PEAR对《The Fable of the Bees》的笔记(1)

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introduction. I. the ideological context of Mandeville's rise to fame

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thesis: "contemporary society is an aggregation of self-interested individuals necessarily bound to one another neither by their shared civic commitments nor their moral rectitude, but, paradoxically, by the tenuous bonds of envy, competition and exploitation."

II. Mandeville's project: A science of socialized man

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longings for power, esteem and sensual pleasure...driving everyone to compete for scarce satisfactions.
polities established by any realistically conceivable process of communal deliberation: absurd. Instead, stabilize the clash of escalating individual desires: only through skillful manipulation of politicians. 
greed: positive social function.
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skepticism: a person's apparent practice of Christian virtue in no way provided...indubitable information about the underlying motives....virtuous acts were rewarded by public esteem,  it was in the obvious interest of the vicious to mime the conventional signs of Christian piety in order to win the approval of their fellows. Forms of Egoism, manifested themselves according to the socially prescribed conventions of propriety amongst skilled social actors. 
virtue: "one of the masks available to fallen men in their pursuit of selfish interests, the difference between virtue and vice would have nothing to do with behavior."(*)
consequences: 
1. majority of mankind was driven by self-love...(*)"any man, atheist or believer, could make a good subject, since civil conduct required only the outward conformity to standards of propriety produced by social pressure, underwritten by law."

2. selfish, conflicting individual desires can be manipulated to political beneficial ends...just as competing social and economic interests be made to obey similar constraints.  "the seemingly anarchic tendencies of the scramble for wealth" are actually "structured social regularities attending the common pursuit of material gratification"