A Modest Proposal for a Political Court

Satirizing the Blood Libel:Ritual Cannibalism, Infant Sacrifice, and Bloodied Knives in "A Modest Proposal" Lori A. Davis Perry (bio) The ritual butchering of Irish children for profit, celebrated as a reasonable economic program that will benefit all concerned in Jonathan Swift's "Modest Proposal," suggests a moral vacuum on the part of the narrator that appalls modern readers. Claude Rawson has argued that the pamphlet targets the Irish simultaneously as a despised and identifiable subgroup and as rhetorical shorthand for the more universal "generalized savage" (3). Swift's contemporary readers, however, would have been subjected to an additional source of unease, for the pamphlet censures the ruling classes through pointed references to anti-Semitic tropes by alluding directly to the Blood, Conspiracy, and Economic Libels, the oldest and most dangerous libels against Jews. His Projector proposes an economic program in which Anglo cultural and national identity are transformed to reflect the most viral accusations against the Jews, thereby reversing centuries of moral posturing that depended to a large degree upon a perceived cultural distance from any and all elements of Judaism. The pamphlet thus translates fears of cultural, religious, and racial conflations between Anglo Christians and Jews into a potential reality, as traditional accusations against mythologized Jews become realized as proposed economic policy. Critical attention to anti-Semitism in British literature tends to focus primarily on either the medieval and early modern periods or the nineteenth century to the present. While Anglo-Jewish historians have paid some attention to the eighteenth century, as a general rule literary critics of philoor anti-Semitism have glossed over the period.1 In part, the absence of large Jewish populations in Britain, and their corresponding absence as overt literary characters, has encouraged literary critics to presume a level of cultural indifference, or even amnesia, about Jews among Swift's readers. Yet the absence of a large Jewish population had little effect upon British ideas about Jews; traditional narratives about Jews, no matter how fanciful, superstitious, [End Page 119] or contradicted by evidence, had been asserted in the British Isles and Europe for centuries, developing into a well-formed, long-lasting mythology that continues even into the current era. During Swift's lifetime, anti-Semitic tropes were so familiar as to be accepted nearly without question by readers throughout the British Isles, and formed the everyday knowledge, common opinions, and received ideas of what Roland Barthes describes as the cultural code. Indeed, the Anglo response to the idea of a Jew infuses not simply the literature but the language itself. Whether scholars, diplomats, travelers, or simply tradesmen and farmers, Swift's readers demonstrate a deep-seated awareness of libels against Jews and a corresponding concept of Judaism as antithetical to Anglo identity and culture. "A Modest Proposal" mines this knowledge for its satirical impact. European hatred toward Jews had increased dramatically in the eleventh century, culminating in the Rhineland massacres of 1096. Thereafter, murder accusations against Jews became routine, developing formal conventions over time. The first accusation of ritual murder by crucifixion appeared in Thomas of Monmouth's The Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich in 1150. Ritual murder accusations (without the accusation of crucifixion) then appeared in Würzburg (1147), Gloucester (1168), Blois (1171), Bury St. Edmunds (1181) and Winchester (1192); inspired by Monmouth, later writers added crucifixion accusations as a matter of course (Langmuir 209-36, 263-81, 282, 298.). Ritual murder accusations spread quickly through Britain and France, but the accusation of cannibalism first appeared in Fulda Germany in 1235, where on Christmas Day, a miller and his wife went to church and returned to find their mill burnt down and the bodies of their five sons in the ruins. The Jews of Fulda, sixty miles north, confessed, presumably under torture, that two of them had killed the boys and drained their blood into bags, to be consumed for religious and/or medicinal purposes. As a result, thirty-four Jews were condemned to mass execution. Thus, the Blood Libel, which conflated ritual child murder and cannibalism, became widespread throughout Europe. After the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 adopted Transubstantiation as official Church doctrine, a Host Desecration Libel arose, in...

This chapter discusses some reflections based on the 'modest proposal' that, as newly appointed CEO of academic publishing group Taylor & Francis, the author presented a forum of experts in scholarly publishing and communications. It attempts to share the author's early observations, first by outlining a modest perspective on the current state of academic publishing, followed by an even more modest proposal formed from an outsider's view looking in. Fifty per cent of a first year’s college curriculum in the US is obsolete by the time a student graduate. In the twenty-first century the need to learn is no longer episodic but continuous. Unless the readers are living off a trust fund or endowment, knowledge over centuries has served two human imperatives: professional advancement and economic sustainability. Increasingly, these goals are unattainable except for a privileged few. Because academic institutions, with the complicity of publishers, are still largely delivering twentieth-century product to a generation trying to successfully meet twenty-first-century demands.

