Mandeville's Hive Tries to Purge Vice, and the Allegory Has the Purge Ruin It
In 1705 Mandeville published The Grumbling Hive: Or, Knaves Turn'd Honest, a poem about a wealthy bee community that sets out to root out all vice from the hive.
The hive is an allegory for an opulent nation such as England, and the poem is built to show the disastrous consequences that would follow any successful attempt to impose a moral reformation on it. The uncomfortable premise is not that vice is charming but that the cleanup is the danger.
Pinning Mandeville down at all takes work: many of his works first appeared anonymously, and in some cases his authorship was established only in the early decades of the twentieth century.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
The joke of the poem is that virtue plays the saboteur. The bees request a moral reset and the hive gets ruin instead of improvement.
Or the real target is the fantasy that an opulent nation can be morally rebooted at no cost. Satirising the bill for reformation is not the same as writing a love letter to vice.