Sublime

It was the consumption of what Mandeville called ‘fripperies’ – hats, bonnets, gloves, butter dishes, soup tureens, shoehorns and hair clips – that provided the engine for national prosperity and allowed the government to do in practice what the Church only knew how to sermonize about in theory: make a genuine difference to the lives of the weak

John Stuart Mill wrote in the 1840s: “I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.”

Mandeville’s thesis shocked his initial audience (as he intended it to), but it went on to convince almost all the great economists and political thinkers of the eighteenth century and beyond. In his essay Of Luxury (1752), Hume repeated the Mandevilleian argument in favour of the pursuit of riches and of expenditure on superfluous goods on the

Smith’s view was that the most just mechanism for allocating resources from the point of view of the individual was one that enabled people to pursue their own self-interest and make their own choices. After all, people are usually the best judges of their own happiness. At the same time, the best allocation of resources for society as a whole was