Mandeville against Luxury

Mandeville the Doctor

When Mandeville left his native Rotterdam in 1685 to matriculate at the University of Leiden, he represented the latest in a family line of physicians. Like his father and great-grandfather before him, he studied gestation; his 1691 dissertation, De Chylosi Vitiata, examined the effects of poor chylification—the process, crucial to the iatrochemical interpretation of digestion, by which the stomach converts food into nourishment. Though apparently consistent with the Cartesian dogma, orthodox in Dutch medical circles at the time, that mind and body are fundamentally separate, Mandeville’s early medical work demonstrates that his materialist streak ran deep, and that he was curious about the potential physiological connections between the body—in particular, the stomach—and the mind. ¹⁰ This section explores the extent to which Mandeville’s symbological and methodological approach to social and political theory took inspiration from his medical training and career.

With regards to method, Mandeville’s approach to social theory echoes his approach to medical practice—both turn on an empiricist critique of abstract reasoning, infused with a strong sense of anti-elitism. In the Treatise, he derides the academic and overly abstract approach to medicine taught in universities, suggesting that the academic study of anatomy and botany prepares one for medical practice in the same way that “a Man that should study Opticks, Proportions, and read of Painting and mixing of Colours for . . . many years, would, without having ever touch’d a Pencil, be able to perform the part of a good History-Painter.” The academic study of medicine represents “the Easie, the Pleasant, the Speculative, and Preparatory part of Physick”; conversely, “the Practical” approach, “attain’d by an almost everlasting Attendance on the Sick, unwearied Patience, and judicious as well as diligent Observation” represents “the Tedious, the Difficult, but the only Useful part” of medicine. Mandeville’s epistemology rewards the patient, steadfast observer. He chides those who would trade the true practice of medicine—“you should spend your Time before the squallid Beds of poor Patients, and bear with the unsavory Smells of a crouded Hospital”—for the painless and lucrative path of the public intellectual, insisting that it is “Observation, plain Observation, without descanting or reasoning upon it, that makes the Art.” ¹¹ In the second volume of the Fable (1729), Cleomenes repeats these charges against abstract medicine—“there is no Art that has less Certainty than [medicine], and the most valuable Knowledge in it arises from Observation, and is such . . . [as] can only be possess’d of, after a long and judicious Experience”—and connects them to the study of the world more broadly. Cleomenes struggles to show Horatio, too often swept up in the speculative theorizing of Shaftesbury, “how really mysterious the Works of Nature are,” and that “more useful Knowledge may be acquired from unwearied Observation, judicious Experience, and arguing from Facts à posteriori.” ¹²

In metaphor as in methodology, Mandeville borrowed frequently from his medical background. Particularly in his early work, the image of the body politic appears frequently. In the first volume of the Fable, he borrows from Hobbes: “By Society I understand a Body Politick, in which Man either subdued by Superior Force, or by Persuasion drawn from his Savage State, is become a Disciplin’d Creature . . . and where under one Head or other Form of Government each Member is render’d Subservient to the Whole, and . . . are made to Act as one.” ¹³ Yet the Fable’s biological imagery goes well beyond the didacticism of Leviathan’s frontispiece; indeed, the Fable’s opening lines critique Hobbes’s over-simplified symbology. Compare Leviathan’s well-known description of the “Artificial Animal”—“for what is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joynts, but so many Wheeles, giving motion to the whole Body”—to the Fable’s opening:

Laws and Government are to the Political Bodies of Civil Societies, what the Vital Spirits and Life it self are to the Natural Bodies of Animated Creatures; and as those that study the Anatomy of Dead Carcases may see, that the chief Organs and nicest Springs more immediately required to continue the Motion of our Machine, are not hard Bones, strong Muscles and Nerves, nor the smooth white Skin that so beautifully covers them, but small trifling Films and little Pipes that are either over-look’d, or else seem inconsiderable to the Vulgar Eyes. ¹⁴

Mandeville makes frequent use of this idea—that the minute and otherwise unnoticed movements of society’s most insignificant parts constitute its animating force—here, however, he uses it to deepen and enrich the body politic metaphor in ways that draw on his extensive medical training.

And, of course, the body politic can get sick. Mandeville had a penchant for colorful political diagnoses. His lively 1724 defense of public brothels, A Modest Defence of Publick Stews, compares the male libido to “a Kind of Peccant Humour in the Body-Politick,” which must be in some way discharged; public brothels, in this case, represent a “Kind of legal Evacuative,” venting the humor without unbalancing “the Constitution.” Prohibition, however, acts “like violent Astringents,” serving only to “drive the Disease back into the Blood; where, gathering Strength . . . it will break out with the upmost Virulence.” Then, in a passage clearly meant to shock:

As we may observe in a Clap, where Nature of her own Accord expels the noxious Humour thro’ the same Passages by which it was at first receiv’d; but if we resist Nature in this Discharge, and repel the Venom by too hasty an Application of Stypticks, the Disease then turns to a Pox. ¹⁵

These passages may be physiologically suspect, but they clearly suggest that, for Mandeville, the boundaries separating the logic of physical and social bodies were highly permeable. Indeed, at times, the direction of the metaphor reverses, and Mandeville interprets the body through social symbols. He describes the work of the brain as “the commerce between the volatile Particles that are employed in the Act of Thinking,” and the nerves as “those airy velocious Agents, the chief and immediate Ministers of Thought; that officiating between the Soul and grosser Spirits of the Senses have always Access to her invisible self.” ¹⁶ In a discussion of malnourishment, Mandeville invokes the economic dynamics of country and court relations as evidence for circulatory theory:

We must believe that [this particular effect of circulation] is in the animal Government as it is in all others; whatever Poverty the Country endures, the Court has always Plenty, and very rarely is destitute of Necessaries. It is reasonable to think, that the Soul, who has a great Command and is so arbitrary over the Spirits, will have [nourishment] . . . for her own immediate Use. ¹⁷

Here, the metaphorical direction of the body politic image reverses—now, the court’s behavior provides insight into the workings of the stomach.

