Bernard Mandeville is seldom accorded an important place in the history of selfhood. The significance of his renowned book, The Fable of the Bees (actually a series of commentaries, issued between 1714 and 1724, on a poem, “The Grumbling Hive,” published in 1705) is usually thought to lie in its presentation of society, and especially of social well-being, as the product of individual immorality – “Private Vices, Publick Benefits,” as the famous and notorious subtitle had it. The sheer scandal his book caused remains one thing that draws readers to it. Its frank challenge to cherished ideas and values, its assertion that society gained more when people behaved badly (by all the generally accepted standards) than when they behaved well, its pitiless exposure of the hypocrisy at the root of civilized behavior, its denigration of claims to benevolence, honor, chastity, and virtue in general, and the clear pleasure its author took in his own defiant and anxiety-provoking avowals and contentions, made it an object of contempt and fear to many high-minded people, so that both book and author were attacked in print and in the courts. His exploration of what he saw as the profoundly permeable boundary between evil and good led him on to ground that would later be examined by Rousseau, by Baudelaire, and by Nietzsche. In his own time even some who insistently declared their distance from him, notably David Hume and Adam Smith, recognized that there was an element of hitherto suppressed truth in what he had to say.