Private Vices, Public Benefits, to undermine Shaftesbury’s view that social affections and a sense of
rational restraint could help to mitigate the selfishness underlying an enjoyment of material wealth. To
Mandeville, what appears as virtue is often actually vice (pride, vanity, egoism) in disguise. He
considered, however, that vices such as selfindulgence in luxury had a positive role to play in
stimulating the wealth and wellbeing of a nation: where, for example, would the fashion industry be,
without the “vice” of pride? In this way, private vices might produce public virtue, rather than having to
be mitigated by personal virtues. Other theorists praised the potential of luxury while failing to identify it,
as Mandeville had done, as a byproduct of vice. JeanFrançois Melon (1675–1738) in his Essay on
Commerce (Essai sur le commerce, 1734), Voltaire in The Worldly One (Le Mondain, 1736), Jean
François de Saint Lambert (1716–1803) in his article “Luxury” (Luxe) in the Encyclopédie and
GeorgesMarie ButelDumont (1725–1788) in his Theory or Treatise on Luxury (Théorie ou Traité du
luxe, 1771) helped to popularize similar messages about the benefits of luxury, variously perceived as the
marker of a civilized nation, a stimulus to employment and generator of wealth. Francis Hutcheson
challenged Mandeville’s elevation of “vice,” questioning the social usefulness of spending on luxuries
and reasserting the importance of a “moral sense” in human beings that was compatible with the pleasures
gained from wealth, especially when gained from industriousness. This positive ideology informed many
portraits of elite families, such as Hogarth’s Wollaston Family (1730).
David Hume also took a more positive view of the possibility of combining strong moral impulses with
the pursuit of material wealth essential to a commercial society (Susato, 2006, 167–168). In his essay “Of
Refinement in the Arts” (1752), he saw wealth derived from knowledge and industriousness as an asset,
rather than as a deterrent, to refined manners and humanity. Of the wealthy, he said:
They flock into cities; love to receive and communicate knowledge; to show their wit or their
breeding; their taste in conversation or living, in clothes or furniture.... Both sexes meet in an easy and
sociable manner; and the tempers of men, as well as their behaviour, refine apace. So that, besides the
improvements which they receive from knowledge and the liberal arts, it is impossible but they must
feel an encrease [sic] in humanity...
(Cited in Solkin, 1993, 157)A blending of wealth with humanity was visible in the eighteenthcentury propensity of the rich to
support and visit charitable institutions such as the Foundling Hospital, where they were received in
splendidly decorated public rooms (Solkin, 1993, 159–162). Adam Smith, a student of Hutcheson’s,
situated the debate about material wealth in a historical context, in his The Wealth of Nations, by
explaining how societies had evolved over the centuries away from a concern with the basic necessities
of life to a concern with “amusements” or “luxury,” as opulence spread more widely across populations.
While seeing commerce as a positive force in society, he did not approve of greedy or irresponsible
companies, thus highlighting more than Mandeville the human virtues of restraint and social responsibility
(Smith, 1970, 480). To LouisSébastien Mercier, however, in his utopian work of 1770, The Year 2440:
A Dream if Ever There Was One (L’An 2440: rêve s’il en fut jamais), the taste for luxury generated
colonial bloodshed, mental dysfunction and moral bankruptcy (Terjanian, 2013, 51–53); and Voltaire
became less positive about the effects of luxury in the wake of the race for colonial riches that constituted
the Seven Years War (Terjanian, 2013, 54). As European countries established their colonies in North
America, the quest for riches became associated with absentee landlords of slave plantations, neglect of
their homeland estates, the excesses of royal estates, servitude, addiction and personal debt (Terjanian,
2013, 57–67).
Genre and audience played important roles in the approaches to luxury in visual culture. Artists such as
Paret y Alcazar, Hogarth and Joseph van Aken (c.1699–1749) completed conversation pieces or serious