This is not to say that Mandeville was unique in his use of this imagery. The body politic trope is as old as political theory itself and had attained new currency in the late medieval and early modern period. ¹⁸ Moreover, the distinctly medical approach to social theorizing was on the rise in both Britain and Mandeville’s native Netherlands. Petrus Baardt’s 1640 work Democratia Corporis Humani argued that, just as the healthy human body makes use of all of its parts, the body politic must incorporate even society’s lowest classes. ¹⁹ Similarly, Martin van Gelderen has noted the influence of Henning Arnisaeus and Bartholomeus Keckermann—both of whom emphasized the applicability of the methodology of the ordo resolutivus on the medical and political arts alike—on seventeenth-century Dutch thought. ²⁰ Elsewhere, what had been for centuries a predominantly symbolic association between the state and the human body was becoming—particularly in the hands of early theorists of political economy—an explanatory device capable of translating the rapidly burgeoning knowledge of medical science into the language of politics. Nowhere is this clearer than in late-seventeenth-century attempts to make sense of money and interest rates, wherein figures like Locke and William Petty relied heavily on explanatory analogies linking the circulation of money in the national economy to the circulation of blood in the human body. ²¹ Remarking upon this a century and a half later, Marx would write that “originally political economy was studied by philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, and Hume, by business men and statesmen . . . and especially, and with the greatest success, by medical men like Petty, Barbon, Mandeville, and Quesnay.” ²²

Thus, even if Mandeville’s use of medical imagery and method was comparatively pervasive and often suggestive—and it certainly was—the permeability of disciplinary boundaries that marks his thought was endemic to early-modern European thought. What makes this permeability particularly noteworthy in the case of Mandeville is the way it recasts his focus on “grumbling.” That is, it provides the basis for reexamining Mandeville’s preoccupation with social and political “grumblers”—what he would call “state hypochondriacks”—in light of his ongoing professional interest in the medical pathology of hypochondria. This section suggests, first, that a social critique constructed with theoretical parts borrowed from medicine would have been entirely in keeping with Mandeville’s intellectual tendencies, and, second, that Mandeville’s specific medical background and practice as a doctor for grumblers casts his social theory—and, as we will see, his views on luxury and idleness—in a curious and new light. As the next section explains, Mandeville’s grumbling patients are not analogs to state hypochondriacks—rather, political grumbling and private grumbling are symptoms of the same condition.

Mandeville and Grumbling

To whatever extent “anti-grumbling” can be considered a theme, it must be one of the most prominent political themes in Mandeville’s work. His earliest known English work, a 1703 penny-pamphlet, “The Pamphleteers: A Satyr,” defends William III and the post-Revolution settlement against “a grumbling Nation that was ne’er at ease,” and closes by wishing a disgruntled London well: “May in your Days the Gift of Heav’n be sent, Which we ne’er tasted yet, to be CONTENT.” ²³ Likewise, his fabulist efforts—first in 1703’s Some Fables after the Easie and Familiar Method of Monsieur de la Fontaine and again in 1704’s Aesop Dress’d—feature several anti-grumbling entries. “The Frogs Asking for a King”—an adapted send-up of Jacobitism—describes a society of frogs who, with “clam’rous rout,” complain of the inactivity of their current king (a log). Tired of their grumbling, Jove sends them a new king—a stork—who proceeds to gobble up many of his new subjects. When the frogs cry again for Jove to “deliver us from Tyranny,” he responds: “Keep this, for fear you get a worse.” Mandeville’s sarcastic moral:

Thank God, this Fable is not meant

To Englishmen; they are content

And hate to change their government ²⁴

The same theme appears in “The Hands, and Feet, and Belly,” Mandeville’s retelling of the traditional fable “The Belly and Its Members.” In this version, a human body sees its hands and feet, “mightily upon the Fret” from being “badly us[e]d,” vent their “grievances” and resolve to go on strike against “Lord Gutship,” “the ungrateful Belly” who benefits unjustly from their efforts. The strike goes poorly, the body languishes, and the members realize their own ignorance of the stomach’s unseen contributions. Mandeville’s moral, inspired by La Fontaine, makes the anti-grumbling meaning clear:

The Belly is the Government, From whence the Nourishment is sent…

The Members are the discontent/Pleibeians; that are ignorant…

But in this Fable they may see/The dismal Fruits of Mutiny;

Whilst Subjects, that assist the Crown, But labour to maintain their own. ²⁵

That same year, Mandeville published Typhon, a tawdry poem in which Jove is again confronted with unappreciative humanity, “ungrateful Puppies” upon whom he is compelled to visit “Discord and Fear.” ²⁶ Mandeville would revisit these themes more fatefully the following year, when the first edition of “The Grumbling Hive” appeared on the streets of London.

Thomas Horne has argued that these early forays into political allegory—including the early editions of the Fable—ought to be read as polemical attacks on the Societies for the Reformation of Manners, associations aimed at promoting public morality that began springing up in London in the years following the Glorious Revolution. ²⁷ Though the Societies do not appear by name in Mandeville’s early work, passages like this, from Typhon, make his intent clear:

. . . For ’twas an Age, in which we read

Of hardly one good Man in twenty, An Age, that spoil’d by Peace and Plenty

Had no Reformers, under Banners/Of holy Thirst-encountring Manners

Those Champions of Sobriety, That watch to keep the World adry;

Whose Drummers teach one day in seven, That the tap-too’s the March of Heaven.

