Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift, Essay Example

Jonathan Swift offers us a unique starting point for thinking about modernity. Our work deals with a number of his works and the scientific and social context that surrounds them. It would be impossible to carry out a summary of all of them, but it would also be difficult to follow our argument without remembering the argument of his artwork, seemingly minor, and that, however, in few pages crumbled to its time and several of the main economic theories of then. We are speaking of a modest proposal for preventing the children of Ireland from being a nuisance to their parents or for the country, more commonly known as a modest proposition, that will be how the hereafter.

In a dispassionate tone, full of details of accounting, the narrator writes a letter to the British authorities, in which proposes that the children of the poor Irish (a nuisance to the public) are fed up to the age of one year and then sold to the gentiles men, that they should eat them with great pleasure in such occasions such as marriages and baptisms.  In the Introduction that performs William Alfred Eddy to the works of Swift mentions an absurdity of multiple faces. A modest proposal emphasizes three aspects of the condition of the poor children: one moral; another economic; and other anthropological. The moral aspect produces “melancholy” and relates to the status of children and their mothers; the second aspect, the economic, consists in being able to maintain their families and themselves producing wealth for Ireland; and the third aspect is that of the transformation of human beings in a commodity. Putting emphasis on this moral crossroads (the status of children, humans transformed into goods), Swift produces a doubt about the “essence” human and, consequently, a doubt about the place of the human being in the city or, in terms of Aristotelian philosophy, on the place of the human being in the polis, in that unit of political organization, social and territorial.

In a sense consistent with that of William Alfred Eddy, George Wittkowsky, in a remarkable article entitled Swift’s modest proposal: The Biography of an early Georgian Pamphlet (1943) describes how Swift deals with a group of theories, mainly four, all of them to the inside of a large pool that is the economic mercantilism.

The first, is the theory of utility of poverty (the theory of the utility of poverty), which considers the child labor as a commodity and “leads, in the first place, to the conclusion that the wealth of a nation is a large population or, as they say the contemporary writers, that the population is the wealth of a nation. [The utility theory of poverty leads] to the faith in a minimum-wage economy”.  This component of mercantilism also includes the idea that, the more you pay, less work can be obtained from the worker. In few words, the theory argues that poverty is useful.

The second theory is the one that points out that the statistics you can explain the social aspects of the human being and can be useful for making social choices, especially in relation to the consequences of the amount of population. According to Wittkowsky, “Swift was familiar with the writings of these three [William Petty, Josiah Childs and Charles Devenant]”.  However, Swift would have disagreed with Mandeville, who considers a danger the excess population.

The third theory with which it treats a modest proposition is the political and theoretical distinction between a poor “capable” (able) and the “unable” (impotent) in an era in which the Elizabethan laws force still showed any responsibility for these and mercantilism considered the poor capable of working as part of the national wealth. During the era in which Swift writes, there is a large change in the attitude and political culture in relation to poverty; in that period, the tendency to give support to the poor on religious grounds decreases. In accordance with this change, George I of Hanover (1660 – 1727) enacted some new laws, which allowed that poor children “unable” and dangerous were placed under the domain of a trader.

The fourth theory is transmitted some reform projects economic-social, that propose solutions to the problems of population and labor. In addition, many of these projects suggest that a company should manage to the poor, by placing the interest of the society on the individual.  Since Swift mistrusted the reform projects, a project to save the poor must have seemed unrealistic. In fact, you can add it to the fourth statement of Wittkowsky the fact that, already in 1704, Swift had lampooned on the pretensions of reforming the human condition. In the meditation on a broomstick writes that a man is a “creature tangled”.

The relationship between Swift and the scientific knowledge of his time not only restricted to economic policy. However, his scientific knowledge did not prevent him from carrying out the “first systematic criticism of the new European science”.  According to Boido, a lot of the experiments of witnessed by the fictional character in Swift, Lemuel Gulliver, might have been created by the Royal Societyy after published in reports and records. The fact that these experiments were carried out by the British scientific institution greater importance does not prevent a swift look at as something absurd or useless and very far from being able to improve the human condition (that was one of the purposes of modernity).  The influence of science on a modest proposition appears in its critical tone, objective and cold, own of the Royal Society, and not in a scientific manner through the critical. In spite of that Wittkowsky, Boido perceive some fundamental characters, don’t perceive the position of Swift in relation to the economy and the science is not that of a scientist to present arguments and experiments. Swift is beyond and more here in a scientific discussion.

A somewhat different view of the above claims Paul Oyarzun.  Unlike them, Oyarzun proposes a broader theory on the relationship between Swift and the knowledge of his time. Oyarzun argues that the critical sense of Swift has to do with something that is at the basis of the whole theory: language. Your criticism of the language is not similar to the other reviews; the language is not a subject, a subject, but rather the basis of all matter and all item, scientific or not. Do we need, to understand, then, that the satires of Swift dealing with economic ideas, scientific and linguistic, which opposed a new theory to the old? No. To criticize the language, critical all modern science and, especially, brings up the topic of the foundation for all science. Talked about the story of the barrel (A Tale of a tub), Oyarzun says: “It has been noted with clarity the strange rigor of a delirium consistent, the paranoid logic of a discourse that deploys a fervor of analogy to the service of premises and conclusions “bastardised” and which does not hesitate to venture comparisons that undermine their own emotions.

Amos approved unprecedented prospects. The analysis that follows, as a result, will examine how the strategy works of textual Swift in a modest proposition and how, in this satire, the treatment of the human body is also a “biopolitics”, one that operates thanks to the mistrust with regard to the meaning, especially the meaning of the concept of the human being.

In Discipline and Punish (Surveiller et Punir), Michel Foucault argues that in all societies there is a knowledge of the body which itself is not a science, but rather a political technology of the body, unetechnologie politique du corps.  In western societies, the punishment system is part of this technology, located in a political economy. This means that the body is directly inserted in the middle of power relations, repeated inversions (in the economic sense, not to give back), making it darker, torturing him and forcing him to work. It is important to analyze this idea of political economy of the body, especially in the French language, language in which Foucault elaborates the concept. The political economy is: “The whole of what affects the production, distribution and consumption of wealth and of the activity being undertaken by the men who live in society in order to achieve that effect.

Viewed from this perspective, any political economy, and even any economy, is related to human activity and with the goods. In other words, it is possible to consider the wealth and goods are the fruit of the external human activity and nothing more, because the human species has been transformed during the historical process of work with the purpose of producing goods. The activity of producing goods requires the construction of factories and the removal of material, which requires a political organization, economic and legal. Fit to the human activity in the productive process requires not only a certain amount of technical knowledge, but a willingness to change the physical and psychological of humanity, which is carried out via schools, religions and punishments (judicial and extra judicial).

A modest proposal is a satirical parody against the utopian proposals intellectuals, against the rational procedures and scientists and against the economic utilitarianism, but it is not only a critical quota toward them. Its basis is not an anti-mercantilist theory, nor any kind of “anti”, but the undermining of any theory, including those that claim to be “anti”.  Acid is a reflection on two levels: firstly, sardonyx and critical in relation to some theories and literary utopias of the seventeenth century; and, secondly, a critical reflection in relation to a policy of rationality and with rationality itself. However, this latter level is transcended and transported towards of what is “not that”; “not said” because what is not said is the vehicle of something silently present: the senselessness of the proposals with too much sense and rational language also with excess of meaning.

Bibliography

Swift, Jonathan. “A modest proposal.” 1729. Quotidiana. Ed. Patrick Madden. 19 Dec 2007.