Of Bees and the Garden: Natural and Human Orders in Mandeville and Hayek

Abstract

Friedrich Hayek regarded Bernard Mandeville as a founding father of the intellectual lineage to which he belonged. This article offers a countergenealogy of his debt to Mandeville. By reading the two philosophers in parallel, it finds continuities beyond those that Hayek himself identifies, notably in their theorizations of evolutionary progress from animals through human savages to bourgeois civilization. Submission to the market, for Hayek, is essential to the civilizing process. The article reconstructs Mandeville’s arguments concerning the similarities between animals and the “lower” classes and races, via the allegory of the beehive. Hayek, likewise, tended to anthropomorphize insects and other animals. In his conception of the evolutionary ladder, robins compare favorably to some human groups. In such ways, the article suggests, ideologies of class and race left an imprint on Mandeville’s and Hayek’s philosophies of nature and human evolution.