Private Vices, Public Benefits: The Straussian connection between Adam Smith and Mandeville

Adam Smith does get cited rather too casually these days and Gavin Kennedy is excellent at spotting lazy readings and misquotations. However he slams Bruce Fein here unfairly for confusing Smith with the Dutch physician and satirist Bernard Mandeville. 

Mandeville was a thinker so notorious that he was referred to as Man-Devil and regarded as being as wicked as Machiavelli for arguing that any attempt to impose virtue on society would led to poverty and that commercial prosperity was based upon vices like greed.

Kennedy begins:

'I know Bruce Fein is out of his depth in the sentence: ‘Smith recognized the happy convergence of private greed and public good in competitive markets.’

I actually think this statement is fair. Fein might well be thinking of the oft-quoted line about a the butcher and the baker. But Kennedy writes:

'This was never anything that was written by Adam Smith. Quite the reverse! The notion of ‘private greed’ and ‘public good’ was not Adam Smith’s. It was the title and the philosophy of Bernard Mandeville’s popular book: ‘The Fable of the Bees, Or Private Vices, Publick Benefits’ [1724] A recent edition was published by Liberty Fund.

Adam Smith severely criticised Mandeville’s assertion and he described his philosophy as ‘licentious’ in his first book, 'The Theory of Moral Sentiments’ (1759) [TMS VII.ii.4: pp 306-14]. He did not change his mind about the findamental errors of the notion of ‘private vice, public benefits’ through his books four edition to 1790.'

All of this is perfectly true but one gets the sense that Smith (and Kennedy) doth protest too much. Mandeville's philosophy was notorious during the eighteenth century hence reputable authors had to damn Mandeville but this does not necessarily mean that they disagreed with him. (I know this sounds very Straussian but it was a commonplace strategy at the time).   As far as I can see Mandeville and Smith concurred when it came to the notion that public benefits (commercial prosperity) could arise from self-interest behaviour (the pursuit of profit).   

The main difference between Smith and Mandeville was not over the idea that public benefits that could arise from self-interested behaviour but over whether or not pursuit of self-interest was truly a vice (in other words Mandeville was quite Augustinian in moral philosophy while Smith tried to move beyond this in the Theory of Moral Sentiments). In this sense Smith was more subversive than Mandeville  . . .