The Political Economy of Swift's Satires and other Prose Works

Jonathan Swift wrote perceptively about the emerging commercial society<br/>in Britain in the early eighteenth century. His particular focus was on the<br/>financial revolution and its implications for economic and political stability<br/>as well as for shifts of power between the landed and commercial<br/>classes. Following his return to Ireland Swift’s focus shifted to the developmental<br/>problems of his native country. In several pamphlets he advocated<br/>consumption of domestic products, challenged existing political<br/>structures and made trenchant criticisms of absenteeism and other dysfunctional<br/>aspects of the land tenure system. Swift’s politico-economic<br/>concerns are fully reflected in his best known work, Gulliver’s Travels but<br/>his most pointed criticism of the emerging commercial system is contained<br/>in A Modest Proposal. Written in the form of an economic pamphlet, A<br/>Modest Proposal is ostensibly designed to address the problem of poverty<br/>in Ireland. In addition to its implicit criticism of economic policy in Ireland,<br/>the pamphlet challenges the separation of economics and morality as<br/>evidenced in the writings of William Petty and Bernard Mandeville. Swift<br/>parodies Petty’s political arithmetic but it is suggested here that he also<br/>had in his sights the consequentialist reasoning present in the work of<br/>both authors but explicitly so in Mandeville.<br/>Keywords: financial revolution, public debt, paper credit, rationality, political<br/>arithmetic, consequentialism, Petty (William), Mandeville (Bernard)