Whether and to what extent Keynes should be considered both a liberal and an individualist is a rather complex question, and one which this paper proposes to disentangle by analyzing Keynes' understanding of Mandeville, whose positions on these two issues were rather ambiguous, as well. Through a comparison of Keynes' reading of the Fable of the Bees with those of N. Rosenberg, F. Hayek and L. Dumont, it is shown that Mandeville' s and Keynes' positions are much more alike than is generally admitted. Furthermore, this similarity invites us to redefine such categories as « individualism », « holism », « liberalism » and « interventionism », which clearly are difficult to apply to either of these two authors.