AN ENQUIRY INTO THE CAUSES OF THE FREQUENT EXECUTIONS AT TYBURN.

Capital punishment is a historical universal — it has been practised at some point in the history of virtually all known societies and places. That is not to say, however, that it is a historical constant — the use, form, function and meaning of execution has varied greatly across different historical contexts. The treatment and understanding of the criminal corpse has differed across time and place, but it has always been a potent force and throughout its history it has been harnessed for the ends of state power, medical science and criminal justice, amongst many other things.

By examining execution and the executed body across a wide temporal and geographical span, this collection of essays provides a fresh perspective on the history of capital punishment, and in the process it seeks to add considerable detail to our knowledge of penal practice in early modern Europe, and to allow us to rethink some of the most commonly cited drivers of penal practice and change. In setting out this line of thought, this introductory chapter is divided into three main sections. First, it begins by sketching out the practice and meaning of execution and the executed body in early modern Europe as essential background context for the chapters that follow, particularly Chapters 1—5, which focus on capital punishment and the criminal corpse in a selection of European nations in the long eighteenth century.

• A Global History of Execution and the Criminal Corpse [Internet].?
• An Enquiry into the Causes of the Frequent Executions at Tyburn (1725).
• HeinOnline;

The rise and fall of aggravated forms of execution which attacked the dead criminal body thus formed an important part of the wider history of capital punishment in early modern and modern Europe. Secondly, the introduction moves on to consider a number of overarching theories which have been put forward to explain the nature and development of capital punishment in Europe across the early modern and modern eras, namely: Together these theories have highlighted social control, feelings to the sight of violence and attitudes to the body, death and the afterlife as key motors of penal practice and change.

But, we might ask, how if at all have these drivers operated within historical contexts far removed from early modern Europe, and what does this suggest, by extension, about the wider applicability of our current overarching explanations of change?

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Chapters 6—9, which range beyond the bounds of early modern Europe, offer some fascinating insights on this subject. The introduction then concludes by introducing each chapter individually and highlighting some of the interconnections and insights which they together provide. A comprehensive account of execution and the executed body in Europe between the late Middle Ages and the nineteenth century is beyond the scope of this Introduction. What I intend to do, rather, is to broadly sketch out the extent to which capital punishment and the desecration of the criminal corpse was put into practice, the various forms that it took, the functions that it was intended to fulfil, the cultural meaning that it held for contemporaries, and how this changed over time, paying particular attention to England, the Netherlands, Germany and France.

My aim is to provide essential background context for Chapters 1—5 in this volume, by placing the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries within the wider perspective of capital punishment in the early modern period as a whole, and to draw out some of the major themes explored in the chapters that follow. A number of distinctive features mark out executions and the treatment of the criminal corpse in the long eighteenth century from the centuries immediately preceding it, and these need to be highlighted. How frequently was capital punishment carried out in early modern Europe, and how did this change over time?

Whilst the evidence is patchy, a broad pattern can be identified across much of Western Europe. Levels of execution fluctuated greatly, but not in any simple or linear way. Most notably, in relation to Chapters 1—5 in this volume, the eighteenth century witnessed something of a resurgence in execution rates. By no means did this reach the astronomical levels of the later sixteenth century, when numbers appear to have peaked, but the frequency with which offenders were being put to death in Western Europe in the eighteenth century was greater than the later seventeenth century.

In the later medieval period, so far as we can tell, given the lack of available sources and detailed research so far undertaken, levels of capital punishment appear to have been relatively low. Just thirteen people were hanged for felony in Warwickshire between and , a situation which seems to be indicative of the pattern in England more widely, marked as it was by extremely low rates of conviction for capital offences.

It is in evidence for several English counties, including the palatinate jurisdictions of Chester and Lancaster, for which the court records are relatively intact. In Chester, about nine offenders were being put to death each year in the s, rising to an annual average of nearly seventeen in the s. Thereafter, however, execution levels fell precipitously, halving in the s and falling to a total of just ten executions in the first decade of the eighteenth century, a pattern that was, according to J.