An impressive amount of evidence has been collected underpinning the importance of international public administrations (i.e., the secretariats of international governmental organizations) in a variety of policy areas, actor configurations, and multilevel political contexts. However, the problem of how to systematically observe and explain bureaucratic influence still lies at the core of the research puzzles that scholars presently attempt to solve. While acknowledging the achievements of recent research efforts, we argue that it is no coincidence that the results remain rather scattered and disconnected—as no consensus has been reached about how bureaucratic influence beyond nation states might be reasonably defined or reliably observed and how the individual insights gained could feed into the construction of a more general theory of bureaucratic influence in transnational governance. Based on a review of the literature, the essay describes what we see as the characteristic pitfalls of current research and presents two modest proposals on how the underlying challenges can be addressed. We first suggest defining the target of influence in terms of a particular policy and second advocate the inclusion of bureaucratic policy preferences into the influence concept. In order to help researchers to observe and compare policy influence across IPAs, we present a simple heuristic measurement scheme, which, if systematically applied, may help overcome the central ailment of recent influence studies. We demonstrate the applicability of the scheme by means of two empirical illustrations. The argument is that in the absence of a comprehensive descriptive, let alone analytical, theory of bureaucratic influence in transnational policymaking, our proposal may help to boost the accumulative potential of current research in the area.

Reviewed by: Sciences from Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities Bonnie Shulman (bio) Sciences from Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities. By Sandra Harding. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. Pp. vii+283. $79.95/$22.95. What can be done to transform modern science and politics, which currently deliver their benefits only to an elite few, into truly democratic practices that serve all of the world’s people? This is the question Sandra Harding sets out to answer in Sciences from Below. Along the way she presents a stunning synthesis of research from post-positivist, feminist, and postcolonial science studies scholars. Her work, although unique in its attempt to integrate these different research agendas, shares the goals of the group of STS activists who advocate for an “applied science studies” to inform social justice projects. The focus of Harding’s analysis is on (Western) modernity and “the ways it remains haunted by anxieties about the feminine and the primitive, both of which are associated with the traditional” (p. 1). Why has this scholar, known for her research in feminist and postcolonial science studies, turned her attention to modernity studies? It is, she writes, in order to “obstruct the way that the modernity vs. tradition binary shapes research projects” (p. 19). In Part I, “Problems with Modernity’s Science and Politics,” Harding reviews the strengths and limitations of the work of three STS scholars who have critiqued the way science and politics are currently organized: the French anthropologist of science Bruno Latour, the German sociologist and environmental theorist Ulrich Beck, and the team of European sociologists headed by Michael Gibbons, Helga Nowotny, and Peter Scott. These three different approaches to rethinking modern science and politics share some commonalities. All three reject postmodernism because it gets stuck in critique and does not offer a positive alternative to transform science and politics. Along with Harding, all three argue that science and politics are inescapably entangled, that changing one inevitably involves changing the other. On the one hand, “science appropriates to itself as merely technical matters decisions that are actually social and political ones” (p. 25). On the other hand, policymakers often appeal to science to legitimize their own projects. One might say one hand washes the other. All three are also mostly gender-blind and make only perfunctory gestures toward science and technology in global contexts. Thus in Part II, “Views from (Western) Modernity’s Peripheries,” Harding reviews the strengths and limitations of scholarship from three social movements at the margins of modernity: Western women’s, postcolonial, and third-world women’s science and technology studies. In Part III, “Interrogating Tradition: Challenges and Possibilities,” Harding uses standpoint theory to look at science and politics “from [End Page 682] below”—from the standpoint of women and the world’s other least-advantaged peoples. In the final chapter she offers her own “modest proposal”—a vision of transformed sciences and politics. Harding’s strongest contribution is the construction of a bridge between traditional science studies scholars and feminist and postcolonial science and technology studies. She looks at each research agenda from the perspective of the others. She points out how all three analyses from Part I “provide powerful justifications for feminist and postcolonial projects even though they do not put their arguments to this goal. In turn, those social movements could effectively make use of some of [traditional science studies’] arguments” (p. 77). She poses some provocative questions: For example, on page 149 she wonders what a “world of mutually, partially independent scientific and technological traditions and projects [would] look like.” Harding is a courageous public intellectual trying to understand how others see us and themselves. For me, the most disappointing aspect of the book was the final chapter. Harding’s modest (critics might say outrageous) proposal entails “start[ing] off research from women’s lives in households” (p. 225). I was eagerly anticipating some concrete suggestions as to how “research on nuclear fission, the ozone hole, or the philosophy of science affects the flourishing of households and those responsible for them” (p. 233), but, alas, Harding leaves us with the acknowledgment that this proposal will be “difficult to pursue” and that it provides a...

This paper attempts to make a stylistic analysis of Jonathan Swift’s registers in A Modest Proposal . In literary writing, a writer chooses his words with care, making sure that the words fit properly into the discourse. This proper choice and use of words is ‘diction’. In carrying out the subtle task of ensuring proper diction, most writers often search for relevant technical terms appropriate to their discourse with a view to achieving realism. Thus, a writer becomes a roving camera, delving into other disciplines so as to achieve this realism. Using the Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT), it is discovered that Swift achieves profound literary realism in A Modest Proposal through appropriate diction and navigation in various registers to the extent that one is prone to conclude that Swift’s profession is multi-dimensional in nature, a positive chameleon in terms of his calling; indeed a literary rainbow with several appearances. Though a single human being, he is discovered to be a man of many diverse parts through his diction that cuts across nine professions/disciplines. He is a literary writer who delves into various professions simultaneously to have an organic unity which natural novels have in common. This paper therefore submits that A Modest Proposal is a literary work that exemplifies convergence adjustment aspect of the Communication Accommodating Theory of Howard Giles as a means of effective communication in literary writing. Keywords: Communication Accommodation Theory, Register, Profession, Diction DOI: 10.7176/RHSS/11-16-04 Publication date: August 31 st 2021

The Right to Food for Children in Brazil: A 'Modest Proposal'?

