constantly coming up with outlandish and unworkable ways to cure society's problems.

When Gulliver lands in the land of the Houyhnhnms, he discovers a race of horses who are perfectly rational, unemotional, logical beings, and the uncivilized brutes of this society, the Yahoos, are human beings.  During this experience, Gulliver actually loses his own identity and considers himself a kind of Houyhnhnm rather than a human being, and when he returns to England, he can barely stand being around people, preferring horses for company.  Swift is satirizing anyone who chooses a philosophy over reality.

In the end, Swift has managed--through the framework of a child's fairy tale--to point out many problems in English society that need correction, and he has accomplished this without pointing overtly to specific people within English society.

'Gulliver's Travels'by Jonathon Swift is often thought of a children's book, yet it's unmerciful satire is aimed at adults. In this book he attempted to critcize some of the elements of the establishment and society he lived in through poking fun at it. He also wrote essays and pamphlets which outlined his grievances in a more direct way, but satire is often admired as a far more subtle and effective form of social critique as people are so often laughing at themselves. This art was not lost on some of his more enlightened contemporaries and he was often 'put down' by royal, establishment and government agencies. Any analysis of Swift's use of satire must pay attention to the way in which he attempted to disguise ferocious criticism by couching it in the seemingly ludicrous, comic or ridiculous.

One could write page after page analyzing Swift's use of satire in Gulliver's Travels.  Specifically, some of his targets are religious schisms, politicians, a hawkish war mentality, and gambling.  In general, he targets political, social, and economic institutions. Even more broadly, he is ridiculing human vice and folly.  Swift's methods of achieving this satire are numerous.  He mixes obvious parallels between his fictional world and his European world with more disguised parallels (in description of the big-endian issue and the channel that separates Lilliput from Blefuscu), for instance.  He also uses much verbal irony, as when he contradicts the evidence contained in the work itself by describing England as, "...the seat of virtue, piety, honor and truth,..."  Swift's targets and methods might be two places to start when analyzing his satire in Gulliver's Travels.

One aspect of Swift's style is to make Gulliver (and by extension, Swift's contemporaries) appear ludicrous through trying to explain human institutions to the various peoples he encounters. His attempts to describe the various causes of European wars to the leader of the peaceful Houyhnhnms, is a particularly relevant example:

Difference in opinions hath cost many millions of lives: for instance, whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh; whether the juice of a certain berry be blood or wine; whether whistling be a vice or a virtue; whether it be better to kiss a post, or throw it into the fire...Sometimes the quarrel between two Princes is to decide which of them shall dispossess a third of his dominions, where neither of them pretends to any right. Sometimes one Prince quarreleth with another, for fear the other should quarrel with him

European customs and mores make no sense to many of the peoples Gulliver encounters, and of course Swift's point is that we ought perhaps to to reconsider some of them. Swift also wrote his story at a time when travelogues of foreign, exotic lands were very much in vogue for European readers just becoming conscious of a much larger world. Swift was thus able to play on an emerging sense of relativism among some European intellectuals, as well as appeal to a common trope in contemporary literature. 

Gulliver also encounters utopias, or near utopias, such as those of the Brobdingnagians (and, for that matter, the Houyhnhnms.) But in each case, he raises important question as to whether these sorts of societies are obtainable for human beings. By portraying the Houyhnhnms, in particular, as horse-like beasts, he seems to be suggesting that human passions would make the kind of peaceful society they live in impossible. 

Swift also uses characters to allegorically represent some figures that would have been recognizable to his readers. Lilliput is England, while Blefuscu is France. Their ceaseless conflict is based on the most foolish of reasons, namely that some in Blefescu interfere in the Lilliputian controversy over whether to break an egg at the big end or the little end. This, of course, is a satire of the Stuarts' associations with France. Swift thus savagely mocks political issues that had led to constant warfare in the early eighteenth century. 

Gulliver's Travels satirizes many of humankind's most negative traits. In the first and second parts, including Gulliver's trips to Lilliput and Brobdingnag, Swift draws attention to the way in which we resort to war or physical conflict to solve many of our problems. Swift also satirizes the way we feel the need to control others' basic ways of life, in terms of religion, when he has Gulliver describe the Trameckstans and Slameckstans and their disagreements. Further, by showing the response of the peace-loving Brobdingnagian king to Gulliver's prideful boasting about gunpowder and other weaponry, Swift emphasizes our brutality and savagery.

Swift satirizes the contemporary rage for conducting useless experiments in the name of progress and science, even when they have no benefit whatsoever for humankind. Experiments like attempting to extricate sunshine from cucumbers or return human fecal matter to its original food matter are depicted as a waste of money, resources, and brainpower. Science can be incredibly useful, and its potential benefit to humanity should perhaps be the way in which we measure whether an experiment is worthwhile or not.

Swift also points out the way in which human beings are incredibly animalistic in part four. The Yahoos are very like us, a similarity that we ought to find somewhat troubling, given how disgusting and loathsome they are. Swift satirizes our greed and selfishness through these creatures.

Jonathan Swift wrote Gulliver's Travels as a direct satire of both the society and norms of the time, and as a reaction to the popularity of fantastic stories of far-off places. He deliberately patterned various parts of the novel after real-life people and events, showing human fallibility by examining culture through other viewpoints. The most important aspect of the novel is how it shows Gulliver, a standard representative of modern human culture, as incapable of surviving on his own in those other societies. For example, the food in Lilliput is far too small to sustain him on its own, and must be provided in enormous quantities. Conversely, in Brobdingnag almost everything is deadly, from a normal-sized human to a small wasp, and despite his instincts Gulliver must rely on the kindness of his hosts to remain alive. The scientists in Laputa know a lot about science, but cannot apply it to any real issues; the Houyhnhnms have a peaceful society based on logic, but have little emotion or creative passion. Each society that Gulliver discovers shows the failures of a specific area in Human society, and each also shows how old traditions become ingrained in culture until they are never questioned (for example, burial practices in Lilliput). Essentially, Gulliver's Travels serves as a satirical look at what makes Humans so unique in both their failures and successes, and posits the concept that even intelligence might be meaningless in the larger scheme of the universe.

One of the many aspects of Swift's satire in this work is the way that concepts such as colonisation and utopia are presented. The many different worlds that Gulliver discovers on his travels are meant to satirically present the themes of colonisiation and utopia, which were of much interest at the time, as indeed they remain of interest (albeit in different ways) today. Consider, for example, the way in which Gulliver apologises for not claiming the lands he visited for England in Part IV Chapter XII. He offers a very satirical presentation of colonisation:

They go on Shore to rob and plunder; they see an harmless People, are entertained with Kindness, they give the Country a new Name, they take formal Possession of it for the King, they set up a rotten Plank or a Stone for a Memorial, they murder two or three Dozen of the Natives, bring away a Couple more by Force for a Sample, return home, and get their Pardon. Here commences a New Dominion acquired with a Title by Divine Right... the Earth reeking with the Blood of its Inhabitants.

What is fascinating about this presentation of colonisation is how radical it would have been for Swift's time. He argues that it is nothing more than a criminal activity sanctioned by the state who deliberately exploit other peoples for their own benefit. Swift employs a typical satirical strategy of introducing something without naming it and then going on to name it in a different way from what we are expecting as readers, thus challenging our assumptions and thinking. In particular, the last phrase, in which colonisation is described as "the Earth reeking with the Blood of its Inhabitants," is one that is particularly revealing in terms of how Swift satirically presents colonisation. Swift's satire is thus terse and vigorous in the way that it forces his readers to examine their own assumptions and views, and hopefully to begin to change them.