Jonathan Swift: A “Modest” Political Theorist

“Much as he relished the fray, Swift would always deny that he had turned renegade. The degenerates who had taken over government, Parliament, the Crown – it was they who had left him no option but resistance. This was Swift’s line of argument; and this, as well he knew, was the reasoning of a rebel, however reluctant.” Thus concludes John Stubbs’ august biography of one of Europe’s most notorious satirical writers. It goes without saying that Swift was a most intricate man; a Tory at heart, a social critic and clergyman by profession, a writer in the memory of posterity. But he was also intimately bound up with the politics of his days and didn’t leave politics from his sharp wit of criticism or without imparting his own thoughts on the subject. Three centuries later, with a world in transformation just like in Swift’s time, his voluminous writings still have much wisdom and insight for us in the twenty-first century.

Jonathan Swift was one of the eighteenth century’s wittiest man of letters. Beyond his fame for A Tale of the Tub, Gulliver’s Travels, and A Modest Proposal, Swift was a civil servant and political writer, as well as being a man of the cloth. He penned many political tracts, often anonymously, during his time as chief writer at the Examiner—the unapologetic Tory newspaper that served as the official mouthpiece of the Harley Ministry. Writing in the aftermath of the Jacobite Civil War, better known as the “Glorious Revolution,” and during the Spanish War of Succession, Swift’s close association to high-ranking ministers made him a keen observer of party politics and parliamentary scheming. His great literary satires, which we remember him most fondly for, not only contain philosophical and theological criticism but also political criticism (it is quite obvious to those who know a thing or two about Swift and Swift’s age that Lilliput and Blefuscu are satires of England and France respectively).

A Discourse of the Contests and Dissensions between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome, an anonymous publication written by the Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Swift can—and should—be understood as a first-rate political theorist.

It can be said that Swift was a man of contradictions. He was a close friend to Alexander Pope, England’s finest poet who was also a Catholic in a time when Catholicism was harshly suppressed by the English state. Swift began his literary and political career as a friend of the Whigs but ended his political career as a staunch Tory. He was a man of the High Church but was able to poke fun at the “superstitions” of the Catholic orientation of High Church Anglicanism. He was a fervent supporter of Crown and Church, yet his political preference for mixed government and constitutionalism places him in the republican tradition.

Swift’s conservatism was moral, societal, and, ironically, idealistic. Swift’s traditionalism lay not in building upon the Williamite Settlement but in preserving the stability, Anglican primacy, and institutions of the English state. Initially, the Tories included closet Catholics and Jacobites that could roll back the Williamite Settlement and cause chaos to erupt in a war-weary England and Ireland. Memories of his uncourageous and embarrassing flight from Dublin still lingered in Swift’s memory.

But as the settlement grew, Swift came to realize that the anti-Papist and anti-Jacobite propaganda was, above all, hysterical. The real threats to the stability of English society lay not in the imaginary Catholic and Jacobite uprisings that seemed to be always on the horizon to the alarmists but in the radical Nonconformists who served as the political base for the Whigs and a thorn in the side of the pretensions of Louis XIV in Europe. After all, Nonconformists were everywhere in England and Louis was consistently waging war across the continent and threatening English commerce and territorial holdings; the Nonconformist pioneered a theory of pan-Protestantism to guide Britain into confrontation with France on not only economic and political grounds, but religious ones as well.

A Discourse of the Contests and Dissensions is better understood as a serious treatment of English politics by using the veil of history to comment on present affairs (as was common in the eighteenth century). Much like Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy, the art of political commentary in early modern Europe drew on the past to discuss the present so to offer the writer plausible deniability if state forces considered it treasonous or a call to insurrection. In discussing the nobles and commons—the Tories and Whigs in his days—Swift concludes that a mixed polity without political parties would be the surest safeguard for civil and political stability. Swift’s “republican” vision is based on how a dynamic balance of the various orders of society come together in a mutual harmony of interests to provide the stability and work important to societal flourishing. But the work is not just a reflection on domestic politics. It is also a work concerning itself with international politics and what later political theorists termed geopolitical realism.

Swift understood that the peace and enjoyment of the present was impossible without a “Ballance of Power” in the international sphere. This, however, shouldn’t be surprising given the early context in which A Discourse of the Contests and Dissensions was written—during the beginning of the War of the Spanish Succession which plunged the whole of Europe into a continental maelstrom with smaller colonial conflicts as well. In a very telling passage Swift writes, “Now consider several States in a Neighborhood: In order to pre-serve Peace between these States, it is necessary they should be formed into a Ballance, whereof one, or more are to be Directors, who are to divide the rest into equal Scales, and upon Occasions remove from one into the other, or else fall with their own Weight into the lightest: So in a State within it self.”

