The Fable of the Bees [antikvár]

IntroductionIntellectual works which have won lasting recognition usually owe their importance to the influence they have exerted, at least for a time, on sympathetic readers. The Discourse on Method, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and The Origin of Species all had to fight their way against the lethargy and even hostility which await most new ideas, but they succeeded, nevertheless, in winning acceptance and changing the course of men's thinking. In some cases, of which the Discourse Concerning Method is an instance, this acceptance was followed by rejection from a later generation; yet the eiiect of an idea, once it has been adopted, is beyond calculation. In some form, modified almost beyond recognition, it survives the change in fashion which overtakes thoughts as well as things.A few intellectual works, however, owe their importance far more to the controversy they excited and the opprobrium they earned than to any proselytes they were able to win. One thinks particularly of three works of this kind whose notoriety is the best measure of their influence : The Prince, the Leviathan, and The Fable of the Bees. By acting as irritants which contemporary readers found impossible to ignore, each of these books stimulated men to re-examine their ways of thought in order to justify their exasperation. In England, indeed, for a period of 200 years the authors of these three books appeared as successive embodiments of the Faust legend. Machiavelli for the Elizabethans, Hobbes for the subjects of Charles II, and Mandeville for eighteenth-century Englishmen became, each in his turn, a continuing figure of the perverse seeker after knowledge who serves the