By 1709, however, Mandeville had partly turned his attentions elsewhere, shifting from the Societies to a new malcontent—Sir Isaac Bickerstaff, the pseudonymous author of The Tatler. Squire Bickerstaff, the pen name of Richard Steele, contributed to a new genre of social commentary which, through a mixture of gossip, letters, and high-brow moralizing, established cultural standards on issues as wide-ranging as dueling, public service, and the proper way to carry a cane. Bickerstaff, who humbly confessed to taking “great Pains to inspire Notions of Honour and Virtue into the People of this Kingdom, and us[ing] all gentle Methods imaginable, to bring those who are dead in Idleness, Folly, and Pleasure into Life by applying themselves to Learning, Wisdom, and Industry,” was, in Horne’s estimation, “a target Mandeville must have found too tempting to resist.” ²⁸

Temptation won out, and Mandeville addressed the censorial Bickerstaff by way of the Female Tatler, a satirical response published in alternating intervals with Steele’s original. ²⁹ Starting in 1709 and extending through the following year, Mandeville penned more than thirty essays in which he derided The Tatler and its guiding mission of being “principally intended for the Use of Politick Persons, who are so publick-spirited as to neglect their own Affairs to look into Transactions of State.” ³⁰ In The Female Tatler #74, Mandeville’s Artesia, distraught over rumors of Bickerstaff’s death, chides “this Degenerate Age” in which “nothing was minded but private Interest,” laments the difficulty of “find[ing] many that could form a Notion of Publick Spirit,” and mourns the loss of Bickerstaff:

Let us but consider the Confusion and Misery the Nation was in . . . when he was Born, to what it is now, since he has Writ. Some People care but little how others divert themselves, what Cloaths or Wigs they wear, or which way they bestow their Canes, when they have no mind to carry them in their Hands; but we that Watch and Labour for the general Benefit of Mankind, take nothing more to Heart, that what is neglected by every body else. ³¹

Mandeville nimbly recasts the public-spirited Bickerstaff as a puffed-up busybody, a meddling nag harassing his neighbors in order “to show,” in Artesia’s description of how Bickerstaff inspired her, “how much I prefer the Common Good to my own.” ³²

The Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions appeared next, in 1711. In it Mandeville treats at length the physiological dimensions of bellyaching. I examine this work more closely below; for now, it is noteworthy, first, because it speaks to Mandeville’s constancy of regard to grumbling and, second, because of the light it casts on his next major work, Free Thoughts on Religion, the Church, and National Happiness (1720). ³³ There, Mandeville describes his adopted England in terms reminiscent of the hive styled in the Fable, resolving to explain why, amidst “so many Blessings,” England emits such “discontent and grumblings” that “all Europe hear[s] us murmur in the midst of so much Ease, and greater Plenty than any Empire, State or Kingdom now enjoys.” Here, “B.M.” the social critic draws on the insights of Dr. Mandeville of Leiden, physician to hypochondriacs:

Should any State Physician behold our goodly Contenance, and having felt our low dispirited Pulse, examine into the real Cause of all our Grievances, he must infallibly pronounce the Nation hypp’d. No Woman in the height of Vapours is more whimsical in her Complaints than some of us, and melancholly Madmen have not more dismal Apprehensions of Things in the blackest Fits of Spleen, than our State Hypochondriacks are daily buzzing in our Ears. In Distempers, where the Imagination is chiefly affected, Men, without any other Remedies, may often reason themselves into Health. ³⁴

As I argue below, this should not be mistaken for mere allegory. Mandeville’s prescription to English society—self-examination and abstention from medicine—mirrors that given to the hypochondriac Misomedon in the Treatise.

This peculiar diagnosis of English ills has been noted by interpreters before, particularly those interested in Mandeville’s odd sort of Whiggism. ³⁵ His most explicitly political works, 1714’s The Mischiefs that Ought Justly to Be Apprehended from a Whig-Government and 1720’s Free Thoughts, portray those critical of the Hanoverian succession and the early years of the Walpole administration—and here Mandeville seems equally critical of Tories and Old “Country” Whigs—as malcontents, ankle-biting scribblers who presume to run the world from their coffee shop. ³⁶ These polemics were motivated less by party fervor—of which he had little, if any—and more by a sweeping skepticism toward the political efficacy of his fellow citizens. Mandeville was moderately Whiggish and perhaps moderately anti-Tory, but he was more accurately anti-participationist or, in Goldsmith’s estimation, a skeptical quietist whose “simple maxim . . . [was]: don’t complain.” ³⁷

Thus, Mandeville’s quietist politics relates substantially to his diagnosis of social and political hypochondria. At this point, a closer examination of the social context of the hypochondriac diagnosis and Mandeville’s 1714 Treatise are required. What they reveal, I argue, is a Mandeville far more ambivalent about the individual and society-wide effects of commercial prosperity than is commonly believed.

Mandeville, Hypochondria, and the Treatise

A Treatise of the Hypochondriack was first published in 1711; it was reprinted in 1715 and then reissued in 1730 in a greatly expanded second edition. By the time it appeared, Mandeville had produced the first edition of “The Grumbling Hive,” as well as Typhon, two editions of Fontaine’s fables, his first dialogue The Virgin Unmasked, and thirty-two essays in The Female Tatler. It was written, in other words, in the midst of his literary career, and was dear enough to its author to be revisited at length after Mandeville had achieved the literary fame he had long sought.

