Mandevillian Prescriptions: “The Planter’s Charity,” The Passions, and the Suffering Body

Abstract

In “Mandevillian Prescriptions: ‘The Planter’s Charity, the Passions, and the Suffering Body,” I argue that Mandeville explores emotions specific to an emergent capitalist economy. Mandeville attacks the sentimental and religious belief that virtuous behavior will lead to reward from God and the marketplace. Yet, while Mandeville rejects sentimentalism, he displays a keen awareness of suffering. As a physician and a philosopher, he understands the relief of suffers as part of the goal. For some people, Mandeville observes, the emergent commercial economy has replaced one kind of suffering (physical exertion) for another (melancholy). Yet for others, it brings relentless physical torment. For this reason, I suggest that the poem “The Planter’s Charity,” a poem about the hypocrisy of Christianizing the enslaved, is Mandevillian, if not actually written by Mandeville. His Treatise of Hypochondria and the Hysterical Passions explores the emotional cost of a system that creates so much melancholy and the role of the physician in attempting to alleviate it. Interest in the suffering body runs from “The Planter’s Charity,” The Fable of the Bees,” and The Treatise.

Keywords

• mandeville. the planter’s charity. commercial society. passions.