Benedict vs. Mandeville

Most people would regard Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, published in the auspicious year of 1776, to be the foundational text for modern economics. Yet 70 years before, Bernard de Mandeville published a text that, though far less scholarly, was far more foundational. That text was first called, The Grumbling Hive; or Knaves Turned Honest. It was a short doggerel poem, but so popular that it was expanded into the combination poem and essay, The Fable of the Bees. You can learn pretty much the whole point of the poem from its subtitle: Private Vices; Publick Benefits, that is to say, our prosperity depends upon our vices, and not upon our virtues. Thus at the beginning of the modern age, we see the split between the world of business, and the world of ethics.