The work takes the form of a dialogue between a hypochondriac and his doctor; in a third act, the patient’s wife—herself “hypp’d”—joins them. The doctor, Philopirio (“lover of experience”), stands in for Mandeville himself, a “Foreigner and Physician” who “came to London to learn the Language,” found it agreeable, and “is like to end his days in England.” ³⁸ The patient, Misomedon, is “a Man of Learning” whose previously pleasant disposition has been ruined by his malady, the onset of which has made him “peevish, fickle, censorious, and mistrustful,” and especially “apt to break out in Rhetorical Flights . . . tak[ing] Pleasure in talking of his Ailments, and relating the History of his Distemper.” Misomedon tells us that he has spent a significant amount of time studying his ailment and medicine in general, but “is no Well-wisher to it, and bears a great Hatred to Apothecaries.” ³⁹ The great pains with which Mandeville sketches out Misomedon in full—the patient soliloquizes on his medical history for some thirty pages—reflect, on the one hand, his diagnostic emphasis on close and careful patient observation; on the other hand, however, Mandeville draws our attention to Misomedon because he represents Mandeville’s attempt to describe a new type of commercial man, one whose implications go beyond medical practice.

In fact, Mandeville’s readers would have found in Misomedon a familiar figure. The image of the hypochondriac stood at the nexus of several important trends in early-modern medicine: the near-ceaseless ingestion of medicine and eagerness to try numerous doctors; the extensive medical self-education, enabled by high levels of literacy and the comfortable, comparatively leisurely lifestyle of the bourgeois; the increased susceptibility to medical entrepreneurship and “quackery,” often manifested in the commodification of medicine (in the form of elixirs, books, and “nostrums” peddled by celebrity doctors or unqualified apothecaries) or the use of metaphor and medical theory designed to impress lay people; in short, the idea of the patient as a consumer of medicine. Hypochondria has for these reasons been called “the quintessentially bourgeois anxiety.” ⁴⁰

Before it became bourgeois, however, it was thought a distinctly English affliction. In 1672, Gideon Harvey titled his early work on hypochondria Morbus Anglicus; later, and more famously, came George Cheyne’s seminal text on nervous disorders, The English Malady (1733). Roy Porter has argued that consumption diseases like hypochondria became for early modern English physicians and literati a vehicle for expressing anxiety over early modern developments in English society—urbanization, the emergence of finance and its role in bankrolling national projects, and the material flourishing that was daily creating new commodities and new bourgeois. ⁴¹ The culprits fingered for widespread hypochondria included coal-filled air, crowded living conditions, and increasingly sedentary lifestyles; above all, however, over-consumption and excess—the English, newly flush, enjoyed too much food and drink, too much sex, too much medicine, too much thinking: in short, too much.

Hypochondria thus became the pathology of civilization itself—the sign of a society and an individual too wealthy for their own good. ⁴² In the years surrounding the 1711 publication of Mandeville’s Treatise, figures like literary critic John Dennis and physician Peter Paxton argued that the decline of English valor and health could be linked to rising levels of wealth; writes Paxton in 1701: “If we will study more to gratifie our tastes, than to satisfie our wants, and delight in nothing but Excess and Irregularities . . . it can be no wonder if we bring upon our selves an infirm habit, a wretched and unhealthful temper.” ⁴³ The most prominent proponent of this view was Cheyne, who argued in The English Malady that “when Mankind was simple, plain, honest, and frugal, there were few or no Diseases . . . Temperance, Exercise, Hunting, Labour, and Industry kept the Juices sweet, and the Solids brac’d,” and that “whoever is acquainted with the History of the Origin of Nations, and the Manner in which they liv’d, preserv’d themselves in Health, and got rid of their Diseases, while they liv’d in their Simplicity, and had not yet grown luxurious, rich and wanton, or had frequent Commerce with other Nations, and communicated with them in their Luxury and Arts, will be . . . satisfy’d of this Truth.” ⁴⁴ Cheyne’s diagnosis reappears in Robert Campbell’s widely read The London Tradesman (1747) and, more familiarly, in the first part of the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, where Rousseau argues that “most of our ills are of our own making,” and that we would be healthy if we “had retained the simple, uniform and solitary way of life prescribed to us by Nature.” ⁴⁵ For Cheyne, addressing hypochondria meant addressing the desires unleashed by luxury—it meant a moderate (even vegetarian) diet and regular exercise, and it meant moderating if not forsaking the relentless pleasures available to the leisured class.

Therefore, it comes as some surprise to find Mandeville at the forefront of the creation of hypochondriac pathology, identifying at length the bourgeois character of the disease a near-quarter-century before Cheyne. That is, the Treatise is not merely consistent with contemporaneous views of hypochondria; it was, in fact, an early and influential attempt to create and pathologize the constellation of symptoms that came to be known as hypochondria, and a remarkably methodical and thoroughgoing attempt to link this pathology causally to the rise in luxury and leisure in England. Crucially for scholars of Mandeville’s social and political thought, moreover, the Treatise is not an isolated work within his oeuvre. Beyond its being composed in the middle of his literary career; beyond his corpus-wide fondness for medical methodology and symbology; and beyond its form as a dialogue (a Mandevillian staple), the feature that marks the Treatise as unmistakably Mandevillian is its central theme, the ill effects of pride. ⁴⁶

Indeed, from the Treatise’s opening page, pride is Mandeville’s subject. It is pride that destroyed “unexperienc’d Adam, by bringing Sickness and Death upon him,” and poisons the health of mankind “by principally obstructing the Progress of the glorious Art, that should teach the Recovery as well as Preservation of Health.” ⁴⁷ Pride draws physicians away from their true craft by making “the Physician abandon the solid Observation of never-erring Nature, to take up the loose Conjectures of his own wandering Invention, that the World may admire the Fertility of his Brain,” an unflattering view of doctors—as interested in cultivating prestige as they are in curing patients—that was widely held. ⁴⁸ Mandeville excoriates his colleagues for their laziness and pretension; they are too busy with the “speculative part of physick” to attend to their patients; enchanted by their own metaphors; consumed by the latest medical fad; and negligent of the slow, laborious, hands-on art of healing. ⁴⁹ “The Arrogance of Physicians in general, and the great Knowledge which they are obliged to pretend to,” Philopirio admits, “are deservedly censur’d, and ridicul’d by all Men of Sense, that examine into the Result of their Practice.” ⁵⁰