By the end of the seventeenth century levels of execution in both territories were about 15 per cent of what they had been a hundred years earlier. At the beginning of the eighteenth century then, levels of execution were running at historically low levels, certainly compared with recent previous centuries. Yet in many parts of Western Europe, execution levels and the severity of the capital sanctions meted out to offenders witnessed something of a resurgence in the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, particularly at times of concern about social disorder, political insurgency or criminality.

In London, levels of execution increased significantly during post-war panics about crime, such as in the s, s and s. Aggravations to decapitation by the sword continued in significant numbers in Nuremberg throughout the period, but they made up a greater percentage of all the executions actually carried out in the early eighteenth century than in the later sixteenth century. The years to saw a substantial increase in the number of executions carried out in Amsterdam.

Nearly twice as many offenders were put to death there in the years —50 as against the previous fifty years The late Middle Ages to the nineteenth century also witnessed significant changes in the form of executions and the punishments that were inflicted upon the criminal corpse. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in particular saw a conspicuous shift towards aggravated forms of execution which attacked the dead, rather than the live, criminal body.

In short, if the ruling authorities of eighteenth-century Europe were increasingly unwilling to publicly inflict the kinds of pre-mortem, physical torments which had come to prominence in the sixteenth century, they were, however, willing to impose similar and other sanctions upon the criminal corpse. Post-mortem punishments continued to be enacted, and in some respects were even extended, throughout the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Brutal forms of execution which inflicted physical pain and attacked the dead criminal body had long existed, and were further extended in the sixteenth century.

In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, treason was increasingly legislated against, punished with forms of post-mortem mutilation such as the spiking of severed heads and the exposure of dismembered body parts. For nobles, decapitation either by the sword or the axe was the norm, since this was believed to be the most honourable and mildest form of execution.

Finally, those convicted of high treason were drawn to the place of execution on a hurdle, and there to be hung by the neck, cut down alive and subjected to a brutal evisceration, beheading and quartering. This extensive range of pre-mortem torments, put to their greatest use in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were also often followed by practices which exposed the executed body to further ignominious and terrifying forms of punishment.

In the course of the seventeenth century, many of the pre-mortem, physical torments of capital punishment particularly in their most aggravated forms were largely abandoned or at least mitigated. Burning at the stake was enacted for the last time in Amsterdam in , whilst in Germany hanging, drowning and burial alive were gradually dropped, such that decapitation by the sword had become the overwhelmingly predominant form of execution there by the beginning of the eighteenth century.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the burnings, breakings and dismemberments came to fall with few exceptions upon the dead, rather than the live, criminal body. Indeed, the seventeenth-century mitigations of the pain inflicted at the gallows by no means entailed an end to the post-mortem violation of the dead criminal body.

Judicial penalties which attacked the criminal corpse continued, and were in some respects extended, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the first instance, long-practised forms of execution which aimed to heap further ignominy on the condemned continued to be put in force. Crime-scene executions, as Steve Poole demonstrates in Chapter 2, continued to be used on an ad hoc basis in England throughout the period. The early eighteenth century in particular saw calls for, and moves towards, greater severity in the penal system.

Frequent calls were made in England in the first half of the eighteenth century for more fearsome deterrents, including an extension to the use of burning, gibbeting and whipping before execution. The Netherlands too saw a notable increase in judicial severity in the early eighteenth century. As noted above, the total number of executions performed in Amsterdam was nearly twice as high in the period —50 compared to the previous 50 years, and of these, prolonged forms of the death penalty became far more frequent. Four offenders were executed by breaking on the wheel in the years —, compared to some 36 offenders in the period —50, a nine-fold increase.

