At the time, the book was considered scandalous, being understood as an attack on
Christian virtues. The 1723 edition gained a notoriety that previous editions had not, and caused debate among men of letters throughout the eighteenth century. The popularity of the second edition in 1723 in particular has been attributed to the collapse of the
South Sea Bubble a few years earlier. For those investors who had lost money in the collapse and related fraud, Mandeville's pronouncements about private vice leading to public benefit would have been infuriating. The book was vigorously combatted by, among others, the philosopher
George Berkeley and the priest
William Law. Berkeley attacked it in the second dialogue of his
Alciphron (1732). The 1723 edition was
presented as a nuisance by the Grand Jury of
Middlesex, who proclaimed that the purpose of the
Fable was to "run down Religion and Virtue as prejudicial to Society, and detrimental to the State; and to recommend Luxury, Avarice, Pride, and all vices, as being necessary to
Public Welfare, and not tending to the Destruction of the Constitution". In the rhetoric of the presentment, Mandeville saw the influence of the
Society for the Reformation of Manners. The book was also denounced in the
London Journal. Other writers attacked the
Fable, notably
Archibald Campbell (1691–1756) in his
Aretelogia.
Francis Hutcheson also denounced Mandeville, initially declaring the
Fable to be "unanswerable"―that is, too absurd for comment. Hutcheson argued that pleasure consisted in "affection to fellow creatures", and not the hedonistic pursuit of bodily pleasures. He also disagreed with Mandeville's notion of
luxury, which he believed depended on too austere a notion of virtue. The modern economist
John Maynard Keynes noted that "only one man is recorded as having spoken a good word for it, namely
Dr. Johnson, who declared that it did not puzzle him, but 'opened his eyes into real life very much'."
Adam Smith expressed his disapproval of
The Fable of the Bees in Part VII, Section II of his
Theory of Moral Sentiments. The reason that Smith heavily criticizes Mandeville is that Mandeville mistakes greed as a part of self-interest. Smith claims that, in reality, greed and the self-interest he comments on in the
Wealth of Nations are separate concepts that affect the market very differently. The book reached Denmark by 1748, where a major Scandinavian writer of the period,
Ludvig Holberg (1684–1754), offered a new critique of the
Fable—one that did not centre on "ethical considerations or Christian dogma". Instead, Holberg questioned Mandeville's assumptions about the constitution of a good or flourishing society: "the question is whether or not a society can be called luxurious in which citizens amass great wealth which is theirs to use while others live in the deepest poverty. Such is the general condition in all the so-called flourishing cities which are reputed to be the crown jewels of the earth." Holberg rejected Mandeville's ideas about human nature—that such unequal states are inevitable because humans have an animal-like or corrupt nature—by offering the example of
Sparta, the Ancient Greek city-state. The people of Sparta were said to have rigorous, immaterialistic ideals, and Holberg wrote that Sparta was strong because of this system of virtue: "She was free from internal unrest because there was no material wealth to give rise to quarrels. She was respected and honored for her impartiality and justice. She achieved dominion over the other Greeks simply because she rejected dominion."
Jean-Jacques Rousseau commented on the
Fable in his
Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men (1754): Mandeville sensed very well that even with all their morality men would never have been anything but monsters if nature had not given them pity in support of reason; but he did not see that from this quality alone flow all the social virtues he wants to question in men. In fact, what are generosity, clemency, humanity, if not pity applied to the weak, to the guilty, to the human species in general?Mandeville sees greed as “beneficial to the public” and he denies men of all social virtues. It is on this latter point that Rousseau counters Mandeville. Despite some overlap between Rousseau's work on self-reliance and Mandeville's ideas, Rousseau identifies that virtues are applications of natural pity: "for is desiring that someone not suffer anything other than desiring to be happy?" Assuming with the ascetics that human desires were essentially evil and therefore produced 'private vices' and assuming with the common view that wealth was a 'public benefit', he easily showed that all civilization implied the development of vicious propensities. ==Analysis==