Abstract/Summary

This chapter looks at Jonathan Swift’s political satire, focusing on a crucial, seldom-discussed and newly-relevant theme: his deep hostility towards experts. It argues that Swift and his allies understood expertise in terms of a broader anti-technical idea of statesmanship, one that also advocated ‘common sense’ as a positive model for political deliberation, and ‘wit’ as a model for discourse. Satire was a common medium for articulating this programme, often in terms that were themselves doubled and ironized. Swift and many of his associates deplored secrecy and innuendo in political life and, at the same time, appropriated them as modes for oppositional satire. They painted modern instrumental thinking and modern technocratic politics as dull and clumsy, while adopting the discourses of those experts parodically as ‘mock-arts’. It was the interrelations between this group of satirical themes and political topoi that gave them power and significance at the start of the eighteenth century. Keywords: expert; technique; craft; statecraft; dexterity; experience; Walpole; Craftsman; Gulliver’s Travels; politics; statesmanship; innuendo; corruption; Machiavellian.