A further and final example of the wider shift towards post-mortem penalties in eighteenth-century Europe is the rise of punitive dissection. Indeed, the eighteenth century represents the era of post-execution dissection in Europe. The anatomisation of executed offenders was embraced most emphatically in England, although it was also practised in several other Western nations. The Murder Act was adopted in colonial America, but here dissection remained the exception rather than the rule for executed murderers. After independence, many states passed statutes giving judges the discretionary power to include dissection in sentences for murder including New York in , New Jersey in and Maine in What did the states of early modern Europe aim to achieve through executions and attacks on the executed body?

As Garland argues, the distinctive political and penological context of early modern Europe meant that capital punishment was absolutely central to the emergent states with respect to two functions in particular — state power and crime control. Through brutally violent and spectacular executions, emergent sovereign states physically inscribed their power on to the bodies of those put to death.

But it was also the product of a strongly held belief in the efficacy of making examples and of deterrence by terror. The deterrent capacity of post-mortem punishment was frequently expressed throughout the early modern period and into the nineteenth century. The orders made by various rulers in the eighteenth century for offenders to be secretly strangled before being broken on the wheel demonstrated the growing conception that whilst capital punishment should not inflict undue physical suffering, it should nonetheless still be a terrifying spectacle.

Even after the apparent decriminalisation of suicide in , individuals who took their own lives in Amsterdam continued to be dragged to the gallows and there hung up with their chins resting on a fork-shaped stake. Executions, which normally took place in towns, were primarily meant as an example to the inhabitants. Corpses blown off the gallows by the wind were regularly re-hung, and in various places harnesses were used to fasten a corpse which had been broken on the wheel in an upright position.

Another key function of execution and punishment of the executed body was the attempt to shame, dishonour and socially outcast the offender. In an attempt to remove the shameful sight and to grant their relative a decent burial, families resorted to petitioning the authorities for taking down the body hanging in chains, or even stealing the corpse away without authorisation to do so. Finally, utility emerges as an additional function of the punishment of the criminal corpse, particularly with the rise of punitive dissection in the eighteenth century.

The cadavers of executed offenders proved to be a useful — although certainly limited — source of bodies for anatomists. In sum, therefore, executions and the punishment of the executed body served a range of functions.

Bernard Mandeville

The dead criminal body was harnessed for a variety of sometimes competing, but at other times complementary, ends. Why was the punishment of the executed body believed to be a terrifying and shameful fate that could serve the ends of state authority and crime control? In order to address this question we need to unravel some of the social and cultural meanings which were attached to the criminal corpse and to the body, death and the afterlife more generally in early modern Europe. A note of caution is needed here. For although we have a detailed knowledge of the practice of capital punishment in this period, uncovering the underlying attitudes to execution and the executed body presents a much more difficult task.

Our evidence is overwhelmingly of what the ruling elite thought of popular beliefs towards post-mortem punishment, much less popular belief itself, or the views of those who actually suffered such punishment.

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The voices of the criminals who suffered and of the crowd who witnessed such spectacles are almost always at one remove. Consequently, our understanding of how and why indeed, even if the punishment of the criminal corpse fulfilled its intended functions is fragmentary at best. For the most part, of course, the terror of post-mortem punishments worked through feelings other than physical pain.

Yet there was one important exception to this: The fear elicited by post-mortem punishments was therefore at least in part that it might in fact involve a physically painful end. But the fear and dishonour also resulted from popular understandings of death and the afterlife — a belief that torments could indeed extend beyond the final breath of life. Significant importance was placed on customary forms of burial, as it was too on bodily integrity after death.

An Enquiry into the Causes of the Frequent Executions at Tyburn () from Project Gutenberg

But none of this is to suggest, of course, that the message which the authorities intended offenders or the crowd to take from the punishment of the criminal corpse was inevitably internalised. Indeed, there has been some debate amongst historians about the behaviour of execution crowds and the extent to which capital punishment successfully imparted its intended messages more generally. In late eighteenth-century New York, moreover, the discovered remains of an executed offender dissected by anatomists were put on show in order to arouse popular indignation.

