4. RADICAL DISSENTERS

While Edmund Burke is rarely admitted into the pantheon of the British Enlightenment, his critics, commonly labelled radicals, are firmly entrenched there. Yet they make strange bedfellows with the moral philosophers who were the charter members, as it were, of the Enlightenment. Richard Price and Joseph Priestley wrote books that were explicitly directed against Francis Hutcheson and the Scottish school of philosophy.¹ And Thomas Paine and William Godwin made reason so preeminent as to leave little or no room for anything like a moral sense. Philosophically and theologically, as well as politically, they were far removed from the Enlightenment of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, Smith and Hume.²¹

It might even be said that these radicals belong more to the history of the French and American Enlightenments than to the British. Paine spent much of his adult life in America and France, and was a member, not of the British Parliament but of the French National Convention. Even after his imprisonment during the Terror and the withdrawal of his French citizenship, he remained in France, returning, finally, not to England but to America, where he died. Priestley was awarded an honorary seat in the National Assembly but chose to live in America rather than France; he, too, died in America. Price and Godwin did live out their lives in England, as ardent sympathizers of the French Revolution. Godwin’s great work had more in common with Condorcet than with any of his own compatriots.

One historian refers to Price and his associates as “late Enlightenment luminaries,” to distinguish them, presumably, from the other luminaries.³ Yet this chronological distinction is deceptive. Smith and Price were almost exact contemporaries (both were born in 1723, and Price died a year after Smith, in 1791). Burke was younger than both and survived them both, and was only several years older than Priestley and Paine. Adam Ferguson, born the same year as Smith and Price, outlived them all. Only Godwin was of a distinctively later generation. What differentiated the two groups was not their age but their ideas. The radicals did not represent a late Enlightenment in Britain so much as an alternative Enlightenment—a “dissident” Enlightenment, in the political as well as theological sense of that word.

In the preface to his very first work, Burke made one of his prescient observations: “The same engines which were employed for the destruction of religion might be employed with equal success for the subversion of government.”⁴ Thirty-odd years later, he had reason to recall that remark, as the French Enlightenment gave way to the French Revolution—the destruction of religion, as he saw it, culminating in the subversion of government. The English radicals had already set out on that path. Unlike Hume, who never translated his religious skepticism into religious radicalism (the disestablishment of the church), still less into political radicalism (republicanism), these radicals—“rational dissenters,” as they were known—pursued their religious dissent as vigorously as their political dissent. Indeed, both were part of a single agenda.⁵ They sought to illegitimize the political order to the same degree, and for the same reasons, as the religious establishment.

Paine was a deist of a familiar, if extreme form, his deism verging on a rationalism that allowed for the largest claims of reason in religious as well as in political affairs. Price’s Unitarianism had a more theological basis. A convert to Arianism, he combined that with a Lockeanism that he took to be the political analogue of Arianism, free will and reason joining together to assure the religious autonomy of the individual and the political liberty of the citizen.⁶ Priestley took a different heretical turn, toward Socinianism rather than Arianism and toward materialism rather than rationalism; thus, he rejected both the the divinity of Christ and free will.

The three also differed on their attitude to republicanism. Priestley, often credited with originating the utilitarian principle of the greatest happiness of the greatest number, was less concerned with the participation of the people in government (“political liberty,” as he put it) than with their personal liberty (“civil liberty”); political liberty had the secondary role of guarding and guaranteeing civil liberty. Thus, he was less insistent than Paine or Price upon a republican form of government.⁷ But the three of them were at one, and were generally viewed as such, in rejecting the existing political as well as religious order and in welcoming a radical reformation that would subvert both.

