Adam Smith, whose ideas we will discuss now, did not start from scratch, of course. He was influenced by many people. Philosophers and intellectuals in Scotland and in Paris, but also by thinkers who lived before him. Take for example, one of the expressions that made him famous, the division of labor. Those words can be found on the first page of his most important book, The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. And it became, as we will see, a core idea with wide-ranging implications, stretching out to the books of Marx and Durkheim, still important in the 20th and the 21st century. Adam Smith borrowed that expression, the division of labor, from an interesting precursor that I want to briefly introduce here, Bernard de Mandeville, the author of a book with the title, The Fable of the Bees. Really a fascinating book. Bernard de Mandeville. The name sounds a bit French, but you should pronounce it the English way, Bernard de Mandeville. Because he worked as a doctor in London, and it was in that city that he wrote his best books. But in fact, Bernard de Mandeville was of Dutch origin, born in the city of Rotterdam in 1670, a student at Leiden University in the Netherlands who moved to London in 1699 to marry his English bride. But, it is not out of chauvinism that I talk about him here. Well, maybe a little bit. But what is more important, if you follow the river of sociological ideas upstream to discover its sources, you will surely come across this wonderful book with its surprisingly modern insights. The Fable of the Bees, its first edition appeared in 1714, is a strange book because it has the form of a commentary on a poem that had been written in fact by Mandeville himself a few years before in 1705. His fable, a thinly veiled, critical pamphlet about the society he lived in, had been misunderstood, or so he thought. And in this book, he tried to defend himself against his detractors, and explain what he actually had wanted to say. The poem that this all began with was called The Grumbling Hive. And yes, it's a fable about bees. It tells us about the most prosperous society of bees that, once upon a time, could be found in the woods. Feared by its enemies, admired by its friends. But, that does not mean that there were no problems in that beehive. At this point, Mandeville begins to tell his readers about the criminals, the scoundrels, the doctors who prescribe expensive medicines that do not work at all, unlicensed priests, corrupt politicians, soldiers that never fight. The reader begins slowly to understand. This fable about bees is in fact, a political satire that takes pleasure in describing, in every ugly detail, all that is corrupt and criminal in England. Now Mandeville says, thus every part was full of vice, yet the whole mass, a paradise. And then, the story takes an unexpected turn. The bees begin to grumble. That means they start to complain. Why are there so many wrongdoers? Why cannot we be honest and good? Why is it so difficult to get rid of the criminals in our midst? When the gods in heaven hear about the complaints of the people that they had overwhelmed with their gracious gifts, they become very angry. And they decide to punish those unthankful bees. Their punishment? It's very simple. The bees just get what they have been asking for. The next morning, every bee has turned into a 100% honest insect, and the results are devastating. All the members of the police force, all the lawyers, all the judges become jobless overnight. The architects building the prisons, they have nothing to do anymore. Mandeville, who was a doctor in London as I told you, tells us that the members of the medical profession now admit to their patients that they really do not know how to heal them, which was quite true in the 18th century, more so than it is today. So they stopped doing what they did. The good-hearted bees do not want to show off their riches to their neighbors, so no more work for the painters, no more work for the sculptors. In short, the whole beehive collapses, most bees go away, and the few that remain live in a hollow tree. And the story ends with two people walking through the woods observing a few bees buzzing around a tree. And one of them says to the other, do you see those poor, little creatures? Can you imagine that once they belonged to the most powerful tribe to be found in these woods? The moral of the fable is printed on its first page. Private vices, public benefits. The bad behavior of certain individual members of a group may lead to the greatest prosperity for the collectivity as a whole. That was the thesis that the author wanted to get across to his audience. The sins for which we pretend to feel ashamed may contribute to the foundations of a flourishing society. Every society, and of course, we are talking here about human beings and not about bees. Every society needs a certain degree of deviance, of illegality, of crime, to work smoothly. And this is an aspect of the human condition that everybody who seriously studies human societies must recognize, whether we like it or not. The poem was considered by many contemporaries as an apology of crime, a terrible pamphlet in defense of immoral behavior. But, that was not at all the intention of Mandeville. So after writing his funny poem of just 13 pages, The Grumbling Hive, he wrote The Fable of the Bees. Hundreds of pages in which he explained in detail and with many interesting illustrative cases, why he believed that human societies cannot prosper without a certain degree of undesirable behavior. Private vices, public benefits.
