Ideas
Mandeville's philosophy gave great offence at the time, and has always been stigmatized as false, cynical and degrading. His main thesis is that the actions of men cannot be divided into lower and higher. The higher life of man is a mere fiction introduced by philosophers and rulers to simplify government and the relations of society. In fact, virtue (which he defined as "every performance by which man, contrary to the impulse of nature, should endeavour the benefit of others, or the conquest of his own passions, out of a rational ambition of being good") is actually detrimental to the state in its commercial and intellectual progress. This is because it is the vices (i.e., the self-regarding actions of men) which alone, by means of inventions and the circulation of capital (economics) in connection with luxurious living, stimulate society into action and progress.
Read more about this topic: Bernard Mandeville
Famous quotes containing the word ideas:
“Young children...are often uninterested in conversation It is not that they don’t have ideas and feelings, or need to express them to others It is simply that as one eight-year-old boy once told me, “Talking is okay, but I don’t like to do it all the time the way grown-ups do; I guess you have to develop the habit.””
—Robert Coles (20th century)
“That neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, exist without the mind, is what every body will allow.”
—George Berkeley (1685–1753)
“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)