The quarrel between Burke and Price has been immortalized in the Reflections . But it had its origins fifteen years earlier at the time of the American Revolution, when Price published his Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, defending the Americans on the same principles he was later to invoke in praise of the French—and in disparagement of the English. It is generally assumed that Burke had this book in mind two years later (although he did not mention Price by name) when he criticized those who conceived of free government in terms of “metaphysical liberty and necessity” rather than “moral prudence and natural feeling.” Because he himself was so strongly identified with the American cause, he may have felt it necessary to dissociate himself from writers like Price, who called any government not willed by the people a “tyranny and usurpation.” ⁸

This exchange (so to speak) between Price and Burke on the subject of America was prophetic, for it was in almost exactly the same terms that they conducted the great debate on the French Revolution. Price’s sermon in 1789, “The Love of Our Country,” ostensibly commemorating the English Revolution a century earlier but actually eulogizing the French, might well have gone unnoticed (certainly for posterity, if not for contemporaries) had it not provoked Burke’s Reflections. Price criticized England for violating what he took to be the basic rights established by its revolution: religious liberty, resistance to the abuse of power, and self-government. The last was belied, he claimed, by the inequality of representation, a defect in the constitution so gross and palpable as to vitiate legitimate government and make of the existing government “nothing but an usurpation.” It was time, he declared, for an “amendment ” in human affairs: “the dominion of kings changed for the dominion of laws, and the dominion of priests giving way to the dominion of reason and science.” His peroration must have been especially pleasing to the French National Assembly, to whom he sent the sermon together with a congratulatory message. “Tremble all ye oppressors of the world! Take warning all ye supporters of slavish governments and slavish hierarchies! . . . Struggle no longer against increasing light and liberality. Restore to mankind their rights and consent to the correction of abuses, before they and you are destroyed together.”⁹

An advocate of free trade and minimal government, Price regarded himself as a disciple of Smith. But Smith did not so regard him. Shortly after Price’s sermon, Smith appended to a new edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments two sections implicitly directed against Price, one criticizing the principle of reason as the basis of morality, the other refuting the idea that “the love of our own country” derived from “the love of mankind.”¹⁰ Privately, Smith was even more derogatory. “I have always considered him,” he wrote to an economist friend, “a factious citizen, a most superficial philosopher, and by no means an able calculator [economist].”¹¹

It remains something of an embarrassment to latter-day radicals that Price, Priestley, and Paine all professed to be disciples of Smith. In fact, Priestley was more laissez-fairist than Smith himself. Taking it as the fundamental maxim of political economy that the state not interfere in the economy, Priestley deduced from this principle (as Smith did not) that the Poor Laws should be abolished. A state provision for the poor, he argued, taxed the industrious and rewarded the idle, encouraging the poor to become improvident and spend everything in the most extravagant manner, knowing that the state would provide for them. Lacking all prudence and foresight, they were reduced to the condition of beasts. It would have been better, Priestley concluded, if government had not interfered with the poor at all, the needy being sufficiently taken care of by the charity of the well disposed.¹² Nor should the government interfere (as Smith had proposed) in the education of children; every man should be free to educate his children “in his own way.”¹³ By the same token, the government should have no part in religion. Again, unlike Smith, for whom religious liberty meant religious toleration and a plurality of sects, Priestley insisted upon nothing less than the disestablishment of the Church of England.

Paine, too, opposed the Poor Laws, and for the same reasons, because they penalized industriousness and caused an unwanted intrusion of the state into the economy. But it was not only the economy that he wanted to protect from the state; it was society itself. Common Sense, published in America shortly before its Revolution, and Rights of Man, published in England shortly after the French Revolution (in rebuttal to Burke’s Reflections ), were vigorous defenses of both revolutions in the name of reason and rights. They also contained trenchant arguments for a minimal government based upon a sharp distinction between society and state.

Society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices.¹⁴

Society is in every state a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil.¹⁵

It is but few general laws that civilized life requires, and those of such common usefulness that whether they are enforced by the forms of government or not, the effect will be nearly the same.¹⁶

Society performs for itself almost everything which is ascribed to government.¹⁷

These passages go well beyond Smith in their distrust of government. The Wealth of Nations, published only months after Common Sense, treated government respectfully, assigning it such important “positive” functions as the military protection of society (the invention of firearms, for example, which might seem to be pernicious, was “certainly favorable both to the permanency and to the extension of civilization”); the administration of justice, upon which depended the liberty as well as security of every individual; and the provision of public works and institutions (such as schools for the poor) which were beyond the resources of individuals or groups.¹⁸ Even on the subject of taxation, Smith was far more moderate than Paine, distinguishing different kinds of taxes in terms of equity and efficiency.

