The late Phillip Harth edited and wrote an introduction for 1970 published edition of Bernard Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees. He writes on Page 7 those intellectuals with a new idea, sometimes gain public sympathy and acceptance of their new idea, perhaps while they are alive.
Harth then proceeds to contrast that fortune enjoyed by those intellectuals with the cold reception received by a few less fortunate intellectuals like Mandeville. Let me quote Harth: "A few intellectual works, however, owe their importance far more to the controversy they excited and the opprobrium they earned than to any proselytes they were able to win . . . By acting as irritants which contemporary readers found impossible to ignore, each of these books stimulated men to reexamine their ways of thoughts in order to justify their exasperation."
I surmise, that getting one's narrative and original ideas into the public consciousness by being notorious rather than esteemed, that being negatively famous is better than remaining anonymous and unknown. Mandeville may have been excoriated but he did not back down or back off with his unpopular views.
I imagine if Mavellonialism ever comes up to being well known, it and I will be regarded as infamous rather than famous for a generation or two.
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