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Mandeville famously tried to exclude religion from his theoretical framework. Within the Commercial Society, he does not pose moral limits to individual needs and to their satisfactions, and assumes that deep disagreement and conflict can be reduced through abundance. Such theoretical project is undermined by the existence of envy: a passion against which any fights are bound to fail. Notwithstanding Mandeville’s failure, his relevance - and, thus, his affinity with Lucretius - consists in resisting to the temptation of many political philosophers both to fight the terror generated by religion through politics, and, to discard what may be defined as Mandeville’s law, according to which: ’any action may generate consequences largely unrelated to its initial motivations’ (Mandeville’s law was later developed by ‘Austrians’). Such consequences other than being often unrelated to agents’ initial motivations may also positively or negatively affect social orders. Among those it is worth mentioning the social benefits arising out of individual vices, the attempts to improve human condition through laws, the outcomes of the miracle asked by the bees to Jupiter, the benefits of flattery in mitigating the virulence of passions, the relationship between Dutch’s interests and the birth of capitalism, the relationship between personal greed, luxury and social welfare. The question I try to answer within this article asks what are the roles of reason, knowledge or experience in theorizing around political orders, in a world that is ultimately subject to Mandeville’s law and to continuos change.
