Hypothetical Thought in Mandeville’s Deconstructive Genealogy of Sociability

Abstract

In the critique he makes of commercial society, Bernard Mandeville often resorts to the use of conjectures about the origins of human nature, and it may even be said that without them, it would not be possible to substantiate the reasons for such critique. Two of the main targets of this paper are, precisely, to show how Mandeville’s hypothetical thought supports the critical observation that eighteenth-century society makes about itself, and, at a pure- ly theoretical level, to point out the similarities and differences that bind it to the so-called “conjectural history”.