Ironically, the Act reawakened popular repugnance towards dissection by coupling it with the dramaturgy of eighteenth-century punishment. Thomas Roberts was apparently unmoved by the sentence of hanging and dissection pronounced on him at the Gloucester assizes in , and shortly before his death in , the Massachusetts rapist Bryan Sheehen actually sold his body to a Dr Kast of Salem for dissection.

The public exposure and punishment of the executed body had thus been a prominent feature of capital punishment in Europe since at least the later Middle Ages. A declaration of the Prussian Ministry of Justice in likewise ceased the practice of exposing the bodies of the condemned, an order that was shortly followed in most other German states, such that by the s the post-mortem exhibiting of executed cadavers had effectively been abandoned.

A number of explanations have been put forward to explain these changes in the punishment of the criminal corpse and the wider changes in execution practice that took place in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is to such explanations — including the factors most commonly identified as drivers of penal practice — that we now turn.

The explanations put forward have formed part of wider, overarching metanarratives which have sought to provide reasons for the nature of penal practice in early modern Europe and for the radical changes which took place in the transition to modern, Western penal systems, not least the disappearance of public executions and the rise of imprisonment. Such metanarratives have thus been established on the penal history of Europe, but more broadly they offer explanations which might be applied to other historical contexts.

My aim in this section is not to weigh up the respective merits or limitations of these competing grand theories, nor to give a definitive conclusion as to the cause s of change. Following in the footsteps of Michel Foucault and his influential work Discipline and Punish first published in French in , and translated into English in , we might first of all see the abandonment of the punishment of the criminal corpse and the wider movement away from public execution in the nineteenth century as part of a shift in the exercise of power and technologies of social control.

But by the mid-eighteenth century, and demonstrated most emphatically by reactions to the brutal execution of Damiens in for attempted regicide, the authorities no longer believed that such spectacles of unbearable suffering were effective as a deterrent. The crowd no longer took the correct message from the public infliction of pain on the body.

Others have, however, taken a more positive view of such sentiments, seeing them as representative of a genuine, longterm development in sensibilities which was as much the cause and, contrary to Foucault, not just the consequence of penal change. In this interpretation, the decline in penal suffering and the publicity of punishment was the product of a growing aversion to the sight of pain and death amongst those who held power.

This did not necessarily involve a fundamental opposition to the judicial infliction of suffering or death per se, only that this should be removed behind closed doors. As emergent states began to assume a monopoly of violence in the later medieval and early modern period, so ruling elites had to restrain and control their emotions, formalising their feelings and behaviour. And as an aspirational bourgeois class in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries sought to ape the manners of the ruling elite, so the uppermost echelons of society developed ever-more refined modes of conduct.

Elias had relatively little to say on the subject of punishment, and it was Pieter Spierenburg in his The Spectacle of Suffering who first set out the civilising process as an explanation for the nature and development of penal practice in early modern Europe. The evolution of repression can be explained, he suggests, by the process of state formation and the concomitant changes in sensitivities to the sight of suffering that this brought about, which by the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries could no longer support a penal system which publicly inflicted physical attacks upon the criminal body, either dead or alive.

Others likewise have examined the relationship between sensibilities and capital punishment. With the early beginnings of the nation-state, he argues, so the idea of a city of law lost its meaning and thus the purpose of displaying executed bodies along highways and at town boundaries. This was not so much a shift in attitudes towards the infliction of pain and suffering as a greater sensitivity to the sight of death, exemplified, Spierenburg argues, by the parallel disappearance after of dead bodies from the realms of art, punishment and public anatomical lessons.

Others have also pointed to the importance of attitudes to death in explaining the nature and development of capital punishment in early modern Europe. But whereas Spierenburg identified this increasing sensitivity to the sight of death as a product of the civilising process, others have laid more stress on secularisation, individualism and the social experience of death as drivers behind the privatisation of death in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In Revolutionary France, for instance, it was urged that the death penalty should as much as possible resemble a natural death.

