Cover of THE KINGDOM OF SATIRE: JONATHAN SWIFT AND THE FOLLY OF THE PERFECTLY REASONABLE

THE KINGDOM OF SATIRE: JONATHAN SWIFT AND THE FOLLY OF THE PERFECTLY REASONABLE

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THE KINGDOM OF SATIRE: JONATHAN SWIFT AND THE FOLLY OF THE PERFECTLY REASONABLE

By: Boris Kriger
Narrated by: Che Flory
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Summary
 Jonathan Swift has been filed for three centuries under the heading of misanthropy, which is the one verdict his books refuse to support. He almost never wrote about fools. His targets are competent men doing their work correctly: economists whose arithmetic checks out, projectors with funded laboratories, reformers with excellent intentions, horses whose logic is flawless, and a public-spirited author who has costed his solution to the Irish famine down to the shilling and can show you the table.This book argues that Swift built an instrument for detecting a specific kind of catastrophe — the kind that arrives not through stupidity but through method, procedure, and impeccable reasoning applied to the wrong thing. To build it he removed the one component satire had always depended on: the signal that tells the reader a joke is in progress. He never appears in his own writing. He is a hack, a draper, a ship’s surgeon, an astrologer’s assassin, a helpful projector with a plan. The mask is never lifted, and the reader is left holding the meaning.That decision explains almost everything that happened to him afterward, including the misunderstandings. It explains why an astrologer he declared dead in print could not persuade the trade that he was alive, why a satire on colonial economics is still occasionally quoted as a serious policy document, and why the most savage book in the English language now sits on the shelf reserved for children, abridged, with its final third quietly removed.Here is the whole life, told without the two explanations that have done the most damage — that Swift was mad and that madness explains him, and that his rage was a personal defect rather than a working instrument.©2026 Boris Kriger (P)2026 Boris Kriger English, Irish, Scottish & Welsh European World Literature
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