The period from the late 1600s through the 1700s is known as the Enlightenment, a time when many writers promoted scientific reasoning as a means...

Swift's essay satirizes the easy acceptance of rational, "scientific" solutions to social problems in a number of ways. One way is to advocate a solution that, according to cold, rationalistic reasoning, makes sense. Swift only accounts for the children of Ireland as economic units, not as human beings.  Seen in this light, they are burdens on their desperately poor parents and Irish society as a whole. Swift's shocking "proposal" to breed, raise, and sell children...

Swift's essay satirizes the easy acceptance of rational, "scientific" solutions to social problems in a number of ways. One way is to advocate a solution that, according to cold, rationalistic reasoning, makes sense. Swift only accounts for the children of Ireland as economic units, not as human beings.  Seen in this light, they are burdens on their desperately poor parents and Irish society as a whole. Swift's shocking "proposal" to breed, raise, and sell children as food for the English is thus framed as a rational solution to a serious social problem. Of course, it is because we cannot overlook the fact that the children are in fact human beings, and that the moral implications of such a policy would be unacceptable to say the least, that his proposal works as the wickedly pointed satire that it is.

So the basic premise of the essay satirizes the cold rationalism of some social reformers of the day. Swift also writes in the style of such a reformer. His essay is full of facts and figures, calculating, for example, that the cost of raising a "beggar's child" is about "two shillings per annum," asserting that the sensibility of his proposal becomes evident when he estimates that the child's parents can probably sell him for ten shillings at one year of age. He goes on and on, citing a litany of statistics to support his point which is, of course, morally untenable. So in both substance and style, Swift satirizes the social reformers of his day who relied excessively on reason and science. He wants to show that solutions to the problems confronting mankind cannot be undertaken without giving due consideration to human morality.