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In Defense of the Small: Why Swift's Lilliputians Were Right All Along

In Defense of the Small: Why Swift's Lilliputians Were Right All Along

For nearly three centuries, readers have laughed at the Lilliputians — their pettiness, their bureaucratic absurdities, their wars over the correct end from which to crack an egg. But what if the joke has always been on us? This essay argues that Swift's tiny civilization is not a caricature of smallness but a mirror held up to every large and self-important society that has ever existed — including our own.