As Israel’s genocidal campaign in Palestine continues to unfold, the number of murdered Palestinians has now surpassed 46,000 civilians, half of which are women and children. This number includes over 10,000 women, mostly in their reproductive age or pregnant, and 15,780 children, mostly infants and toddlers. This paper argues that the gendered nature of Israel’s genocide in Gaza theorizes the ontology of Palestinian women as socio-political agents in their embodied connection to time and place. Resisting Israeli settler colonial practices of dehumanization, women emerge as embodied ‘time beings’ whose capacity to remember and (re)produce differentially affirms Palestinians’ historical and socio-cultural connection to the land. Using Karen Barad’s agential realism, I diffractively read the British settler colonial practices in Ireland as captured in Jonathan Swift’s satire, ‘A Modest Proposal’ (1729), through the Israeli practices of erasure in Palestine. My goal is to show how satire is a literary form that ‘stay[s] with trouble’, explains unexpected space-time entanglements and collaborations, and reveals the importance of Palestinian women as central agents to an open-ended becoming of a Palestinian state and identity.

Deliberating across the Divide: A Response to 'A Modest Proposal' By Jane Suiter

All-Payer Rate Setting: A Response To A 'Modest Proposal' From Uwe Reinhardt

Writing in 2013, under the ironic title of ‘Marriage: A Modest Proposal’, John Eekelaar advanced what he acknowledged was in fact a ‘truly radical’ solution for the reform of marriage law. In it he advocated that the law should allow a legal marriage to take place anywhere within England and Wales, and in any form, the only legal requirements being that it be ‘attested by two witnesses’ and preceded by rigorous formalities designed to ensure that the parties were eligible to marry. As he noted:

Previous articleNext article No AccessComment on Professor Pontecorvo's "The State of Worldwide Fishery Statistics: A Modest Proposal"MICHAEL A. ROBINSON and FRANCIS T. CHRISTY, JR.MICHAEL A. ROBINSON Search for more articles by this author and FRANCIS T. CHRISTY, JR. Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Marine Resource Economics Volume 6, Number 11989 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/mre.6.1.42629005 Views: 2Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright © 1989 Taylor & FrancisPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Douglas M. Johnston Is coastal state fishery management successful or not?, Ocean Development & International Law 22, no.22 (Jan 1991): 199–208.https://doi.org/10.1080/00908329109545956

Deliberating across the Divide: A Response to 'A Modest Proposal' By Jane Suiter

Introduction: The Spider and the Bee: Ancients vs. Moderns and the Battle of the Books 1. The World Swift Saw Aborning 2. The Priesthood of All Readers:'This good had full as bad a Consequence' 3. Swift and the Modern Personal Essay: A Tale of a Tub and 'A Modest Proposal' 4. Tripping and Troping , Inside and Out:Surface, Depth, and the 'Converting Imagination' in A Tale of a Tub 5. 'The Physical Act of Worship, not the Mental Act of Belief or Assent': Reading An Argument against Abolishing Christianity

This chapter explores the classical form of the essay; the ethical proof; the use of the two major rhetorical devices, diminution and refining; and the less frequently used devices. Jonathan Swift's best and most popular ironical essay, Modest Proposal, reveals Swift at once as master ironist and master classical rhetorician. The narration contains the statement of the proposal, with some further preparation for the proof. A revolutionary new proposal is insinuated in a traditional, respected form. The steady reiteration of man-to-animal diminution tends to establish it in the reader's consciousness as a norm, and thus the rhetorical device becomes one of the means of establishing the ironic norm of the essay. The rhetorical device is, however, usually meant to name an extended set piece of description. Modest Proposal is a brilliant example of the use of non-argumentative devices of rhetorical persuasion.

Draft Law to Create the Green CardThe following article is the translated text of the Green Card draft law endorsed by Member of Parliament Neematallah Abi Nasr and submitted to the Minister of Justice Ibrahim Najjar for review. Yet Another Modest ProposalWhen Jonathan Swift published his satirical essay “A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public” in 1729, he little knew that he was starting a chain of events that would in time become a common pastime – the writing of “Modest Proposals” on a vast range of subjects. Member of Parliament Neematallah Abi Nasr recently offered his own “modest proposal” with regard to the issue of Nationality Law in Lebanon, to wit that the state should offer the families of Lebanese women a Green Card similarto the system normally practiced in the USA and elsewhere in the western world.