Theory and methods Théorie et méthodes The emancipation of economics from morality: Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees

DUMONT The following essay is part of a study in intellectual history bearing on one aspect of the configuration of ideas and values characteristic of modern civilisation or, as the author calls it, "modern ideology " *. This system of ideas and values has the category of "the economic " as one of its major categories, one of its basic dimensions or reference coordinates. Yet the economic category has not always been there, and it is possible to isolate some of the stages or changes by which it became what it is. A new category, if it is to attain a separate existence, must in particular be emancipated from the old categories which had hitherto dominated the ideological field and prevented its independent assertion. It must get disentangled or, as Karl Polanyi would have said, dis-embedded from the configuration that still ignored it. In this case, emancipation was necessary in two directions, in relation to poli-tics on the one hand, to morality on the other. Locke’s Two Treatises of Govem-ment contains a choice expression of the first aspect, while the second can be documented from Mandeville’s Fable. It is not too arbitrary to take Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, as the birth certificate of &dquo;the economic&dquo; as a separate, independent category of modern thought. By comparison with the &dquo;mercantilist&dquo; liter-ature where the economic dimension was still by and large &dquo;embedded&dquo; in and subordinated to the political, the emancipation from politics should be obvious. It is, on the face of it, less evident that a similar process took place * The essay is extracted from a book to appear under the title From Afandeville to Marx: Genesis and triumph of the economic ideology, an expanded version of a series of lectures give