ABSTRACT
The intellectual foundations of Gulliver's Travels can be distinguished in Swift's English: his clever, seemingly effortless writing stems from his familiarity and confrontation with established ideas and institutions. The structure of Gulliver's Travels can be outlined in terms of major categories of political theory since Plato. Part I, for example, set in Lilliput, is both Machiavellian and Hobbesian, stressing two varieties of royal rule, both of which admit a limited, two-way relationship between the ruler and the ruled. Part II is on properly functioning government, which is Aristotelian, but on defending one's own particular way of life against one's enemies, which is Augustinian. Part III, on mathematics and the scientific academy, could be viewed as modeled on both Lucretius and Francis Bacon, with its theoretical explorations of the very nature of nature, reminiscent of Lucretius's notion of the atom. Part IV, on the Yahoos and Houyhnhnms and on Gulliver's decline into madness, can be linked to the classic utopian works.