Evans has also emphasised the social experience of death as an essential component of its gradual removal from the public domain: To briefly summarise, then, if metanarratives have pointed to the stability of the state, alternative means of social control, attitudes to public suffering and understandings of death, the body and the afterlife as crucial for explaining penal practice, then how did these drivers play out in the case-studies of eighteenth-century Europe and the other historical contexts examined in this volume?

How might very different understandings of the body, death and the afterlife, for instance, have shaped execution and the treatment of the executed body at other times and places beyond early modern Europe? The chapters in this volume provide some fresh perspectives on such questions. Chapters 1—5 examine executions and the criminal corpse in eighteenth-century Europe and add valuable detail to our knowledge of its extent, form, function and meaning in this period.

Chapters 6—9 spread the net wider, examining capital punishment and the executed body in the respective historical contexts of the nineteenth-century British Empire; nineteenth-century China; pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial Africa; and twentieth-century Germany, allowing us to rethink some of the key motors of penal practice and change in the past. Whilst it is therefore in no way comprehensive, this volume does nevertheless provide a good balance of depth and breadth, spanning three centuries and four continents, thereby adding to a number of studies which have examined capital punishment in times and places not covered here.

Post-mortem attacks on the criminal corpse were never isolated acts. Instead they formed but one aspect of the wider execution ritual, and it is important that we consider the executed body within this broader context. Nor are they confined to an analysis of the criminal corpse in terms of its tangible, physical remains — as the chapters by both Song-Chuan Chen and Stacey Hynd show, similar issues were raised even in the absence of the executed body.

The remembrance of executed offenders and their figurative embodiment in popular memory and historiography could be as powerful as any physical remnants of the bodies. Does this include, for instance, bodies left hanging from the gallows for a few hours after execution, or the brief holding up of severed heads to the watching crowd before interment? Should any form of execution which prevented the customary burial of the condemned be considered a postmortem punishment? Do we need to draw a distinction between the pains of intention and the pains of neglect? No simple answer can be given to such questions, and any definition would of course be specific to the particular historical context in consideration.

Contributors have thus been free to examine the penal practices which they feel fit within the remit of execution and the criminal corpse, including where appropriate extrajudicial forms of execution. The practice of capital punishment in this period followed no simple linear pattern, nor the kind of dramatic, wholesale shift suggested by Foucault.

• Melmoth (Classiques de lImaginaire) (French Edition).
• The Rival Sirens (Cambridge Studies in Opera);
• Una historia sobre un diablillo, Girarabo (El cuento sobre un elefante llamado – Campanilla) (Spanish Edition).
• Sermones Expositivos (Spanish Edition).

On the contrary it fluctuated back and forth, applied with greater or lesser force in response to outbreaks of criminality and political subversion. The recourse to exemplary sanctions particularly the use of hanging in chains actually increased over the middle decades of the eighteenth century in the face of serial killers and agrarian disorder. And the direct threats to ruling Protestant authority in the s prompted an even greater resort to aggravated executions, not least the display of severed heads in public places.

For one thing, per-capita levels of execution for property offences were much lower in Ireland as they also were in Wales, Scotland and on the far western and northern peripheries of England than in South East England. Dublin was not unique in this regard: In the first instance, change was long-drawn out and uneven, illustrated by the protracted and patchy retreat from crime-scene executions.

The political economy of crime-scene executions was such that they continued to be put in practice in spite of their considerable costs in terms of time, money, potential disorder and the opposition of local inhabitants. The personal, local and deeply emotional nature of executions conducted at the scene of the crime affected the offender and the crowd in ways which could not be matched at regular sites of execution.

