The Fable of the Bees

Bernard Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees is a wickedly ingenious satire on the uneasy bargain between private vice and public prosperity. At its center is the famous poem The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn'd Honest, first published as a controversial moral allegory about a thriving bee society whose wealth, order, and power depend on fraud, vanity, luxury, ambition, and self-interest. When the bees demand honesty, their world collapses: lawsuits disappear, trades fail, industries wither, and the hive sinks into poverty, revealing how deeply commerce, labor, government, and national greatness had relied on the very corruption they condemned. Framed by Mandeville's combative preface and wide-ranging reflections on charity schools, society, government, religion, learning, manners, and human nature, the book argues that people are driven less by reason than by appetite, pride, and the need for praise and shame. Bold, unsettling, and relentlessly provocative, it challenges conventional morality by suggesting that civilization itself may be built on motives moralists prefer to deny. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.