The dark side of recognition: Bernard Mandeville and the morality of pride

ABSTRACT

This article reconstructs Bernard Mandeville’s pride-centred theory of recognition and advances two main arguments. First, I maintain that Mandeville really did regard pride as a vice and took the prevalence of this passion as evidence of our morally compromised nature. Mandeville’s account of pride may have been indebted to French neo-Augustinian moralists, yet I show that the moral connotations he associated with the passion are based on a naturalistic analysis of our moral psychology and do not depend upon endorsing any theological assumptions about our fallen condition. Second, I offer a qualified defence of Mandeville’s pride-centred theory against other eighteenth-century philosophers – Archibald Campbell, David Hume and Adam Smith – who presented the desire for social esteem in a more positive light. Even if there is nothing troubling about a moderate and well-regulated desire for esteem, I suggest that Mandeville’s analysis remains deeply unsettling in so far as it reveals the extent of pride behind our desire for recognition.

KEYWORDS:

• Bernard Mandeville
• pride
• recognition
• Augustinianism
• David Hume

Acknowledgements

I presented versions of this paper (and longer draft chapters from which it is drawn) at the University of Groningen, the University of York and Brown University. I am very grateful for the insightful comments received on each occasion, and for especially helpful suggestions and criticism I would like to thank Heikki Haara, Daniel Luban, Johan Olsthoorn, Paul Sagar and Tim Stuart-Buttle, along with the reviewers for this journal.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 McBride (Recognition, 72) suggests that many contemporary theories of recognition are insufficiently attentive to “our longstanding ethical ambivalence about self-esteem”, and counters that no “discussion of social recognition is complete … unless it confronts the dark side of recognition”.

2 For the general argument that Mandeville sought to ridicule and/ or overturn austere (Augustinian/ Calvinist) moral standards, see, for example, Harth, “Satiric Purpose”, 333–40; Colman, “Reality of Virtue”, 128; Nieli, “Commercial Society and Christian Virtue”; Viner, Essays, 178–82; Hundert, Enlightenment’s Fable, 144; Goldsmith, “Mandeville’s Pernicious System”, 79–81; Herdt, Putting On Virtue, 268–9, 275, 280.

3 For ease of expression, I follow Mandeville in referring to pride as a vice. Strictly speaking, however, this should be taken as shorthand for the vice of acting from pride, since vice involves gratifying or indulging (and not merely experiencing) a passion (see Fable I, 48; Fable II, 7, 269–71).

4 For more extensive analysis of how Mandeville’s satire relates to his philosophical and scientific goals, see Hilton, Bitter Honey, especially 177–93.

5 For Mandeville’s thought in this context, see Kaye, “Introduction”, lxxix–lxxxiv; Lovejoy, Reflections on Human Nature, 153–79; Horne, Social Thought, 19–31; Dickey, “Pride, Hypocrisy and Civility”; Hundert, Enlightenment’s Fable, 30–38.

6 On this point in relation to La Rochefoucauld, see Moriarty, Disguised Vices, 368–80. For an account of Mandeville’s Augustinianism close to that which I defend here, see Maurer, Self-Love, Egoism and the Selfish Hypothesis, 59, 72–3, 81, and the accompanying endnotes.

7 I use the term ‘naturalistic’ to differentiate claims about human nature that are based on observation or empirical analysis, from those which instead appeal to revealed (i.e. scriptural) knowledge.

8 Mandeville does deploy the opposition in the opening chapter of Free Thoughts (1, 18–20), however, tellingly entitled “Of Religion”.

9 For a helpful overview of Augustine’s criticisms, see Brooke, Philosophic Pride, 7–10; and 76–100 on seventeenth-century French Augustinians. More comprehensively on the latter, see Moriarty, Disguised Vices, with 61–78 focusing on the original criticisms in Augustine.

10 The Fable was first published in 1714, with a considerably expanded edition following in 1723. The second volume, or Part II, appeared at the end of 1728 (the title page states 1729), and Origin of Honour in 1732.

11 An anonymous reviewer suggested that Mandeville uses pride more frequently only before introducing the concept of self-liking in “The Third Dialogue” of Fable II. This is not the case. Mandeville refers to self-liking regularly when introducing and explaining the concept at Fable II, 129–38, but, on my count, he uses the term only five more times in the remainder of the book. By contrast, even after having introduced the concept of self-liking (i.e. after Fable II, 138), Mandeville subsequently refers to pride explicitly more than twenty-five times. He uses self-liking and pride a similar number of times in Origin of Honour.

12 This point is separate from the distinction Smith also draws, with Mandeville in his sights, between the love of praise and love of praiseworthiness. Smith argues that the truly virtuous amongst us desire only to be praiseworthy, irrespective of the praise (or social esteem) we receive. In such cases, any love of praise would be derivative, serving only to confirm that our judgement of our own praiseworthiness is well-founded. See Theory of Moral Sentiments, especially III.2.3, III.2.24.

13 For a similar point, see Smith (Theory of Moral Sentiments, VI.iii.23), who distinguishes between two standards of evaluation: first, “the idea of exact propriety and perfection”, and, second, “the degree of approximation to this idea which is commonly attained in the world, and which the greater part of our friends and companions, of our rivals and competitors, may have actually arrived at”. Smith argues that we judge ourselves based on both standards to varying degrees in different cases.

14 At one point, Mandeville considers the objection that someone might “have had several Motives” determining their action. He responds by denying that the person in question did, in fact, act from any public-spirited motives, but he grants, at least by implication, that we should change our evaluation of the person’s conduct if public-spirited and pride-based motives were both at play. See Fable II, 120–21.

15 Honneth (Recognition, 56) claims that the publication of the Fable “led to a philosophical counter-movement” strongly opposed to the French approach to recognition. He does not discuss Mandeville’s ideas in any detail, however, and the case of Mandeville complicates Honneth’s attempt to categorise different approaches to recognition on the basis of nationality.