Most crime-scene executions ended with the corpse being hung in chains on the same spot, the gallows doubling as a gibbet. As in the case of Ireland described by James Kelly, so too in England the middle decades of the eighteenth century c. Hanging in chains had been practised in England since the late fourteenth century upon a common understanding — not enshrined in law — that the bodies of executed felons were at the disposal of the king.

The passage of the Murder Act in , which for the first time put hanging in chains onto the statute books, might then be seen as the formal coming of age of gibbeting. But as Zoe Dyndor notes in Chapter 3, as a result of the prosecution and exemplary punishment of several members of the notorious Hawkhurst gang of smugglers in the late s, hanging in chains was carried out with greater frequency on the eve of the Murder Act than in the decades which followed its introduction.

Through a detailed case-study of the smugglers hung in chains in the s, Dyndor highlights the ways in which the location of the crime, the background of the offender and the particulars of landscape, space and place dictated the choice of gibbet locations in different contexts. She reveals the specific messages and functions that the exposure of the criminal corpse was designed to convey and fulfil within each particular gibbet location typology. And just as spaces and places gave meaning to instances of hanging in chains, so in turn the gibbet made its mark through place names, folklore and memorials.

By following the bodies and voices of the condemned as they were mediated through the staging of capital punishment, he seeks to understand how the death penalty changed, even before physical death, the very nature of the offender and their reinvention under the ceremony of justice. The bodies and voices of the condemned, it becomes apparent, were conceptualised in very different ways in London, Paris and Palermo. In France, unlike in England to which could be added Ireland , the criminal hauled onto the scaffold moments before execution was in an important and very meaningful sense already dead.

In England, by contrast, felons were expected to speak for themselves on the gallows, to make their peace with God and the injured community. Developments in the treatment of suicide corpses were crucially mediated through local customs and traditions, making it difficult to speak of a single process of change throughout early modern Europe. We are treated to a pan-imperial history of judicial killing which reveals the relationship between capital punishment and the broader culture of empire. The parallels with penal practice in early modern Europe are clear, not least in the physical inscription of sovereign power upon subjected bodies.

The symbolic messages conveyed by execution and attacks on the dead criminal body were as central to nineteenth-century colonial executions as they were in Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. If symbolism was one important element then so too was the spectacle of raw power which could be enforced on slave bodies at times of revolt and challenges to ruling authority — gruesome forms of mutilation, as Anderson notes, formed a part of capital sentences for much longer in the colonies than in Great Britain.

Anderson concludes her chapter with a word on the remarkable shortness of British imperial memory and its sense of moral superiority. By the start of the twentieth century, as she notes, British imperialists regularly condemned the apparently barbaric punishments practised by other nations, particularly China, and in the process made implicit claims to their own humanity as well as attempting to distance contemporary Empire from the barbarities of its own recent past.

It is to the origins of this Western discourse of Chinese legal despotism — which can be found in the infamous execution by strangulation of two Western sailors at the hands of the Chinese in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — that Song-Chuan Chen turns in Chapter 7. When placed within the larger historical context of the punishments meted out to other foreigners similarly convicted of murder on Chinese soil; the nature of the Chinese legal system in general; and the struggle between the interests of state security and local trading interests in Canton, it becomes clear that these two executions were exceptional events which did not accurately reflect the judicial treatment of foreigners in China.

Yet this was far from the view taken by the British at the time, who, shocked by the manner of the executions, set the tone for a narrative that was sorrowful and distrustful of Chinese law. Ensuing, and highly sensationalised, representations of the two cases in the British press in the s cemented the idea of Chinese legal despotism even in the face of voices to the contrary, such as that of the Chinese legal expert George Thomas Staunton.

Hynd also picks up a number of the threads raised by Clare Anderson in Chapter 6. Drawing upon nineteenth-century travelogues, early ethnographic texts and subsequent historical research, Hynd reveals the ways in which pre-colonial conceptions of the body, death and the afterlife influenced capital punishment and the treatment of the criminal body amongst the Ashanti of the Gold Coast Ghana. Colonial justice in Africa was thus marked, as Hynd says, by a tension between the messages which needed to be conveyed to global and local audiences: In the political struggles of the post-colonial period too, tensions arose between the need on the one hand for postmortem display of the bodies of executed political opponents to dispel rumours of escapes from justice, and on the other the danger that such bodies might become relics for a cult of martyrdom.