Yet Mandeville attributes the ill state of medicine—and, in particular, the study of hypochondria—not to the doctors’ pride, but rather to that of the patients. It is the pride of the patient “that makes him in love with the Reasoning Physician, to have an Opportunity of shewing the Depth of his own Penetration.” ⁵¹ Mandeville’s hypochondriacs are complicit in their own poor treatment; they, too, regard medicine as a game at which they might prove their own intellectual acumen. This judgment is consistent with recent historical work establishing the consumerist dimensions of early modern medicine. The explosion of political and cultural pamphlet culture in England, which signaled what Habermas labeled the emergence of the public sphere, and which encouraged the sort of lay societies that drove Mandeville to fits, had been preceded by an explosion in the production and consumption of medical texts. That is, lay attempts to participate in the formation of medical knowledge were by 1711 long underway. ⁵²

To soothe the pride of both physician and patient, Mandeville prescribes the therapeutic powers of epistemological humility. Quoting the “emphatical Truth” of Italian clinician Baglivi, that “the most minute and subtile Texture, remote not only from the Sense but likewise from the Reach of human Understanding . . . is and will eternally be hid from us,” Mandeville cautions against the proud “acute Philosophers,” who deny the possibility that “Nature should have Recesses beyond the Reach of their Sagacity.” ⁵³ Unsurprisingly, the doctor Philopirio—Mandeville’s surrogate—is a paragon of humility. Throughout their conversation, he confesses his ignorance of topics with which his patient assumes he is familiar—on mathematics and other subjects, he “can only speak of it, juxta cum ignarissimis (equally with the most ignorant).” ⁵⁴ Philopirio is unimpressed with his colleagues and argues that the move to mechanistic modeling of biological processes puts the cart before the horse: “if we could undress Nature, and penetrate into the first Elements of her, we might perhaps give Reasons for those things [mechanistic explanations of biological processes], but before we can do that I shall always laugh at the Ignorance and Vanity of those that pretend to it.” ⁵⁵ Prideful physicians thus mistake speculation for real knowledge about processes that may be simply unknowable. Mandeville hopes to erode the sense of certainty that, in his view, mistakenly corrupts popular medical knowledge. This pride—shared alike by medical philosophers and Mandeville’s hypochondriac, Misomedon—actually contributes to his patient’s illness.

In the meantime, however, Misomedon is very ill indeed. The Treatise opens with a lengthy soliloquy recounting his adult life and the onset of his disease. We learn that, aged twenty, he inherited a modest sum from his father; that he studied at Oxford and left to practice law in London; briefly traveled in France and lived beyond his means; married into more money; lived somewhat profligately but was saved from ruin and placed in a position of some affluence by another large inheritance. ⁵⁶ Included in this new estate was a large library, and Misomedon quickly “became a great lover of Reading, and by degrees fell to hard Study.” Dividing his leisure between study and his conjugal responsibilities, he describes a period of some years in which “I enjoy’d abundance of satisfaction, and tho’ I had seemingly more Care upon me, pass’d away my time rather more contentedly . . . than before.” ⁵⁷ Up to that point, he notes, he had enjoyed good health.

It was at that point that he fell into “distemper”—what began as a stomach ache soon became dyspepsia and a host of other unpleasant symptoms. He describes at length a series of doctors and apothecaries whose “cures”—bleeding, purging, potions, and a variety of other procedures and concoctions—only produce more unpleasantness. ⁵⁸ Increasingly wretched and idle, he begins to study medicine himself, beginning with the classics and progressing to modern textbooks on dissection and anatomy. ⁵⁹ By the time he meets Philopirio, he is well-versed in medical literature, which he cites ostentatiously with flourishes of Latin. Yet his “Illness visibly encreas’d.” ⁶⁰ Doubling down on doctors, treatments, and his own studies, he nonetheless failed to alleviate his misery, and it was in this state that he called upon Mandeville’s Philopirio. In short, the first section of the dialogue describes how Misomedon became wealthy, acquired leisure, turned to intellectual pursuits, and subsequently—Mandeville will argue, consequently—became a hypochondriac.

The second dialogue—a subsequent house call—contains many of Mandeville’s critiques of contemporary medical methodology. Here, Philopirio’s slow discrediting of these methods has a therapeutic effect; while, in the first dialogue, he was content to let Misomedon vent at length about his illness—pausing only to reassure and offer a sympathetic comment or two—he here confronts and slowly diffuses Misomedon’s worries by unraveling the certainty of the learned approach to medicine. ⁶¹ The practices that have long distressed Misomedon—intellectually, in the case of the texts to which he has devoted himself, and physically, in the case of the physicians and apothecaries whose “cures” have only worsened matters—are exposed as fads intended to glorify their practitioners while misguiding doctors and patients alike. By the close of the second dialogue, Misomedon, acknowledging how deeply the social dimensions of medicine have compromised the care of bodies, remarks, in Mandevillian key, how the doctors of his youth “study’d dull and heavy, as well as grave and pensive Looks, gave themselves stiff and pedantick Airs on purpose to be thought Men of deep Learning; and to shew their disregard to the Fashions of the World, affected either Slovenliness in rich Cloaths, or an awkward Simplicity in their Dress, that made them remarkable.” ⁶² Philopirio has turned his patient to the view that medicine and healing, like most arts, are tragically susceptible to the effects of pride, and that these pride-driven practices and practitioners have only contributed to his illness.

