Frugality

 

Phillip Harth wrote an introduction to Bernard Mandeville’s book, The Fable of the Bees. On Pages 21 and 22, he writes about how frugality is a learned virtue, and that the naturally vice-impelled citizens would rather chase after luxury and wealth. Their vicious preference was to make the country rich and powerful, a real benefit: “Still others, such as Remarks Q, S, V, and X, suggested that frugality and other ascetic virtues are the true enemies of national prosperity to a far greater degree than the honesty which destroyed the opulent hive. ‘What I call vices,’ Mandeville was to explain later in A Letter to Dion, ‘are the Fashionable Ways of Living, the Manners of the Age, that are often practiced and preached against by the same people.’

 

My response: Clearly Mandeville dismisses the hypocrites of damaged credibility that enjoy luxury while condemning it. Mandeville believed the people were vicious and selfish no matter how they praised asceticism, and there is much to his satire of their virtue signaling.

 

Harth continues: “A truly virtuous society, he argues repeatedly in the Fable, would be like that of the Spartans; frugal, abstemious, free of pride, luxury, prodigality and other vices, but also devoid of every comfort and pleasure that Englishman have come to regard as no more than their due. Yet, where is the man, he asks, who would be willing to pay such a price for virtue, or forego the public benefits of vice? On every side, men dream of a Golden Age they could not endure for a single day while they condemn the opulence that provides them with their most precious enjoyments.”

 

My response: Mandeville is consistent in suggesting that a virtuous people like the Spartans end up poor, but the rich, luxury-enjoying British are blessed with riches, pleasure and luxury so it is nonsense and ingratitude to dismiss what being vicious has given their nation. He is not so much a cynic as he is a realist.

 

Harth continues: “Nothing Mandeville had to say on the subject of vice proved as offensive to so many as his identification of luxury with the national interest and his dismissal of frugality as “an idle Virtue that employs no Hands, and therefore very useless in a trading Country.’ To so many of his countryman luxury was the most glaring example of a private vice which, if it became prevalent, could lead to public disaster. Preachers were fond of reminding their congregations that every previous civilization had been destroyed by the growth of luxury among its citizens; the depravity of the late Roman empire and its subsequent fate offered a lasting reminder of the wages of self-indulgence. But the moralists were not alone in attacking luxury. They received strong support from many economists.”

 

My response: Mandeville was not so cynical as realistic, although he was perhaps too blunt, but he knew that trading is fed on moving lots of goods back and forth, and the desire for luxury and nice things, consumers desires driving increased consumption does grow the economy.

 

It almost seems as if his critics were otherworldly, medieval, rural and naïve as to what it takes to grow the economy and increase employment. He as just too modern, too proto-capitalist and ahead of his late-medieval era. 150 years later, his remarks would not even be very controversial.