Paine, on the other hand, regarded government itself as little more than an instrument for raising taxes. Monarchy was “a mere court artifice to procure money”; the English constitution was “the most productive machine for taxation that was ever invented”; “taxes were not raised to carry on wars, but . . . wars were raised to carry on taxes.”¹⁹ In contrast to Burke’s theory of the state as “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born,” Paine posited a radical disjunction of past, present, and future. The living, he insisted, owed nothing to the dead. Each “generation” was a new “creation,” beholden only to itself.²⁰ He even went beyond Price, who illegitimized the English constitution because it did not fulfill the promise of the Glorious Revolution. Paine illegitimized it at its birth, so to speak, as the product of conquest rather than reason. William III could not atone for the original sin of William the Conqueror.

The second part of Rights of Man, published in 1792, was even more subversive than the first—and more successful, partly because the price had been reduced from three shillings to sixpence, and partly because of the publicity resulting from Paine’s flight to Paris following his indictment on the charge of seditious libel. In denouncing the monarchy—any monarchy—as illegitimate and tyrannical, Paine in effect sanctioned revolution, compounding the offense a few months later in a pamphlet calling for a convention to draft a republican constitution—this while England was engaged in war with France.

If Smith would have been appalled by the revolutionary message of Rights of Man, he would have been pleased by some of its reflections on commerce and self-interest.

All the great laws of society are laws of nature. Those of trade and commerce, whether with respect to the intercourse of individuals, or of nations, are laws of mutual and reciprocal interest. They are followed and obeyed because it is the interest of the parties to do so, and not on account of any formal laws their governments may impose or interpose. ²¹

I have been an advocate for commerce, because I am a friend to its effects. It is a pacific system, operating to unite mankind by rendering nations, as well as individuals, useful to each other. . . . The most effectual process is that of improving the condition of man by means of his own interest; and it is on this ground that I take my stand. If commerce were permitted to act to the universal extent it is capable of, it would extirpate the system of war and produce a revolution in the uncivilized state of government. ²²

A very different Paine, however, emerged in the final pages of the second part of Rights of Man. Just as Smith, toward the end of the Wealth of Nations, seemed to reverse course by suddenly presenting the image of workers so debilitated by the division of labor as to necessitate a state-supported educational system, so Paine, toward the end of his book, took a turn that appeared to belie the principles he had expounded earlier. After arguing, for two hundred–odd pages, in favor of a society liberated from government by a free economy, a flourishing commerce, and the absence of taxes, Paine introduced an elaborate program of social reform that required the active intervention of government and the imposition of new taxes. In place of the Poor Laws, he proposed a comprehensive welfare system to be subsidized by the government, including a budget worked out in precise book-keeping detail. The plan was designed for “that class of poor which need support”—one fifth of the population, Paine estimated (which was larger than the current class of paupers). It provided allowances for poor children and the aged, with different sums for those of different ages; education grants for children who did not qualify as poor but who could not afford schooling; birth and marriage stipends for those who applied for them; funeral expenses for people who died away from home; and workhouses to employ and if necessary house and feed the “casual poor.” All of this was to be financed partly by excise taxes (which would eventually be phased out), but largely by a system of progressive taxation on estates, ranging from 3d per pound on the first £500 to a confiscatory 20s per pound at the highest level. Thus, the Poor Laws (“those instruments of civil torture”) would be replaced by a system that would provide relief not as a charity but as “a right.”²³

Paine must have been aware of the contrast between his proposals and Smith’s. Smith, too, had favored a system of progressive taxation (although not a confiscatory one) that would benefit the poor, with taxes on luxuries rather than necessities, a land tax but not a window tax, and taxes on the salaries of higher officials but not on the wages of workers. And the Poor Laws he approved of were intended only for paupers, not, like Paine’s plan, for the far larger class of the poor. In one respect, Smith’s was the bolder proposal: his education scheme called for government subsidies and supervision, whereas Paine’s provided for education allowances to parents who would be responsible for finding teachers for their children. “Distressed clergymen’s widows,” he suggested, would suit that purpose.²⁴

