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

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