The passage is striking indeed. The harmony of peace, and the blessings it gives, is dependent upon an international balance of power free of international rivalry and conflict. While Swift discoursed on the conflict between Carthage and Rome to underscore his point (itself a veiled discourse on England and France, or France against the rest of the Alliance) his analogy would have been clear to the English audience reading the pamphlet. The peace that the English had just enjoyed, now taken away, was the result of a lack of balance of power in the international sphere. International disharmony is just as threatening to domestic tranquility as domestic quarrels. (The balance of power argument was equally critical of emergent British imperialism which also disturbed the balance of power between nations.)

Swift’s critique of international rivalry reached a satirical apogee in Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, better known today as Gulliver’s Travels. Lemuel Gulliver, the English patriot and humanist, is shipwrecked and becomes a captive, then emissary, of Lilliput. Swift leaves no illusion that the silly aside on Lilliput and Blefuscu is a critique of European rivalries, “It is to be observed, that these Ambassadors spoke to me by an Interpreter; the Languages of both Empires differing as much from each other as any two in Europe, and each Nation priding itself upon the Antiquity, Beauty, and Energy of their own Tongues, with an avowed Contempt for that of their Neighbour.” Moreover, when war between Lilliput and Blefuscu occurs, Gulliver learns that it is over an ancient dispute over which side of an egg to crack is more proper.

While we laugh at the comical elements of the rivalry between Lilliput and Blefuscu, with the tininess of both peoples reflecting Swift’s own assessment of the pathetic puniness of Enlightenment Europeans, Swift’s association of international rivalry with ancient disputes and overzealous pride in antiquity and language is meant to convey his views that international conflict is often the result of stupid disputes and pretensions. Here Swift’s idealism is fully revealed. Is it really hard to be civil and respectful to our fellow man? Must discourse always devolve into contention and conflict?

Swift doesn’t just critique international problems; he critiques domestic problems as well. During Swift’s time as a political connection and Tory writer at the Examiner he was privileged through his friendship with Whigs then courtship by the Harley Ministry to see the inner workings of English politics. He was left disgusted by the putridity of the pettiness of political squabbles and scheming. This is reflected in Gulliver’s crash course in the laws of Lilliput, including such arcane and laws that no one should discharge liquid in the palace; a law that he breaks to save the emperor’s palace when burning in a most comical way. It is also reflected in Gulliver’s arrest for treason—an event that alludes to Lord Bolingbroke’s arrest for treason for Jacobite sympathy and his subsequent flight to France to escape Whig witch hunting. Despite Gulliver’s service to the emperor, saving the palace and thwarting an invasion, when his relationship with the emperor and his chiefs sours the Lilliputians arrest him on that ancient clause for discharging liquid on the palace grounds.

The arrest and attempted blinding of Gulliver is arrayed on four charges which Swift brilliant deconstructs through our knowledge of what Gulliver has done which was overlooked then but now claimed for his arrest: saving the palace (by peeing on the fire to save it); saving Lilliput from invasion (by only capturing the invasion fleet and not venturing into Blefuscu and capturing the rest of the ships); brokering peace between Lilliput and Blefuscu (doing so without official decree and the legal means of negotiation); for wanting his liberty restored to him (considered treason for wanting to leave Lilliput). The pettiness displayed by the Lilliputians toward Gulliver is a commentary on the pettiness of the Whigs and their arrests of, and accusations against, prominent Tories who had served the Crown during the War of Spanish Succession. Many of the Tories wanted peace while the Whigs wanted a continuation of the war. Succession disputes in England and changes in political fortunes then allowed the Whigs, having returned to power, to try and brush away the Tories, especially Jacobite sympathizers, once and for all irrespective of prior dutiful service.

Swift’s eventual revulsion to politics was based on his witnessing, first-hand, the shady wheeling and dealing and posturing of parliamentarians, lords and bishops, in his own lifetime. Those who opine a return to “purer” days to politics are truly blind or ignorant of history. Yet the pettiness of politics ruins the aim of politics properly understood: tranquility and the enjoyment of tranquility.

