Not the least remarkable aspect of Jonathan Swift's defense of hypocrisy, the Project for the Advancement of Religion (1709), is the extent to which Swift foregrounds the very word hypocrisy. Swift makes no attempt to downplay the most controversial aspects of his program for bestowing material rewards on virtue and its simulacra alike, and the rhetorical success of Swift's Project depends in a very real sense on his careful management of two terms. One of these is hypocrisy. The other is livery, a word whose signification in eighteenth-century discourse is curiously divided: used metaphorically, it offers a conventional analogy for appearances or surfaces, while its literal meaning is associated with an explosive set of arguments about the rights and duties of the servant class. As Swift puts it in the Project, “Hypocrisy is much more eligible than open Infidelity and Vice: It wears the Livery of Religion, it acknowledgeth her Authority, and is cautious of giving Scandal” (11.57). The phrase “the Livery of Religion” momentarily undermines Swift's positive argument for hypocrisy as the best approximation of virtue, introducing into his metaphor a key word in contemporary attacks on the behavior and morals of servants in livery.

The rhetorical instabilities that accompany the intrusion of anti-servant polemic into moral writing affect a wide range of texts produced and published at the beginning of the eighteenth century.