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Experts in Early Modern Political Writing Experts in Early Modern Political Writing
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Walpole and The Craftsman Walpole and The Craftsman
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Swift and the Mysteries of Lilliput Swift and the Mysteries of Lilliput
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Swift and Political Satire after 1726 Swift and Political Satire after 1726
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Select Bibliography Select Bibliography
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24 Against the Experts: Swift and Political Satire
Get accessPaddy Bullard is Associate Professor of English Literature and Book History at the University of Reading. He is the author of Edmund Burke and the Art of Rhetoric (2011). With James McLaverty he co-edited Jonathan Swift and the Eighteenth-Century Book (2013) and, with Alexis Tadié, Ancients and Moderns in Europe (2016). With Timothy Michael he is co-editor of volume 15 (Later Prose) of The Oxford Edition of the Works of Alexander Pope.
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Published:04 September 2019
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Abstract
This chapter looks at Jonathan Swift’s political satire, focusing on a crucial, seldom-discussed and newly relevant theme: his deep hostility towards specialists and 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.
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