s on the fashionable rigor of their
doctrine but insisted on the practical impossibility of living up to it
in the absence of efficacious grace. In my interpretation, Mandeville
was both intellectually and temperamentally a "libertine" patently
putting on the mask of rigorism in order to be able at the same time to
attack the exponents of austere theological morality from their rear
while making a frontal attack on less exacting and more humanistic
systems of morality. The phenomenon was not a common one, but it was
not unique. Bourdaloue, the great seventeenth-century Jesuit preacher,
not very long before had called attention to libertines in France who
masqueraded in rigorist clothes in order to deepen the cleavages among
the members of the Church: "D'ou il arrive assez souvent, par
l'assemblage le plus bizarre et le plus monstrueux, qu'un homme qui ne
croit pas en Dieu, se porte pour defenseur du pouvoir invincible de la
grace, et devient a toute outrance le panegyriste de la plus etroite
morale."[21]

[21] "Pensees diverses sur la foi, et sur les vices opposes,"
_Oeuvres de Bourdaloue_, Paris, 1840, III. 362-363.

The _Letter to Dion_ has bearing also on another phase of Mandeville's
doctrine which is almost universally misinterpreted. Many scholars,
including economists who should know better, regard Mandeville as a
pioneer expounder of laissez-faire individualism in the economic field
and as such as an anticipator of Adam Smith. Kaye accepts this
interpretation without argument.

The evidence provided by _The Fable of the Bees_ in support of such an
interpretation is confined to these facts: Mandeville stressed the
importance of self-interest, of individual desires and ambitions, as
the driving force of socially useful economic activity; he held that a
better allocation of labor among different occupations would result, at
least in England, if left to individual determination than if regulated
or guided; he rejected some types of sumptuary legislation.

All of this, however, though required for laissez-faire doctrine, was
also consistent with mercantilism, at least of the English type. The
later exponents of laissez-faire did not invent the "economic man" who
pursued only his own interest, but inherited him from the mercantilists
and from the doctrine of original sin. English analysis of social
process had in this sense always been "individualistic," and in this
sense both mercantilism and the wide