To some historians, Paine’s program was a harbinger of the “welfare state,” a “state system of social security,” even “social democracy.”²⁵ It differed from them, however, in one crucial feature. Where the welfare state and social security, to say nothing of social democracy, are “across the board” programs, designed for the population as a whole, Paine’s was intended specifically for the “class of poor.” Nor did Paine’s later pamphlet, Agrarian Justice, bring him, as one historian claims, “to the threshold of socialism.” ²⁶ So far from seeking the abolition of private property, Paine was writing in rebuttal to “Gracchus” Babeuf, who favored an “Agrarian Law” that would have done just that. Defending the principle of the private ownership of land, Paine proposed only some measure of redistribution by way of taxation and allowances.

If the economic views of the British radicals do not conform to present-day notions of radicalism, some of their religious views may be still more disconcerting—or would be, were they more widely known—to those who celebrate them as the apostles of reason. Paine was the more familiar type of rational dissenter. “I believe in one God, and no more,” he announced in the opening pages of Age of Reason. “I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.”²⁷ His own mind was so self-sufficient that he boasted he did not own a copy of the Bible. He apparently acquired one, however, before writing the second part of that book, because there he engaged in a systematic refutation of the scriptures, including a denial of the miracles of the Bible, of revelation, and, finally, of Christianity itself (but not, he added, the idea of God).

This was rational dissent in its classic form. But Price and Priestley were decidedly not in this genre, although the term is often applied to them and may even have originated with them. Nor can their religious beliefs be dismissed as the amiable, inconsequential eccentricities of otherwise rational men. Those beliefs were, in fact, at the heart of their radicalism—their political as well as religious radicalism.²⁸ Priestley himself wrote a critique of Age of Reason, agreeing with Paine in rejecting the Trinity and divinity of Christ, but ardently affirming the Bible as the product of divine revelation. Indeed, both Price and Priestley were obsessed by religion, not in the sense that an aggressively anti-religious thinker may be said to be obsessed by it, making a religion of irreligion, but in a truly religious sense. They were as passionate in pursuing scriptural evidence for the millennium—a spiritual and temporal millennium in one—as they were in their opposition to any established church. William Hazlitt called Priestley “the Voltaire of Unitarianism.”²⁹ But Voltaire would have been appalled by Priestley’s apocalyptic millenarianism based upon a literal reading of biblical prophecies as revealed truth.

For Price, as for Priestley, the rebellion against a religious establishment was based as much upon religion itself as upon reason. The disestablishment of the church was to be accompanied by the overthrow of the monarchy and the dissolution of all civil and ecclesiastical authorities, thus preparing the way for the millennium, complete with the resurrection of Christ and of all mankind. Price’s account of the American Revolution as portending the final stage of history, when the “old prophecies would be verified” and “the last universal empire” of reason, virtue, and peace would be established,³⁰ may sound like the “city on a hill” credo of American evangelicals. But it went beyond that in affirming, not symbolically or figuratively but literally, the coming of the millennium, not in the distant future but in the present, and not in an otherworld but on this earth. Sedulously scouring the scriptures for prophecies and catastrophes, Price related them to current events and to the imminent appearance of the Messiah, who would come “in glory to abolish death, to judge mankind, to execute justice on the wicked, and to establish an everlasting kingdom, in which all the virtuous and worthy shall meet, and be completely and unchangeably happy.”³¹

Priestley’s millenarianism was even more remarkable than Price’s, not only because he himself was a respected scientist (a chemist), but also because he combined millenarianism with the rigorously materialistic and deterministic philosophy of his mentor, David Hartley. Now remembered as the father of associational psychology, Hartley was also (this is less well known) a fervent believer in the literal, empirical truth of scriptural prophecy. Like Hartley (but unlike Price), Priestley rejected the dualism of mind and matter and with it the idea of free will. But he believed all the more in the resurrection of Christ, the details of which he disputed at some length with Price. For Price, the soul did not die with the death of the body but only slept, awaiting resurrection; for Priestley, the resurrection was all the more miraculous because the soul, inseparable from the body, had died with the body.

