Abstract

ABSTRACT By defending the general thesis that “private vices” were indispensable to obtaining “public benefits,” Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees provoked outraged reactions and earned its author the reputation of an enemy of virtue. Among the criticisms made against him, the one according to which he had cunningly used a rigorist conception of virtue to demonstrate the impossibility of any genuinely virtuous action stands out. Taking this criticism as a motto and trying to see to what extent it can be pertinent or not, this paper intends to examine the thesis contained in the subtitle of the Fable considering the philosophical project in which it is inserted: that of an “anatomy of the invisible part of man”. From there, we hope it will be possible to indicate what questions The Fable of the Bees aims to answer and how it does answer them, what place it holds for morality, as well as which are the consequences of the Mandevillian critique of morals.