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. Mandeville concluded that vice, at variance with the "Christian virtues" of his time, was a necessary condition for economic prosperity. His viewpoint is more severe when juxtaposed to Adam Smith 's. Both Smith and Mandeville believed that individuals' collective actions bring about a public benefit. Smith believed in a virtuous self-interest which results in invisible co-operation. For the most part, Smith saw no need for a guide to garner that public benefit. On the other hand, Mandeville believed it was vicious greed which led to invisible co-operation if properly channelled.

Mandeville's qualification of proper channelling further parts his philosophy from Smith's laissez-faire attitude. Essentially, Mandeville called for politicians to ensure that the passions of man would result in a public benefit. It was his stated belief in the Fable of the Bees that "Private Vices by the dextrous Management of a skilful Politician may be turned into Publick Benefits". In the Fable he shows a society possessed of all the virtues "blest with content and honesty," falling into apathy and utterly paralysed. The absence of self-love cf. Hobbes is the death of progress.

The so-called higher virtues are mere hypocrisy , and arise from the selfish desire to be superior to the brutes. Among other things, Mandeville argues that the basest and vilest behaviours produce positive economic effects. A libertine , for example, is a vicious character, and yet his spending will employ tailors, servants, perfumers, cooks, prostitutes. These persons, in turn, will employ bakers, carpenters, and the like. Therefore, the rapaciousness and violence of the base passions of the libertine benefit society in general. Similar satirical arguments were made by the Restoration and Augustan satirists.

A famous example is Mandeville's "Modest Defence of Publick Stews," which argued for the introduction of public, state-controlled brothels.

The paper acknowledges women's interests and mentions e. Mandeville was an early describer of the division of labour , and Adam Smith makes use of some of his examples. But if one will wholly apply himself to the making of Bows and Arrows, whilst another provides Food, a third builds Huts, a fourth makes Garments, and a fifth Utensils, they not only become useful to one another, but the Callings and Employments themselves will in the same Number of Years receive much greater Improvements, than if all had been promiscuously follow'd by every one of the Five In Watch-making, which is come to a higher degree of Perfection, than it would have been arrived at yet, if the whole had always remain'd the Employment of one Person; and I am persuaded, that even the Plenty we have of Clocks and Watches, as well as the Exactness and Beauty they may be made of, are chiefly owing to the Division that has been made of that Art into many Branches.

The Fable of the Bees , Volume two. While the author probably had no intention of subverting morality , his views of human nature were seen by his critics as cynical and degraded. Another of his works, A Search into the Nature of Society , appended to the later versions of the Fable , also startled the public mind, which his last works, Free Thoughts on Religion and An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour and the Usefulness of Christianity did little to reassure.

The work in which he approximates most nearly to modern views is his account of the origin of society. His a priori theories should be compared with the jurist Henry Maine 's historical inquiries Ancient Law. He endeavours to show that all social laws are the crystallised results of selfish aggrandizement and protective alliances among the weak. Denying any form of moral sense or conscience , he regards all the social virtues as evolved from the instinct for self-preservation , the give-and-take arrangements between the partners in a defensive and offensive alliance, and the feelings of pride and vanity artificially fed by politicians, as an antidote to dissension and chaos.

Mandeville's ideas about society and politics were praised by Friedrich Hayek , a proponent of Austrian economics , in his book Law, Legislation and Liberty. Other works attributed, wrongly, to him are The World Unmasked and Zoologia medicinalis hibernica From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Rotterdam , Dutch Republic. Hackney , Kingdom of Great Britain. The Fable of the Bees. The Case for The Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples —