The Fable of the Bees

2018 Reprint of 1962 Edition. Abridged Edition. Full facsimile of the 1962 edition. Not reproduced with Optical Recognition software. Originally published in book form in 1714, this masterpiece of eighteenth-century British satire sparked great social controversy by rejecting a positive view of human nature and arguing the necessity of vice as the foundation of an emerging capitalist economy. Mandeville suggests many key principles of economic thought, including division of labor and the "invisible hand", seventy years before these concepts were more thoroughly elucidated by Adam Smith. Two centuries later, the noted economist John Maynard Keynes cited Mandeville to show that it was "no new thing ... to ascribe the evils of unemployment to ... the insufficiency of the propensity to consume", a condition also known as the paradox of thrift, which was central to his own theory of effective demand. At the time, however, it was considered scandalous.