By now, Misomedon is ready to hear the true cause of his illness, and Philopirio delivers. There is, of course, the “venery” of Misomedon’s youth—the “Hecktick Fire of Conjugal Fire” in which he too often indulged in the first years of his marriage at the expense of his animal spirits. ⁶³ Of more consequence, however, is “the Labour of the Brain in that five or six Years hard Study commenced soon after your Estate was so unexpectedly fallen to you.” ⁶⁴ Hypochondria, explains Philopirio, is the “Disease of the Learned,” and not because hypochondriacs spend too much time with their belly against books (thereby upsetting digestion). Rather, hypochondria strikes the learned because a man in such a position “over-charges his Head with Business, and . . . keeps the rest of his Body inactive.” ⁶⁵ These habits in turn are the product of the material conditions in which hypochondria emerges. Thus, it turns out, Misomedon’s comfortable, easy lifestyle is making him sick.

Immoderate Grief, Cares, Troubles, and Disappointments, are likewise often Concomitant Causes of this Disease; but most commonly in such, as either by Estate, Benefices, or Employments have a sufficient Revenue to make themselves easie: Men that are already provided for, or else have a Livelyhood by their Callings amply secured, are never exempt from Sollicitudes, and the keeping not only of Riches, but even moderate Possessions, is always attended with Care. Those that enjoy ’em are more at leisure to reflect, besides that their Wishes and Desires being larger, themselves are more likely to be offended at a great many Passages of Life, than People of lower Fortunes.

These lower sorts, who “labour under such a Variety of Necessities, and are so diverted with their present Circumstances,” lack the time to “think on one thing,” and thus “the Vexations of the Mind have not so great an Influence on them.” Misomedon’s grumbling is a product of his wealth and leisure; he bellyaches because he can. Philopirio’s counterintuitive conclusion is somewhat obvious by now: if his patient had never been given his estate and thereby spared from working “from loaf to loaf,” his distemper “would neither so soon, nor so severely have attack’d [him].” ⁶⁶

In the final dialogue, which takes place the following evening, Misomedon objects by noting that the brain is always in use, by everyone, even in sleep, and that a system always in use can hardly be said to deplete or replenish itself. Philopirio explains that hypochondriacs, who typically enjoy above-average intelligence, consume mental spirits more rapidly. “Wit,” he explains, “is nothing but an Aptitude of the Spirits by which they nimbly turn to, and dexterously dispose the Images that may serve our purpose”—in other words, mental acuity is a measure of how quickly one can convert potential energy into thought. Thus a “blockhead” might sit deep in thought all day without consuming an amount of spirit equal to the far shorter mental exertion of a man like Misomedon—“blockheads,” Philopirio argues, “are almost as secure from becoming hypochondriacal, as those, that cannot Write, from being pillory’d for Counterfeiting other People’s Hands.” ⁶⁷

But how can Misomedon escape his own lifestyle? Mandeville’s initial prescription is one of moderation: less study, less thinking, less medicine—after all, these activities are motivated, not by the desire to heal, but by pride. Instead, he prescribes thinking in moderation and diversion “daily with Hunting, the Tennis-court, or other brisk Exercises”—a return to more vigorous and less self-conscious way of life, and a prefiguring of Cheyne’s advice in The English Malady. ⁶⁸ Misomedon must commit to doing nothing about his ailment—at the bedside as in the coffeehouse, Mandeville proves a quietist. More importantly for those interested in Mandeville’s thought, however, this suggests that Mandeville’s quietist posture is rooted in a skepticism towards the very things—luxury and excess—he is held to champion. As wealth rises, an increasingly idle and educated class will vent its pride in new ways—in this case, through the pathology of hypochondria, in which one’s health takes on near-lyrical properties. Misomedon loves his illness—he narrativizes it and intellectualizes it; he lavishly consumes goods and services in its name; he makes of it his life’s project. Yet, Mandeville insists, these prideful acts should not be construed as even incidentally related to the art of healing—they are, in fact, an illness Misomedon inflicts on himself.

Not just on himself, it turns out. With the introduction of Polytheca, Misomedon’s wife, in the third dialogue, Mandeville reveals the social and political consequences of pathological grumbling—specifically, he illustrates the ways in which grumbling manifests as tatling and party fervor. Polytheca (“many drugs”) also suffers (along with their adult daughter) from hypochondria (“vapors” in women). Her arrival dramatically transforms Misomedon; gone is the polite conversationalist of the previous three-hundred pages, and here is a bitter and mean-spirited husband. He ridicules his wife’s taste for apothecaries (“design’d to be . . . Servants” of real physicians), mocks her swoons and fits, and questions the seriousness of her illness (“I know that sometimes she is very bad, but she is seldom constipated, and the least Laxative in the world moves her. I can’t think but the greatest Part of her Distemper is Fancy”). ⁶⁹ His attempts to acclaim academic physicians by discrediting apothecaries—whose chief sin seems to be the fact that his wife prefers them over trained physicians—make clear that Misomedon desires to prove his own value as a scholar of medicine and a partisan of the elite medicological class. “A Physician,” he argues, “is brought up among Gentlemen, and from the most early beginning of his Studies is treated [as such] . . . he is ever taught to direct his Labours to a noble End, the Godlike Office of restoring the Afflicted”; the apothecary, on the other hand, “commencing with the servile Drudgery of a Foot-boy, is bred in a paultry Shop.” ⁷⁰ Exasperated by his wife’s objections on behalf of her apothecary, he cites textual authority, “the Work of an eminent Physician, Dr. Pit, who, for the Good of the Publick, has shewn the vast Difference” between druggists (who merely follow physicians’ orders) and apothecaries; surely Polytheca could see reason if she “give [her] self the Trouble of reading this little Book.” ⁷¹ Polytheca, like many of Mandeville’s female characters, is perceptive—she points out how embarrassed Misomedon was when he discovered that he could not read the Latin in her apothecary’s receipt. ⁷²

Polytheca recognizes with Philopirio that there is far more at stake here than physiology. Misomedon’s condition has inflamed his pride at least as much as his stomach—he has become an eager partisan, caught up in disputes over apothecaries and texts. His health has become another thing to take sides over, an activity for which he shows great enthusiasm throughout the text. Like the coffeehouse scribblers, coming to blows over parties and policies they understand only very dimly, Misomedon berates his own wife over distinctions and theories about which he knows vanishingly little.

