Swift’s moral economy

In this article we call for a paradigm change in relation to the way we tend to look at how markets and morals are entwined in the writings of Jonathan Swift (1667–1745). We argue that it would be wrong to apply contemporary notions of economics retrospectively and somewhat a-historically to a thinker of an axial time in which economics as a separate sphere did not exist, and morals and markets and the way they relate to each other were about to be reconceptualised. We argue that it is thus no accident that Scottish Enlightenment thinkers such as David Hume and Adam Smith took to Swift. They admired more than the expressive or rhetorical skills in Swift; in the first instance, they read Swift as somebody who managed to express moral sentiments (and even outrage) in an appealing, that is mostly satirical way, thereby not only criticizing the cruel conditions in Ireland at the time but also identifying the gap between rhetoric and reality and thus taking issue with the hypocrisy and double standards of the time. We will use two famous examples of Swift's work to illustrate our case, A Modest Proposal (1729) and Directions to Servants (1745)

Art · Enlightenment · Epistemology · Hypocrisy · Literature · Outrage · Political science · Relation (database · Rhetoric · Rhetorical question · Scottish Enlightenment · Sociology · Swift · Theology · Historical Art and Culture Studies · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Law · Philosophy · Scottish History and National Identity

• That Noble Science of Politics

  Open Access•Stefan Collini, Donald Winch et al.•That Noble Science of Politics•1983

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• The Life of David Hume

  Ernest Campbell Mossner•The life of David Hume•2001

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• Swift

  Phillip Harth, Irvin Ehrenpreis•Eighteenth-Century Studies•1985

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• Eighteenth-Century Ireland

  Open Access•Herbert Butterfield•Irish Historical Studies•1967

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