Bernard Mandeville, British Moralist and Author of Fable of the Bees.

Hobbes is popularly thought of as the modern philosophical father of egoism and hedonism (the theses that the only ultimate objects of desire are self-interest and pleasure, respectively) in his ethical and political theory. However, this handle may be more deservedly assessed to the English philosopher of Dutch origin, Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733).

In his great work, The Fable of the Bees (1714), Mandeville develops a political theory in which Private Vices are said to lead to Public Benefits—the notion that the individual pursuit of self-interest leads to collectively advantageous results in a properly organized community (many have used this slogan, unadvisedly, to interpret Adam Smith’s later political economic theories). While Hobbes does develop a moral psychology in which the pursuit of self-interest is at the motivational foreground, there is much evidence in his Leviathan and other political/ethical works suggesting that he did not endorse the much balder egoist and hedonist psychological assumptions later popularized by Mandeville.