If grumbling makes him a foolish partisan, it likewise makes him the most common of Mandevillian characters: a hypocrite. Exasperated and made physically ill by her husband’s assaults, Polytheca withdraws. Afterwards, Misomedon continues his attack:

How strangely can a Distemper alter People for the worse! She was once the gayest-temper’d and most obliging Woman in the world, and now she nothing but thwarts and contradicts me: I did expect it would put her into the Vapours, if I spoke more against the Apothecaries than she could answer. ⁷³

Misomedon’s hypocrisy is staggering, and Philopirio chides him: “Whilst you speak of your Lady’s Distemper, and the Change it has made in her, I doubt you forget, that you have likewise one of your own, of which you have confess’d the same.” ⁷⁴ Later, after Misomedon admits that he sometimes consults textbooks in order to prove his wife’s illness is faked, Philopirio chides him again, observing “that People troubled with either Hypo, or Vapours, to a considerable degree, never think others so bad as themselves, and yet are always wonderfully offended, if their own Distemper be any ways slighted.” ⁷⁵

This hypochondriac bellicosity extends beyond his marriage. Misomedon confesses that, upon seeing a friend in good health—one insolent enough to exclaim cheerily “Well, Misomedon, how goes the Hypo?”—he must restrain himself from violence (“quod vix a manibus me temperaverim,” “That I could scarce keep my Hands to my self”). ⁷⁶ Those who do not suffer as he does—who do not grumble with him—insult his pride, and are thereby guilty either of thoughtlessness (his carefree friend) or dissembling (his wife). Grumbling, like tatling, is the vehicle through which we vent our pride onto others, through which we ignore our own faults to focus cruelly on those around us. In addition to moderation in diet and exercise, Misomedon must finally recognize that he is the cause of his own misery—that, as Mandeville writes in his final advice to the English in Free Thoughts, personal and national happiness requires one “to have both the Will and Capacity of distinguishing between the Evils that befall us from the Faults of others, and those we suffer on the Score of our own.” ⁷⁷

Conclusion

By now it should be clear that Mandeville’s references in 1720’s Free Thoughts to “our State Hypochondriacks” are no idle turns of phrase. In fact, the argument of the final chapter of Free Thoughts, “Of National Happiness,” parallels that found in the Treatise, with the English body politic standing in for Misomedon. As with the wealthy hypochondriac, it is “undeniable” that Britain enjoys an enviable position in Europe—its “well stor’d Magazine of Native Blessings” includes the protection of the sea, the bountifulness of its soil and moderate climate, the character of its people, the quality of its arts, and the “most substantial Blessing,” its legal and political institutions. ⁷⁸ Yet, Albion is not content. Given these favorable material circumstances, “what hinders us from being happy”? What spurs these “State Hypochondriacks . . . daily buzzing in our Ears”? ⁷⁹

As with Misomedon’s distemper, the problem lies with our “Imagination,” the “groundless Jealousy and pannick Fears” that arise as we survey our social and political lives. As in the Treatise, where Philopirio soothed Misomedon’s overactive imagination by methodically deflating his rationalist medical pretensions, Mandeville in Free Thoughts mollifies the English imagination by illustrating the impenetrability of an organism as infinitely subtle and complex as the political order of a modern civil society. Focusing here on the ever-contentious question of the character of “Courts and Ministers,” he helps his reader to “think freely” and thus “dare to examine and boldly look into the Face of Things” as they really are. ⁸⁰ Slowly, he explains why ambitious men are so frequently found and even required at court, and why, conversely, good and honest men are so rarely courtiers; he identifies the insuperable difficulties of knowing “a good Man from a bad one” and of identifying the true motive behind a given action; he illuminates the dizzying complexity of court activity within the British legal and political structure; and, most importantly, he cautions his readers to be wary of the insurmountable prejudice human observers bring to any investigation. ⁸¹

And, as with the hypochondriac Misomedon, England’s political grumblers cause meaningless but painful conflict. Despite the overwhelming complexity of the political order, grumblers organize themselves into parties that “furnish them . . . with frequent Opportunities of shewing their Wit, Honour, Steddiness, Intelligence, and Reading,” and in which “trifling Disputes daily produce substantial Enmities.” Party fervor makes a grumbler “serious and vehement to maintain a Cause, which . . . he is conscious he knows nothing of” and manufacture enemies “such as despise him, and would not dirty their Shoes to save him from hanging.” Party, the political manifestation of pride, “causes . . . a thousand Disquiets for nothing.” ⁸²

This analysis of party follows Free Thought’s treatment of religious schism, in which Mandeville slowly unwinds the doctrinal and ecclesiological disputes that animated modern religious controversies in Britain. His theory of schism parallels that found in his discussion of political and medicological dispute: despite the abiding uncertainty that attends religious questions, and despite the fact that dogmatic conflict almost always results from historical accident, pride tempts religious partisans—especially priests (“monsters of stink and darkness”)—into seizing these disagreements for their own gain and glory. As a result, Christianity is corrupted and its practices put in the service of schism, persecution, and even civil unrest. ⁸³ Religious discontent begins when pride exploits the ignorance that characterizes such complex and ultimately unknowable subjects, and this discontent is amplified and directed outward through the conductor of faction.

