what was Swift actively involved in?

I'm not exactly sure what you are referring to here. Swift intended to lampoon a series of proposals that were being published at the time about solving Ireland’s economic problems, although many of them were unfeasible and unhelpful. By asserting, like these other pamphlets, to have a cure-all solution, Swift exposed the naiveté of such a view. “A Modest Proposal” was also satirizing the new trend in political thought that applied scientific innovations to political questions.