Man-Devil: The Mind and Time of Bernard Mandeville, The Wickedest Man in Europe is the best monograph on Bernard Mandeville in English. In it, John J. Callanan provides a complete account of Mandeville’s thought and its context. Throughout Man-Devil, the scope of Mandeville’s embeddedness in the social and intellectual milieu of 18th-century London is made clear. While the writer was not initially well-regarded, Callanan shows that, by the mid-1720s, Mandeville was on the minds of most in the Res Publica Litteraria. And despite the scant biographical material available, Callanan also succeeds in giving the reader a sense of Mandeville’s character, who comes across as cheerful, delighting in controversy and in exposing the hypocrisy of the moralists, but not as the “vicious and cruel sceptical misanthrope” he is often made out to be (p. 269).

Callanan notes that Mandeville held onto three claims throughout his writings: “firstly, that human beings are fundamentally driven by their own self-interest (or ‘self-love’); secondly, that individuals’ self-interested and frequently vicious actions can bring about positive economic benefits for the society at large; thirdly, that vice flourishes in modern economy” (p. 16). While none of these claims are entirely new, being found in the work of Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, Bayle, Nicole, and others, he stresses that Mandeville approached his subject matter—that of human beings—with an uncompromising attitude not found in many of his contemporaries. What brought great offense to many readers was Mandeville’s unflinching insistence that “the human species is illegitimately elevated above other animals, that we are deceived as to the extent and power of our own rationality, and that our moral codes are little more than fig leaves for our true self-interested motivations” (p. 21). All that one needed to recognize these facts was the courage to see things as they really are —while moralists paint the human beings in brighter colors, Mandeville presents us as we are in “our current form” (p. 20).

Callanan notes that this desire to present human beings in our current form led Mandeville to pursue an observational science of human nature, an aspiration that can already be seen in his writings on medicine. Mandeville is skeptical of most medical theorizing and argues that medical practice should proceed from close “listening” and “observation” (p. 70). The skilled doctor learns how to “read” their patients, much like the scientist of human nature learns how to read human beings. Learning how to read human beings requires grappling with forces beyond the individual, and so, Mandeville invites us to “see as an economist” (p. 193). This means treating individuals as part of an interconnected system governed by its own “natural rules that govern human life at the macro level” (p. 199). These natural rules—and the institutions they inform—“emerged gradually over enormous lengths of human history, without any planning or design” (p. 241). A science of human nature studies this spontaneous order and its development. The moralist, by contrast, fails by importing ethical significance to these rules, like the theorist fails in their championing of abstraction: both read their desires into nature rather than observing what it presents.

That said, Mandeville’s science of human nature is hardly sober. Callanan draws a connection between Mandeville and other skeptical humanists like Pierre Bayle and La Rochefoucauld who delight in the paradoxical nature of human beings. Despite being at the “mercy of our passions,” we find this thought difficult to accept and so “construct entire theories to rationalize its denial” (p. 128). Human beings may believe that we are differentiated from animals in our ability to exercise rational self-control over our passions, but we are governed by them. It just so happens that our passions differ from animals in our “overdeveloped need for esteem” (p. 145). This desire for esteem and our overweening pride is what leads us to act charitably, pursue honor, and seek virtue. Mandeville uses satire and fable as modes of writing because, as Callanan notes in a discussion of Samuel Butler, “human beings are not receptive to truths that clash with their self-image. They cannot be told uncomfortable truths head-on” (p. 101). And so, Mandeville prods his audience rather than reasons with them.

But there is a tension running through Callanan’s reading of Mandeville. While it is well-established that Mandeville delights in exposing the hypocrisy of those “who claim the moral high-ground” (p. 92), Callanan argues that at times Mandeville does so for humanist aims. Consider Mandeville’s “An Essay on Charity, and Charity Schools” (1723), where he holds that “charity schools must be resisted…because they aim to remove everyone out of a poor underclass; but society requires a poor underclass if it is to prosper” (quoted in Callanan, p. 185). Callanan forwards the view that Mandeville opposed these schools because they are a place of “indoctrination,” where the poor are filled with dogmatism that is contrary to “freedom from oppression” (pp. 188, 190). Similarly, with Mandeville’s The Virgin Unmask’d (1709), Callanan notes that it could be his sensitivity to the cruelty that women face at the hands of men that leads Mandeville to view romantic love as “a fiction invented to disguise the realities of the pervasiveness of sexual desire on the one hand, and the commercial transactions of sexual relations on the other” (p. 91).