The closing paragraphs of the Free Thoughts further underscore the parallels with the Treatise’s diagnosis of hypochondria. “The greatest part of [Britain’s] complaints” are “frivolous and unreasonable,” yet are nonetheless the “faults” that prevent the British, “in the fruition of so many native Blessings,” from “as much Happiness as the Condition of Mortals is susceptible of.” And from whom do these complaints issue? From those who, “for want of Application to Business . . . [and] that Industry and Vigilance [such] Callings require,” are reduced to “Sloth, Supineness or Indolence.” These men—“generally [those] who complain most of Mismanagements in publick Affairs”—are too prideful to reflect on the true cause of their idleness and failure “to thrive in the World”; instead, they turn to grumbling and, “by their constant Murmurs against Ministries and Governments, keep off the Chagreen they would feel, should they reflect on the real Cause of their Misfortunes.” ⁸⁴

In this way, Mandeville’s pathology of grumbling brings to light an unexpected dimension of consumerism’s first and orneriest defender—an anxiety, informed by his experience treating hypochondria, of the potentially debilitating effects of luxury and prosperity. As his English compatriots filled their leisure time with the pamphlet and coffeehouse culture of London, reading and talking and directing the affairs of the world over coffee and beer, they would fall into bellyaching, misery, self-pity, and, finally, needless partyism and animosity toward their fellow citizens.

Finally, if hypochondria is Mandeville’s diagnosis, what is his prescription? To be clear, he does not recommend, in anticipation of Rousseau, a full-scale retreat or transformation of commercial society—if the Fable demonstrates anything, it is that the benefits of luxury outweigh its costs. “All Lovers of their Country, and even the best of Men, have always wish’d and pray’d for Wealth and Power, with the Encrease of Knowledge to the Nations they belong’d to,” Philopirio tells Misomedon in the Treatise, “and they have no sooner enjoy’d what they have wish’d for, but they have always grumbled and shew’d themselves impatient to bear those Evils which ever were and ever will be the Consequences of those Blessings in all large and flourishing Societies.” ⁸⁵ It is to the “impatience” with which his compatriots confront the ills attendant to prosperity that Mandeville addresses himself; it is this “impatience,” borne from pride and leisure, that yields grumbling.

Thus, unsurprisingly, his prescription to England’s discontents echoes that given to Misomedon in the Treatise. To begin with, he recommends political quietism based on skepticism of both the motivations of political actors and the depths of our own moral and empirical insights, for “Human Understanding is too shallow to foresee the Result of what is subject to many Variations.” ⁸⁶ This advice to approach politics with utmost caution and modesty, and to avoid intervening in processes not fully known, resembles the regimen Philopirio prescribes to Misomedon and Polytheca: a simple diet, regular exercise, and a greatly chastened routine of pharmaceuticals and medical procedures. ⁸⁷

More than this, however, Mandeville prescribes a more personal and, arguably, classically influenced remedy to grumblers everywhere. After Misomedon runs off his long-suffering wife, Philopirio admonishes him by quoting a passage from Horace: “denique te ipsum Concute”—“At last look into and examine your self.” ⁸⁸ This is a remedy Mandeville offers consistently to grumblers—in Free Thoughts, which seeks to provide its readers “both the Will and Capacity of distinguishing between the Evils that befall us from the Faults of others, and those we suffer on the Score of our own” and which offers the following as its “Aim”: “to make Men penetrate into their own Consciences, and by searching without Flattery into the true Motives of their Actions, learn to know themselves.” ⁸⁹ Likewise in the preface to the Fable, where he defines his audience as “the People, who continually find fault with others, by reading them, [and who] would be taught to look at home, and examining their own Consciences, be made asham’d of always railing at what they are more or less guilty of themselves.” ⁹⁰ Ironically, luxury’s great defender turns to a classical maxim—“know thyself,” a thread pulled through Socrates, Montaigne, and Hobbes—to remedy the modern plight he diagnoses.

Yet one might reasonably ask whether Misomedon truly suffers from a lack of self-knowledge—indeed, as we have seen, his near-obsession with self-examination contributed to his misery. ⁹¹ On the one hand, Mandeville’s meaning is relatively straightforward—examining oneself carefully and skeptically will, by revealing one’s own less-than-pure motives, encourage a more tolerant attitude towards others. On the other hand, however, such thorough self-examination may require precisely the sort of over-intellectualizing and navel-gazing that render the leisured class more susceptible to distemper. Ultimately, Mandeville does not raise this question, but one way of answering draws inspiration from a source very dear to the Dutch doctor—the stomach. Confronted in the Treatise by an exasperated Misomedon searching for “certainty” and a clear “Rule” in the treatment of his illness, Philopirio suggests that “every body ought to consult his Stomach, and whatever agrees with that perfectly well, is wholesome for him, whilst it continues to do so.” Mandeville, through Philopirio, “advise[s] every body to live up to the Belief” that “the Stomach . . . is the Conscience of the Body.” ⁹² The stomach, of course, is an organ whose motives are mysterious and whose values are thoroughly subjective; it is not subject to rational control or learned instruction, and its tastes are not mistaken for universal judgments. In short, the stomach likes what it likes; it is deeply unpretentious. Misomedon, impatient to remedy his initial bouts of illness brought on by luxury, corrupted his stomach in making it serve the purposes of his intellectual pride; likewise, England’s “buzzing” hypochondriacs render the country unable to find contentment amidst unrivaled prosperity. Just as Misomedon must be taught to please his stomach without inflaming his disorder, so London’s discontents must be taught to consume their bountiful material and intellectual culture without inflaming their pride.