Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees and the Financial Revolution: Politics of Moral Discourses and its Resonance in the Neoliberal Context
Keywords:
Virtues, Financial Revolution, Neoliberal, MandevilleAbstract
Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees: or Private Vices, Public Benefits is a product of the Financial Revolution that witnessed the use of novel financial and credit instruments. This paper looks at the reinterpretation of ideas of vice, virtue, morality, ideals of societal well being, and luxury in conjunction with P.G.M Dickson’s scholarship regarding workings of credit, trade and attendant profit accumulation from 1688 to 1756. The Fable of the Bees: or Private Vices, Public Benefits’ attempt to re-conceptualise these seemingly immutable categories constitutes an instantiation of a discursive practice that functions by silencing the voices of the marginalised and also an attempt to gloss over processes of imperialism as well as its attendant violence as an integral structural component of capitalism. The contemporary neoliberal moment demonstrates similitude with this discursive practice. The paper refers to Niall Ferguson’s historiography wherein virtue is recast so that oppression and subjugation of other nations and civilisations for the sake of material gains is perceived as progress.
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