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This thesis is arranged in three parts, dealing in turn with the Philosophical and Religious background to The Fable of the Bees, the Social Background, and the Debate about the Nature of Society that concerned Mandeville. In the first part there is an account of the early editions of The Fable of the Bees together with a discussion of its intellectual antecedents. This is followed by a survey of religious and philosophical arguments as they concerned Mandeville in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. The second part comprises an examination of Reformation Societies in this period together with an account of the Charity-school movement, and concludes with a middle-class, Dissenting view of society as presented in the 1715-16 diary of Dudley Ryder. The third part consists of a discussion of how Mandeville's ideas related to the distinctive society of his times and how his analysis of the way it functioned led him to propose in his peculiarly abrasive way his novel thesis about the real source of its dynamism.