debt. It was Mandeville, I argue, who made Rousseau aware of the logical inconsistencies of the modern school of natural law and led him to undertake a systematic critque of it in the Discours sur l'inegalite. Many of Rousseau's most important ideas--the distinction between "amour de soi" and "amour-propre," the grounding of morality in the pre-rational emotion of pity, and the doctrine of "perfectibilite"--can be shown to have their origin in the second part of The Fable of the Bees. My claim is not original. Adam Smith pointed out over two centuries ago that Rousseau's conjectural history of mankind was very similar to Mandeville's. As this has been a relatively neglected area in the interpretation of Rousseau, however, I have set myself the task of exploring some of the connections, explicit and implicit, that link the "immoral" apologist for luxury to the advocate of ancient simplicity. ;This is, I believe, a more fruitful approach to Rousseau than the one usually taken, which consists in "updating" him for whatever philosophical or ideological axe the critic may have to grind. Since the French Revolution and the advent of Romanticism, Rousseau is too often read as if he were a prefiguration of all our problems. In a sense, of course, he is. But one can only understand those problems when they are seen as part of the "crise de la conscience europeenne," the conflict between Renaissance humanism and Christianity, which inaugurates the Enlightenment and prepares the way for the political and cultural upheavals of modern times