| Sumario: | "In this book, John Callanan provides a sense of Mandeville's mind through his writings. He argues that only a thinker of Mandeville's character, and in possession of his rich intellectual heritage, could have written a book quite like the The Fable of the Bees, which attracted such notoriety. Callanan sets crucial aspects of Mandeville's intellectual character into sharper relief: his medical background and his first-hand observation of the complex interplay between the physical, psychological and societal factors that determine well-being; his medical treatment of women and his acute analyses of their vulnerability in society; his particular literary sensibility and his uncanny grasp of the psychology of the reader; his keen understanding of the unprecedented political situation in England at the time, where the interests of Whigs and Tories, court and country, Protestant and Catholic, businessman and aristocrat, vied in increasingly complex combinations; and, above all, his philosophical inheritance from figures such as Erasmus, Montaigne, Spinoza, Bayle, and La Rochefoucauld"--
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