“LIBERALISM” – Social Ecology ABC

“Where property is sufficiently protected, it would be easier to live without money than without poor people, because otherwise who would do the work.”

“The vast majority must remain both ignorant and poor.”

An early champion of market liberalism, Bernard de Mandeville (1670-1733) at least had the merit of clearly and unhypocritically revealing the foundations of this ideology and his conception of society. In his work The Fable of the Bees, originally published in 1705, Mandeville outlines this vision of humanity as being guided essentially by greed, deceit and selfishness. The most skilled and competent in these matters form a privileged class living at the expense of the great mass of the population, whose only function and purpose is to serve them. A valiant forerunner, he is also the inventor of the trickle-down theory, according to which the opulence of the upper classes would eventually reach some of the lower classes. A French advocate of this theory and of contemporary neoliberalism has recently revived it, but without convincing many people.

The book caused a scandal when it was published in London, then the capital of rapidly expanding capitalism; the class he praised found this brutal frankness completely unexpected and even annoying. It did, however, set a precedent, as it inspired such renowned liberal theorists as Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek and even Keynes.

Marx also identified this source in “Das Kapital”, quoting it several times.

It is worth noting that Mandeville could not conceive of his “liberalism” existing without the complicity of the sovereign power of the State, an indispensable condition for the protection of property. In this, too, he was less hypocritical than his successors in this ideology of the market economy, a term that its promoters now prefer to use as being more neutral and less worrying.

Translated by TerKo with the help of a free translation tool.