The article addresses the issue of the impact in continental Europe of the English liberal doctrine, closely linked to market and competition. In particular, it examines the positions of Hegel, Marx, Jevons and Pareto with respect to Mandeville’s idea that the majority of the population should have been formed by the hard-working poor. Hegel’s perspective is grafted onto this reflection, which considers bourgeois civil society, founded on the principle of the market, to be detrimental to the principles that found a state. Furthermore, for Hegel, a society in which the needs of the individual multiply, and consequently the work necessary to satisfy them multiplies, is sick at the root because the worker satisfies his needs to a minimum extent and is destined instead to satisfy in large measure the needs of others.
