The Ambivalence Of Bernard Mandeville
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Condition: Good. Jacket: No dust jacket - cloth/board in good condition. Page Condition: Good. Markings: No markings. Binding condition: Good.
Few thinkers in the history of Western philosophy have provoked as much controversy as Bernard Mandeville, the Dutch-born satirist whose scandalous The Fable of the Bees argued that private vices are the very engine of public prosperity. Hector Monro's The Ambivalence of Bernard Mandeville confronts the paradoxes at the heart of Mandeville's thought, meticulously charting the tensions between his moral cynicism and his proto-economic insights, his satirical wit and his genuine philosophical rigour, in a study that refuses to reduce one of the Enlightenment's most slippery minds to a simple caricature. Monro presents Mandeville not as a straightforward cynic or a proto-utilitarian, but as a genuinely divided thinker whose contradictions are themselves historically revealing. Written with scholarly precision and an eye for intellectual irony, this work illuminates how Mandeville's ideas rippled forward into the moral philosophy of Hume, the economics of Adam Smith, and beyond — leaving the reader to wonder whether the ambivalence Monro uncovers belonged to Mandeville alone, or to modernity itself.
Author: Hector Monro
Format: Hardback
Published: 1975, Oxford University Press
Genre: Philosophy
Condition remarks:
Condition: Good. Jacket: No dust jacket - cloth/board in good condition. Page Condition: Good. Markings: No markings. Binding condition: Good.
Few thinkers in the history of Western philosophy have provoked as much controversy as Bernard Mandeville, the Dutch-born satirist whose scandalous The Fable of the Bees argued that private vices are the very engine of public prosperity. Hector Monro's The Ambivalence of Bernard Mandeville confronts the paradoxes at the heart of Mandeville's thought, meticulously charting the tensions between his moral cynicism and his proto-economic insights, his satirical wit and his genuine philosophical rigour, in a study that refuses to reduce one of the Enlightenment's most slippery minds to a simple caricature. Monro presents Mandeville not as a straightforward cynic or a proto-utilitarian, but as a genuinely divided thinker whose contradictions are themselves historically revealing. Written with scholarly precision and an eye for intellectual irony, this work illuminates how Mandeville's ideas rippled forward into the moral philosophy of Hume, the economics of Adam Smith, and beyond — leaving the reader to wonder whether the ambivalence Monro uncovers belonged to Mandeville alone, or to modernity itself.