Despite the trend in recent decades to view Gulliver’s Travels as a general satire on the folly of mankind, this chapter argues that the Travels is a deeply partisan book. Swift’s text made a specific intervention in contemporary debates about the structural vulnerability of English political institutions. Most of the societies that Gulliver encounters are in terminal decline, resulting from political maladministration. The chapter highlights distinctive parallels of language and thought between Bolingbroke’s oppositional leaders for The Craftsman and the King of Brobdingnag’s assessment of the debased English constitution. Like the essays in The Craftsman, the Travels suggests that English politics has been corrupted by rigged elections, parliamentary placemen, and standing armies. References in the voyage to Lilliput suggest that this corruption of the English constitution, which had now reached a nadir under the ‘Robinocracy’ of Sir Robert Walpole, could be traced back to the death of Queen Anne, the persecution of his former ministers, and the suppression of the Tory opposition. Swift’s general satire against debased political institutions was therefore aimed at a specific political target: the men who based them.

What did Plato mean when in Timaeus he characterised his account of the created world as an εἰκὼς μῦθος? The phrase is typically translated ‘a probable story’, ‘a likely tale’. Connotations that modern empiricist philosophy of science might attach to those expressions are misleading. Careful attention to the two terms Plato uses, and their resonances in previous Greek literature and thought, suggests instead the strikingly oxymoronic: ‘a rational/reasonable myth’. This is not, however, the reasonableness of deduction or of inference to the best explanation, but of the practical reasoning in which a supremely good designer would probably engage, assuming that he wanted to make his product as like himself as possible, but from materials with their own properties not of his making. Practical wisdom cannot aspire to the same standards of rigour as theoretical wisdom can. It can attempt only the most reasonable option given such constraints – as could any account of why that choice was made. Hence the importance of the Timaeus’ initial reminder of Socrates’ construction of a political order (witness the Republic), and its address to a company competent in politics as well as mathematics, interested no less in κόσμος as political order than in cosmology.