John J. Callanan, Man-Devil: The Mind and Time of Bernard Mandeville, The Wickedest Man in Europe

Man-Devil: The Mind and Time of Bernard Mandeville, The Wickedest Man in Europe is the best monograph on Bernard Mandeville in English. In it, John J. Callanan provides a complete account of Mandeville’s thought and its context. Throughout Man-Devil, the scope of Mandeville’s embeddedness in the social and intellectual milieu of 18th-century London is made clear. While the writer was not initially well-regarded, Callanan shows that, by the mid-1720s, Mandeville was on the minds of most in the Res Publica Litteraria. And despite the scant biographical material available, Callanan also succeeds in giving the reader a sense of Mandeville’s character, who comes across as cheerful, delighting in controversy and in exposing the hypocrisy of the moralists, but not as the “vicious and cruel sceptical misanthrope” he is often made out to be (p. 269)