Abstract
This article examines two discussions of prostitution by eighteenth-century social theorist Bernard Mandeville and argues that how a society perceives and names risk reflects less about concrete dangers than about desires to preserve social order. Mandeville addresses his writings to anxious members of a commercial society who were specifying risk and assigning blame against a backdrop of widespread corruption. His calls for the legalization of prostitution expose the pervasive moral uncertainty and vice that animate a commercial society and raise questions about the purported social benefits yielded by the persecution of prostitutes, who Mandeville represents as simply one class of vicious commercial actors among many. His work suggests that the public designation of prostitution as a moral risk is a feeble attempt both to soothe generalized fear about the immorality of commerce and to buttress a cherished social order. Mandeville’s writings thus can be interpreted as an early engagement with the politics of risk and blame.
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Mary Douglas, Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 1992), 23. Risk enters the vocabulary of Anglophone political and economic thinkers in the early modern period—most likely in the mid-seventeenth century among the commercial classes of sea-faring merchants and traders. By the time Mandeville was writing, the term was in wide circulation, had acquired diverse meanings, and was not confined to descriptions of economic practices. In scientific and philosophical circles, risk was treated as probabilistic or predictive knowledge about an uncertain future, generated by cognitive habits of calculation and experiential reasoning. But, much as we often do today, early modern thinkers frequently used risk in lieu of terms like danger or harm to connote adventure, pleasure, and profiteering. For a study of the contemporary variations in the meaning of risk, see David Garland, “The Rise of Risk,” in Risk and Morality, ed. Aaron Doyle and Richard V. Ericson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 301–44. For a lovely treatment of the dual character of risk—peril and profit—in the Victorian age, see Elaine Freedgood, Victorian Writing About Risk: Imagining a Safe England in a Dangerous World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Lorraine Daston traces the history of probability and notes that by the nineteenth century, probabilistic thinking is shaded by looming senses of danger, rather than hope for gain. This article proposes that this tendency can also be seen in eighteenth-century treatments of risk within commercial societies. See Lorraine Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London: Routledge, 2002), xix. The idea of blame or scapegoating addressed in Risk and Blame extends Douglas’s early work on purity and “dirt” in the first edition of Purity and Danger (1966), reinterpreted through the lens of risk and politics. Ian Hacking explores some of these themes in “Risk and Dirt,” an essay that considers the triangulated relationship between ideas of pollution, the development of risk portfolios, and the maintenance of a community’s borders. While Hacking pursues the consequences of this set of moves for contemporary politics, he notes that communities have been working through these relationships for quite some time, an idea in keeping with Douglas’s work across time and culture. See Ian Hacking, “Risk and Dirt,” in Ericson and Doyle, Risk and Morality, 22–47. Elaine Freedgood’s study of British Victorian efforts to keep risk at bay supports this view, too. Freedgood, Victorian Writing About Risk.
Douglas, Risk and Blame, 39.
See Bernard Mandeville, “A Modest Defence of Publick Stews,” in Bernard Mandeville’s “A Modest Defence of Publick Stews,” ed. Irwin Primer (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 58. All further citations from the tract will refer to Primer’s edition and will be cited by page number.
See E.J. Hundert, The Enlightenment’s Fable: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 216.
Mandeville published the poem in 1705. It was followed by an edition with commentary in 1714 under the title The Fable of the Bees, which was followed by another expanded edition of The Fable in 1723. One can discern across the editions Mandeville’s development of the core idea that vicious activities can generate desirable public benefits, of which prostitution is but one example.
“Parties directly opposite,/Assist each other, as ‘twere for Spight;/And Temp’rance with Sobriety, /Serve Drunkenness and Gluttony.” Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees: Or, Private Vices, Public Benefits, 2 vols., ed. F.B. Kaye (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1988), 10.
Ibid., 95. He reiterates this point almost verbatim in the concluding remarks of “A Modest Defence.”
While Mandeville argues that prostitution can provide a helpful channel for lust, he eventually concludes that another institution serves a similar function: marriage. In 1732’s An Enquiry into the Origin of Honor and the Usefulness of Christianity in War, he comments that marriage “was instituted to regulate a strong passion, and prevent the innumerable mischiefs that would ensue, if men and women should converge together promiscuously, and love and leave one another as caprice and their unruly fancy led them.” Bernard Mandeville, “An Enquiry into the Origin of Honor and the Usefulness of Christianity in War,” in The Fable of the Bees and Other Writings, ed. E.J. Hundert (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997), 205.
In the expanded 1732 Fable’s Sixth Dialogue, the brutally honest Cleomenes notes the degree to which nature and convention have become conflated in our understanding of morality:
By diligently observing what Excellencies and Qualifications are really acquired, in a well-accomplished Man; and having done this impartially, we may be sure the Remainder of him is Nature. It is for want of duly separating and keeping asunder these two things, that Men have utter’d such Absurdities on this Subject; alledging as the Causes of Man’s Fitness for Society, such Qualifications as no Man ever was endued with, that was not educated in a Society, a civil Establishment of several hundred Years standing. But the Flatterers of our Species keep this carefully from our View: Instead of separating what is acquired from what is natural, and distinguishing between them, they take Pains to unite and confound them together.
