Abstract
Autore:
Cubeddu Raimondo
Titolo:
"Considerazioni su Mandeville e sulla scontentezza dell’alveare"
Mandeville famously tried to exclude religion from his
theoretical framework. Within the Commercial Society, he
does not pose moral limits to individual needs and to their
satisfactions, and assumes that deep disagreement and
conflict can be reduced through abundance. Such theoretical
project is undermined by the existence of envy: a passion
against which any fights are bound to fail. Notwithstanding
Mandeville’s failure, his relevance - and, thus, his
affinity with Lucretius - consists in resisting to the
temptation of many political philosophers both to fight the
terror generated by religion through politics, and, to
discard what may be defined as Mandeville’s law, according
to which: ’any action may generate consequences largely
unrelated to its initial motivations’ (Mandeville’s law was
later developed by ‘Austrians’). Such consequences other
than being often unrelated to agents’ initial motivations
may also positively or negatively affect social orders.
Among those it is worth mentioning the social benefits
arising out of individual vices, the attempts to improve
human condition through laws, the outcomes of the miracle
asked by the bees to Jupiter, the benefits of flattery in
mitigating the virulence of passions, the relationship
between Dutch’s interests and the birth of capitalism, the
relationship between personal greed, luxury and social
welfare. The question I try to answer within this article
asks what are the roles of reason, knowledge or experience
in theorizing around political orders, in a world that is
ultimately subject to Mandeville’s law and to continuos
change.
