Simulation and Dissimulation. Mandeville’s Satirical View of Commercial Society

Abstract

It is our belief that a theoretical reading of Bernard Mandeville’s Work without the consideration of the satirical elements that compose it, is an incomplete and equivocal reading, and may also lead to a distorted view of Mandeville’s social thought. Satirical forms have at their core a peculiar discursive expressiveness that distinguishes them from other narrative genres. It is a double expressiveness because its moral content, almost always supported by the binomium “virtue-vice”, has firstly, as social referent, the character of human beings. The caricature arises therefore inevitable. It is precisely this second aspect that is very current in the satirical purpose of Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees. As a symptom of commercial society, Mandeville realizes the enormous moral incongruity – “hypocrisy”, according to the author – between action and expression, between individual practices and moral defense of collective values. He begins by satirizing man’s hypocritical moralist discourse, since it corresponds to an ethics without empirical content, without any equivalence in terms of man’s individual action in the modern society. Thus, our main goal is to analyze the Mandevillean fundamentals of the relationship between satirical discourse and moral transparency. To a certain extent, it seems that the function of modern satire, as it is assumed by Mandeville, does not imply a corrective purpose, but functions for humans only as therapeutic function.