Mandeville suggests that the conflation of human nature and civic education happened somewhere in the distant past, and has been artfully maintained ever since. Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, 359.
Ibid., 97.
Ibid., 152.
Ibid., 63.
Mandeville’s scrutiny of conventional accounts of male and female desire and gender appears first in The Virgin Unmask’d (1709). He argues there for equality of desire between men and women, attends to the ways in which convention masks this equality, and notes how conventional standards put women in the unenviable position of perpetually guarding their chastity. These themes persist in his later treatment of gender and desire in The Fable and “A Modest Defence.” See Bernard Mandeville, The Virgin Unmask’d, ed. Stephen H. Good (Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1975).
Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, 97.
This would be a marked difference from eighteenth-century London, where prostitution was primarily conducted in public places and in plain sight. See Sophie Carter, Purchasing Power: Representing Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century English Popular Print Culture (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2004), 10.
While Mandeville denaturalizes commonly held ideas about the distinctions between men and women, he frequently reinforces another social convention—class—and arguably simply accepts the perpetuation of poverty and the exploitation of the poor. As acknowledged later in this essay, in “A Modest Defence” he does express some sympathy for the poverty of prostitutes and suggests they are worthy of pity. But, this amounts to little more than a brief aside in a pamphlet in which he develops another idea: that upper-class women need brothels teeming with poor women, in order to keep their families stable and the household incomes flourishing. This subordination of the poor corroborates some of Jenny Davidson’s analysis of Mandeville’s “Essay on Charity and Charity-Schools.” She argues that in the essay, Mandeville thinks that manners are confined to a small subset of society and that an education in manners merely encourages the poor to aspire to a lifestyle they cannot achieve. See Jenny Davidson, Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness: Manners and Morals from Locke to Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 34–36.
One could argue that Mandeville has already applied a commercial predilection for cost-benefit analysis by positioning prostitution as a lesser inconvenience to society than lust run amok.
Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, 96–99.
Ibid., 50.
G.J. Barker-Behnfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 88.
Mandeville, The Fable of The Bees, 84.
Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, xii–xiii.
Ibid., viii.
Phillip Harth was the first to note that in The Fable, “Mandeville’s satire … is clearly not directed against the palpable vices which accompany his hive’s prosperity. His target is the less obtrusive vice of hypocrisy as practiced by those outwardly respectable people who decry crime and luxury while enjoying to the utmost the public benefits with depend on private vices for their existence.” See Phillip Harth, “The Satiric Purpose of The Fable of the Bees,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 2 (Summer, 1969): 328. Harth’s observation spurred a favored line of interpretation by other Mandeville scholars, most notably E.J. Hundert. See Hundert, The Enlightenment’s Fable. Recently, David Runciman has situated Mandeville’s work in a stream of modern Anglo-American political discourse in which hypocrisy is a central concept. See David Runciman, Political Hypocrisy: The Mask of Power, From Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 45–73.
Hundert, The Enlightenment’s Fable, 175. See also Runciman’s Political Hypocrisy, 45–73, for an analysis of Mandeville’s multi-faceted depiction of hypocrisy in The Fable and his shorter works.
Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, 24.
Laura Rosenthal, Infamous Commerce: Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 61.
The charge was that “studied Artifices and invented Colours have been made use of to run down Religion and Virtue as prejudicial to Society, and detrimental to the State; and to recommend Luxury, Avarice, Pride, and all kinds of Vices as being necessary to the Publick Welfare, and not tending to the Destruction of the Constitution: Nay, the very Stews themselves have had strained Apologies and forced Encomiums made in their Favour and produced in Print, with Design, we Conceive, to debauch the Nation.” Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, 445.
Questions linger as to the pamphlet’s authorship due to the lack of firm evidence that Mandeville penned it. Most contemporary Mandeville scholars agree, with greater or lesser conviction, that he wrote “A Modest Defence.” For a helpful overview of the authorship debate, see Primer, “Introduction,” 109–111.
A helpful resource for understanding the role of the Societies for the Reformation of Manners in moralizing politics is Alan Hunt, Governing Morals: A Social History of Moral Regulation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), especially chapters 1–2. On the activities of the societies and their impact on sexual mores in eighteenth-century London, see Margaret R. Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender and the Family in England, 1680–1780 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 101–24; and Robert B. Shoemaker, “Reforming the City: The Reformation of Manners Campaign in London, 1690–1738,” in Stilling the Grumbling Hive: The Response to Social and Economic Problems in England, 1689–1750, ed. Lee Davison (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 99–120.
Mandeville, “A Modest Defence,” 59.
Ibid., 62.
