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Anticipating Keynes's paradox of thrift, Mandeville argued that the "moral" activity of saving was actually the cause of recessions whereas luxurious consumption (a "vice") was a stimulus.
Mandeville replied with a "Vindication of the Book", adding it to the 1724 edition of the Fable and then a whole new volume, Fable of the Bees, Part II in 1729.
Mandeville's responses to his critics (he is particularly polemical against Berkeley) are found in his 1732 Letter to Dion and his Vindication (1734).
Mandeville was born and educated in the Dutch Republic.
Mandeville's idea that the pursuit of self-interest, when properly managed, can have good consequences, and his insights into the way in which vanity makes people conform to social norms were put to good use by the principal philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume and Adam Smith.
Moreover, the tension Mandeville exposed between the standards of Christian virtue and the beneficial outcomes due to the pursuit of self-interest provided an impetus to develop a new moral idiom that could accord some value to the tamed forms of self-interest that have beneficial consequences.
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