No political theorist is truly complete without reflections on political economy. Here too, Swift set sails for uncharted territory. Swift was an early eighteenth-century Henry George; he criticized the money and credit economy of the liberals and Whigs of his day and preached the superiority and stability of an economy centered on land and labor. The Financial Crisis of 1720, in his mind, vindicated him.

The money economy was inherently unstable and prone to excessive abuse, growing decadence and a lifestyle of luxury, which Swift condemned as an “Egyptian Bondage” strangling Britain and Ireland most especially. An economy grounded in land and labor, Swift felt, was inherently more stable and—one might say—divinely ordained. Swift was not an enemy of wealth; he was friends with many of the landed and wealthy gentry of Ireland and England, but he also felt that such wealth was well-earned and exuded a spirit of charity reflective of a Christian society. The wealth accrued by credit and the money economy, however, Swift saw as a product of random chance, deceit and stock manipulation, and imperial exploitation.

In Swift’s ruminations on politics we see what the true guiding spirit of his thought is—the want for a beautiful peace that permits an enjoyment of the present. Peace, moreover than stability or order (which are merely the means for the greater reality of peace), is what rests at the heart of Swift’s political thought and desire. Those who deliberately, or ignorantly, exclude the emphasis on peace do a great disservice to Swift’s political thinking. Later English conservatives, like Edmund Burke and Michael Oakeshott, followed the good Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in desiring the same. Peace provides for the enjoyment of tranquility and the truest pursuit of happiness, the ability to enjoy the pleasures of life.

Yet we also see what the threats to peace are: international rivalry; domestic quarrelling; and party politics. Swift’s preference for a mixed political construct and constitutionalism is based on his reading of history that mixed polities provide the most internal and external peace. By denying a single class, or group of people, political power, mixed polities prevent the tyranny of the majority as well as preventing the tyranny of the minority. By denying a single man, or woman, absolute power, mixed polities prevent the ambitious pretensions of tyrants like James II or Louis XIV. By denying individuals absolute power international conflict can be avoided which maintains the domestic peace. Political denialism, that is a denial of absolute power whether through guises of monarchy or the commons, ensures that tranquility is not disturbed by the pretensions and designs of those in power.

Swift’s great fear, not unwarranted given the time he lived in, was the return of civil collapse, war, and the utilization of state institutions and power for tyrannical ends; all of which destroys the domestic peace which permits human flourishing to take root. Swift was aware how domestic quarrels and international rivalry both serve as agents of disruption; he also became aware how party politics, personal ambition, and score settling also serve as agents of disruption. Swift, then, was a great prophet calling for peace.

The balance that Swift sought in politics, domestic and international, aimed not at restructuring societies or the promotion of convoluted constitutional fantasies over other people, but at a peaceful fraternity between nations which permitted people to be the spirits of innovation, growth, and prosperity. He was, as such, a champion of individual liberty—at least toward those who wouldn’t disturb the peace of society. People necessarily become the caught-up cogs of war, ambition, and pretension when imbalance reigns supreme producing the scourge of chaos. For Swift, the chaos wrought by imbalance always exhausts itself in tyranny. After all, it was never political leaders or kings who fought on the terrible battlefields but common people deprived of their family and homestead who were sent to die for the pretensions of some Lord Minister or King.

Through Swift’s many writings we see him sharpen the knife at those who threaten domestic tranquility. That includes people in one’s own country as much as it does people outside of it. Here the great foresight of Swift is seen; Swift understood long before international relations theory became a profession that international relations were integral to the blessings of peace and happiness. Swift later became a critic of British imperialism, but his criticism never amounted to an abdication of international responsibility. British imperialism, from Swift’s subtle hand, was a threat to tranquility—that’s why he criticized it; not out of hatred but a deep patriotic desire for peace. Swift’s later criticism of his own country was not out of hate but out of love and want for his country to be a leader for peace instead of war.

Beneath the mockery of religious fanatics (the Nonconformists especially) in A Tale of the Tub, Horatian and Juvenalian satire in Gulliver’s Travels, and shocking rhetoric of A Modest Proposal, we see a man who was deeply considerate about the world and its many complex workings. We find a man who was more than just a literary figure bequeathing to the world writings that now make us laugh. We find a man who was, in the end, perhaps, a modest political theorist. Swift’s desire for peace is still a desire many find palpable. Perhaps we can drink with Swift in comradery or join him in exposing the pettiness and tininess of Lilliputians, the prideful largesse of Brobdingnagians, or insanity of supposedly rational Laputans and Houyhnhnms.

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