Attacks on the status of the mandarin classes have become a common feature of public debate since Michael Gove’s famous declaration that we have all "had enough of experts". But Gove echoes some old themes in British political writing. This paper uncovers the source of those echoes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writings on the ‘craft’ of government, and in contemporary satirical literature. In A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver’s Travels Jonathan Swift combined satire on Sir Robert Walpole’s technocratic statecraft with a broader attack on the emerging professional classes. But the violence of his satire was mitigated by his sense of how manual expertise might serve as a positive analogy for a statesmanship that is at once materially grounded and ethically ambitious. But does this eighteenth-century line of thinking still resonate in today’s crisis of expertise?

中文翻译：

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讽刺作家和专家

自从迈克尔·戈夫 (Michael Gove) 著名的声明“我们都受够了专家”以来，对普通话阶级地位的攻击已成为公共辩论的一个共同特征。但戈夫在英国政治写作中呼应了一些古老的主题。本文揭示了 17 和 18 世纪关于政府“手艺”的着作以及当代讽刺文学中这些回声的来源。在《浴缸的故事》和《格列佛游记》中，乔纳森·斯威夫特 (Jonathan Swift) 将讽刺罗伯特·沃波尔爵士 (Sir Robert Walpole) 的技术官僚治国之道与对新兴职业阶层的更广泛攻击相结合。但他讽刺的暴力性被他的感觉减轻了，因为他认为手工专业知识可以作为一种政治家的积极比喻，政治家既有物质基础，又有道德野心。