Abstract
THE AIM OF THIS ESSAY is to provide a context for some of Swift's writings which will demonstrate the advantages to be gained from seeing him as a member of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy of the eighteenth century. Two Irish writers Hutcheson and Burke and two English writers -Shaftesbury and Mandeville have been chosen to illustrate some of the features of an intellectual background against which Gulliver 's Travels and A Modest Proposal may be read. Contemporary attitudes towards travel literature, towards economic theory, including the role of emulative consumption as it manifested itself in the new emphasis upon fashion in clothes, towards atheism, despotic power and, most of all, towards what Hutcheson called 'national love' and the bearing of all these issues upon the Anglo-Irish ascendancy's position in Ireland, constitute the dominant themes of the discussion. The limited treatment given them here is meant to do no more than indicate the complexity and importance of the Irish intellectual tradition in this period.
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