Swift and Addison

Adam Smith
· Seen as a pioneer of political economy, Adam Smith studied moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow and Oxford University. Starting his professional career as a lecturer he is well known for writing the books ‘Theory of Moral Sentiments’ and later after travelling across Europe; ‘The wealth of nations.

Smith is against slavery, not morally but because he thinks it does not work economically to have slaves instead of free men working. Smith goes on to make this point by stating that free men who will benefit from a good crop of produce will naturally want to work harder and make profit.

‘Such tenants, being freemen, are capable of acquiring property, and having a certain proportion of the produce of the land, they have a plain interest that the whole produce should be as great as possible, in order that their own proportion may be so.’

Smith makes the point that being free men they will have a certain proportion of crop and will want the crop, whatever it is, to grow well and thus will put a lot more effort into seeing it succeed. He thinks that they will have the opposite mindset of a slave who will have no motivation.

Jonathon Swift

· Jonathon Swift takes a satirical look at the current goings on at the time of the Irish famine. In his publishing ‘A modest proposal’ he makes a long winded sarcastic suggestion at the predicament that the Irish people find themselves in at the time of the famine. Essentially he has written about eating your own children, even at one point suggesting on how they should be cooked. He of course does not really think people should eat their children, but this is how he sees people like Smith thinking.

Swift takes a very sarcastic and humorous approach to his writing in ‘A modest proposal’. Although the writings of Smith were written many years after, Swift is attacking the sort of thinking of people like Smith who are constantly trying to figure out prices, profit and business. He takes a very sarcastic viewpoint, when saying;
‘Thus the squire will learn to be a good landlord, and grow popular among his tenants; the mother will have eight shillings net profit, and be fit for work till she produces another child.’
Here he is talking about the profit of selling a child (for food) and the woman producing another as something similar to growing and selling corn. By taking such a blunt satirical look at empiricist thinking, that Smith will go on to write about, he looks down on people who only think of profit.