Asocial sociability

Seigel devotes a fascinating section of his book ( Idea of the Self ) to a summary of Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees , in which Mandeville describes what Kant characterized as the “asocial sociability” of human nature. Social in the sense that even in a natural state, prior to society, human beings seek society; but asocial because they seek society in order to gain the esteem of others and dominate them. Explaining this, Mandeville distinguished between self-love, the passion for self-preservation and satisfaction of needs, and self-liking, the “hunger to value oneself over others and induce them to acknowledge their inferiority. Self-liking was the root of the search for approval, esteem and honor; it was pride in action.”

Seigel claims that Mandeville’s distinction is “essentially the same” as Rousseau’s distinction between amour de soi and amour propre . For Rousseau, however, the two are distinguished as natural and social: “Outside society human beings were devoid of the desire to master others and of all the evil impulses that flowed from it; neither sociability nor any kind of vice belonged to original human nature.” Mandeville saw both as arising from nature, and thus “social action with others [is] a need from the start, so that human nature turned out to be anti-social and social at the same time, ‘made up of Contrarieties,’” to use Mandeville’s own formula.

Seigel finds Rousseau more “consistent,” and I suppose that’s true. Rousseau’s sketch, which places all vice on the “culture” side of the nature/culture divide, is certainly neater. But Mandeville seems to be more accurate as a description of human behavior. For what is more characteristic of the ancient hero, or Aristotle’s magnanimous man, than precisely this kind of “asocial sociability.”