This book analyzes Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels from a political philosophy perspective. When authors have focused on politics in Swift’s writings, this has usually meant a study of how Swift located himself on issues of his day such as church and state, and Ireland. Robertson claims by contrast that Gulliver’s Travels is fundamentally a book about the “ancients” (e.g. Plato, Aristotle), and the “moderns” (science and technology), and their contrasting views about the human condition. The claim that the Travels is “a kind of prolegomena” to political philosophy leaves open the possibility that it does not achieve, or seek to achieve, a fusion of various teachings but rather uses the device of alien societies to point us to uncomfortable aspects of political philosophy’s “larger questions” we are prone to ignore. Swift, Robertson argues, draws our attention to some version of the classical republic, as idealized in Aristotle’s political writings and in Plato’s Republic, as opposed to a modern regime which, at its best or most intellectual, emphasizes modern science and technology in combination as a way to improve the human condition.
Author(s): Lloyd W. Robertson
Series: Recovering Political Philosophy
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 222
City: Cham
Series Editors’ Preface
Acknowledgments
Praise for Political Philosophy in Gulliver’s Travels
Contents
1 Introduction
Gulliver’s Travels Today
Reading Swift: A Modest Proposal, Tale of a Tub and Other Writings
Other Prequels to the Travels: Ancients and Moderns
Battle of the Books and Tale of a Tub
Approaches to Gulliver’s Travels
2 Little People and Big People
Big and Small Bodies
Souls and Statesmanship
Where Are Big Souls Found?
The Transition to the Third Voyage
3 Nameless Moderns: Science, Miracles and Faith
A First Look at Modern Science
The Promise or Prospect of Miracles
Medicine, the Body and Politics
The Need to Return to the Ancients
4 A Realistic Utopia, and Human Passions
Old Lilliput
Swift’s Realistic Utopia
The Upper Classes and Liberal Education
5 Heroic Ancients
Speaking With the Dead
Brutus and Others: Heroes and Citizenship
Aristotle vs. The Moderns
Other Afterlives
6 Rational Horses and Humans
Cruel Humanitarians and Xenophobic Citizens
Houyhnhnms vs. Yahoos
Plausible Cosmologies
Yahoos and Modern Europeans
7 European Imperialism and the Bible
Types of Animal and Human Being
People of the Book
8 What We Can Learn
What Do the Houyhnhnms Learn?
The Master: Reason, Enlightenment and Physics
Sources
Index
