Bernard Mandeville e l’economia politica: commercio, lusso e libertà

In this paper I deal with Bernard Mandeville's views on political economy, in order to reconstruct his overall perspectives on individual moral psychology and on the topic of luxury. First, I discuss Mandeville's views on labour, wages, political management and the balance of trade against the background of contemporary paradigms of 'mercantilism' and 'free trade'. I argue that he freely moved between these categories, and I also contend that they can not be taken as a rigid orthodoxy, which would prevent a real historical recovery of their meaning. Then I turn to his discussion of luxury. I maintain that this aspect of Mandeville's thought can not be reduced to a paradoxical provocation (however brilliant), but must be reconstructed along a three-dimensional framework, because Mandeville elaborated the relative difference between needs and desires in three contexts. This framework was not explicitly stated by Mandeville, but can be recosntructed through a close reading of his writings: first, an international context, in which certain countries specialised in exporting, whereas others in consuming, luxury goods; secondly, a social context, in which the differentiation between luxuries and wants mirrors a social hierarchy; and finally an evolutionary dimension, in which the consumption of luxury goods helps spread benefits to all social ranks in the next generations. In a final section I reconsider the classic question of Mandeville's role in the growth of political economy and his alledged theory of 'possessive individualism' coupled with classical liberalism. I disagree with those reconstructions that take for granted the attendant rise of free trade, individualism and liberalism. Mandeville is a crucial case in point for showing how economic arguments were still strictly interwoven with insights in moral psychology, party politics and social criticism.