At the same time, Callanan points out that Mandeville’s writings seek to defend the new “self-interested bourgeois mercantile class as the basis of a new society, one promising to replace religious ideology with commerce and international trade” (p. 171). This aim seems opposed to an open-hearted humanism but not in the eyes of Mandeville. As the author notes, Mandeville saw the “emerging economic order offered something like happiness for human beings,” allowing us to satisfy our desires and to minimize “suffering and oppression” in the process (p. 268). Commerce relieves poverty: “by rendering us discontented with what we have, society ultimately improves the lot of the poor by virtue of the industries and employment needed to keep up with demand” (p. 118). Likewise, commerce enables people to pursue their desires unfettered by the oppressive constraints of morality—an argument that is central to Mandeville’s defense of prostitution. The moralist, with their indifference to “actual flesh and blood human beings,” hypocritically aims to craft the world in their own image (p. 271), decrying the engines of commerce while continuing to rely on them.

Despite the concordance that Mandeville sees between humanism and commercial society, one might be suspicious of claims about their harmony. Callanan recognizes the tension between these two, noting Mandeville’s indifference to large swaths of humanity. Callanan points out that, in Mandeville’s essay on charity schools, he argues “that the system of modern commercial society functions by virtue of its perpetuation of inequalities and exploiting the working class,” and he “endorses” this fact as an overall good (p. 206). Even with this recognition, however, Callanan does not give much weight to this tension in Mandeville’s thought or acknowledge the downstream implications for his system. Mandeville can hardly escape the charge of being a pessimist or a cynic when he states, without reservation, that national prosperity requires the majority to remain in servitude. And while Callanan argues that Mandeville should not be read as “claiming that economic considerations should always trump moral one” (p. 222), he provides no examples of where Mandeville says otherwise—or evidence that he has a thick enough conception of morality to have an account of moral considerations or its weights.

Likewise, Callanan does not fully interrogate the limits of Mandeville’s naturalism. In discussing William Law’s response to Vol. 1 of The Fable of the Bees, Callanan admits that many of Mandeville’s explanations of our behavior require a radical redescription of the facts, despite his claim to “simply offers what makes the most sense of what we see around us” in his theory of human nature (p. 236). As Callanan writes, “confronted with the evidence of apparently naturally benevolent behaviour in ourselves and other animals, Mandeville insists that the simplest explanation is not that they have benevolent passions but that they are fundamentally self-interested animals. Yet this strains credulity…” (p. 237). Rather than seeing this revisionism as being at odds with Mandeville’s stated naturalism, Callanan notes that his claim to be a mere empiricist illustrates a “false humility” (p. 237) and that he should instead be interpreted as a partisan of Epicureanism, which espouses a theory of human nature according to which all our actions are explained by a desire to pursue pleasure and to avoid pain. If this is true, however, it undercuts the impact of Callanan’s arguments about Mandeville’s anti-theoretical stance in A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions (1711) as offering a distinct, observational approach to a science of human nature. I would have liked to see Callanan address these concerns about Mandeville’s system directly in Man-Devil.

This slight point of disagreement aside, Man-Devil is a necessary read for anyone interested in the life and times of Mandeville as well as in the impact of his thought on the British moralist tradition. While others have tackled aspects of his writings with greater precision, Callanan succeeds in presenting an overall sketch of Mandeville’s thought that is engaging and true to his character. One imagines that were Mandeville able to encounter Man-Devil in his postmortem state, he would respond with a wry smile, content with both the impact he has made and the infamy he has achieved.