Carter notes that from the 1750s onward, prostitution reform by middle-class philanthropists centers on an idea of the prostitute as miserable and exploited. This marks a considerable shift in attitudes from the kind of reform that Mandeville is criticizing. We can see an early version of this more modern approach in some passages of “A Modest Defence.” See Carter, Purchasing Power, 24.
There is lively ongoing debate about the genre of “A Modest Defence.” Hundert and Laura Rosenthal view the work as almost entirely unsatirical and as a serious policy proposal. See Hundert, The Enlightenment’s Fable, 217; and Rosenthal, Infamous Commerce, 42–69. Irwin Primer, following Richard Cook, argues that while we should take the tract’s message of reform seriously, the writing also illustrates Mandeville’s talents as a stylist and his mastery of satire. In other words, while the work is not a straightforward satire, at least some parts of it are meant to be funny. Of course, as Primer notes, readers are then left with the task of parsing what is jocular and must ask whether the jokes underscore a serious point elsewhere in the text. See Irwin Primer, “Introduction,” in Bernard Mandeville’s “A Modest Defence of Publick Stews, 7–25; and Richard I. Cook, “‘The Great Leviathan of Lechery’: Mandeville’s Modest Defence of the Public Stews,” in Mandeville Studies: New Explorations in the Art and Thought of Dr. Bernard Mandeville, ed. Irwin Primer (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1975), 22–33.
Mandeville, “A Modest Defence,” 55; emphasis added.
Ibid., 84.
Ibid., 86–87. Irwin Primer rightly calls this appeal to political arithmetic absurd. See fn. 159 to Primer’s edition of “A Modest Defense.”
Mandeville, “A Modest Defence,” 86–87.
Ibid., 62.
This move has drawn the critical attention of feminist scholars in particular, who note that the prostitute’s single contribution to society (after Mandeville is done with her) is to alleviate the sexual desire of male commercial actors, so that they can participate in commerce more fully and without distraction. As Rosenthal comments, prostitutes help generate order and prosperity for a commercial society without “pleasure, mobility, freedom, autonomy, or most of all, the opportunity to indulge in the tempting range of vices that for Mandeville define humanity itself.” See Rosenthal, Infamous Commerce, 69.
Mandeville, “A Modest Defence,” 62.
Ibid., 62.
Ibid., 65.
Carter notes that the patriarchal logic of Mandeville’s argument for prostitution would have been readily accepted by his readers and hence was not perceived as too scandalous. In her opinion, the radical nature of his argument rests instead on the claim that prostitution could ever be an appropriate outlet for sexual vice. Carter, Purchasing Power, 21.
Claude Rawson, “Mandeville and Swift,” in Eighteenth-Century Contexts: Historical Inquiries in Honor of Phillip Harth, ed. Howard D. Weinbrot, Peter J. Schakel, and Stephen E. Karian (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 75.
Mandeville’s prose in these metaphors is morally inflected enough to raise questions about whether he appeals to rather than undermines public tendencies to scapegoat prostitutes for the ills of a society troubled by rampant desire and persistent threats to sexual mores. Certainly, in these moments, he does little to unseat popular perceptions of prostitutes as among the most morally and physically unclean members of the population, even as he argues that they pose no special risk. Laura Mandell argues that Mandeville periodically scapegoats all women for their consumerism, even as he marshals protofeminist arguments throughout his analysis of commercial society. See Laura Mandell, “Bawds and Merchants: Engendering Capitalist Desires,” ELH 59 (Spring 1992): 107–23.
Mandeville, “A Modest Defence,” 50; emphasis added.
Ibid., 84.
Ibid., 90.
See also Rosenthal, Infamous Commerce, 68.
Rawson, “Mandeville and Swift,” 76.
Freedgood, Victorian Writing About Risk, 2.
Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace applies Mary Douglas’s thoughts on risk, “dirt,” and purification to eighteenth-century views on prostitution, and argues that prostitution was targeted in order to organize a patriarchal structure of exchange and shore up traditional marriage. I agree but would emphasize that Mandeville’s work on prostitution reveals the ways the perception of prostitutes as a risk is connected to broader anxiety about the risky moral character of commerce. See Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping and Business in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 135.
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The author wishes to thank Danielle Allen, Paulina Aroch-Fugellie, Barbara Buckinx, W. James Booth, Jason Brennan, Yvonne Chiu, Helene Landemore, Neven Leddy, Jacob Levy, Alexander Livingston, Howard Lubert, Patchen Markell, Neil Roberts, Anna Marie Smith, Lucas Swaine, Marina Welker, Andrew Volmert, and participants in the Brown Political Philosophy Workshop and the Cornell Society for the Humanities workshop for helpful suggestions on earlier drafts of this essay. Likewise, many thanks to Ernie Zirakzadeh for his editorial guidance, and to three anonymous reviewers for Polity for their extremely useful critical comments.
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Nacol, E. The Beehive and the Stew: Prostitution and the Politics of Risk in Bernard Mandeville’s Political Thought. Polity 47, 61–83 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2014.27
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2014.27