It is ironic that Burke’s conventional, latitudinarian idea of religion should have disqualified him (for many historians) from membership in the Enlightenment, whereas the millenarianism of Priestley and Price did not. Their millenarianism, moreover, was not the bland utopianism that infected so many radicals. Nor was it inspired by the heady experiences of the American and French Revolutions, for it long pre-dated those events. “Whatever was the beginning of this world,” Priestley had predicted in 1768, “the end will be glorious and paradisiacal, beyond what our imaginations can now conceive.” A few years later, he foresaw the downfall of church and state leading to “some very calamitous, but finally glorious, events.” ³² At the height of the Terror in France, and from the safety of his home in America, Priestley wrote of himself, in the third person: “The Declaration of Rights in one hand, and the Book of Revelation in the other, Priestley awaited the imminent fall of the Papacy and the Ottoman Empire and the return of Jews to Judea.”³³ The Bible also confirmed him in the assurance that all the monarchies in Europe would be destroyed: the ten horns of the great beast in Revelation corresponded to the ten crowned heads of Europe, the first of those horns falling off with the execution of the king of France. Even this scenario—the destruction of the papacy and monarchy and the repatriation of Jews—was relatively restrained compared with his prediction of the return, within twenty years, of Christ to earth.³⁴ He regretted that he himself might not live to see that glorious event, but he comforted Benjamin Rush (the noted American physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence) with the thought that Rush was probably young enough to witness it.³⁵

William Godwin also looked forward to a millennium—a thoroughly secular one, however. He was more truly a rational dissenter than the others because his vision of the future was based upon an idea of reason that left no room for any religion, even natural religion, let alone for the revelations of the Bible. He was also more radical than the others, his commitment to liberty being as absolute as his commitment to reason. His major work, published in 1793—An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness— professed to be based upon a universal science of politics and morals, a demonstration of “the one best mode of social existence” for all of mankind, where all individuals would be perfectly free and perfectly rational.³⁶

Unlike the other radicals, who subscribed to one or another version of deism, Godwin was an avowed atheist. Where they called themselves disciples of Smith, Godwin abhorred the very idea of political economy, dismissing the interests motivating any political economy as immoral and irrational. ³⁷ Where they recommended, at most, a partial redistribution of property, Godwin proposed the entire abolition of private property. Where they sought to replace monarchical government with republican government, Godwin wanted to do away with government itself. And not only government, but all the institutions created by government: constitutions, laws, juries, courts, contracts, prisons, punishments, schools. And not only the institutions of government, but those of society: religion, marriage, the family. And not only these official and quasi-official institutions, but all collective or cooperative enterprises, whether voluntary or compulsory, having to do with either work or leisure. Concerts and plays, for example, were oppressive because rational men had no desire to “repeat words and ideas not their own,” to “execute the compositions of others,” or to engage in activities requiring an “absurd and vicious cooperation.”³⁸

The principle behind all these injunctions and proscriptions was the sovereignty of reason. Only in the absence of all oppressive institutions (and all institutions were, by nature, oppressive) could mankind be thoroughly rational—and, being rational, also virtuous, free, and equal. There would be no passion or prejudice to inhibit the intellect, no error or falsehood to stand in the way of the truth, no self-love or self-interest to interfere with benevolence, no acquisitiveness or competitiveness to undermine equality, no coercion or cooperation to restrict individuality. Without families to divert them from their higher obligations, individuals would be able to devote themselves to humanity at large. And without marriage (that “most odious” of all institutions) or other contracts to bind them to a future course of action, they would be rational and free at every moment of their lives.³⁹

In a much quoted and criticized passage, Godwin illustrated his “science of morals” by positing a situation in which the philosopher Fénelon and his chambermaid were trapped in a fire and only one of them could be rescued. Godwin had no doubt that it should be Fénelon, because he was more worthy and important than the maid, just as a man was more worthy and important than a beast. The choice would be the same if the chambermaid happened to be the rescuer’s wife or mother. “What magic is there in the pronoun ‘my’ to overturn the decisions of everlasting truth? My wife or my mother may be a fool or a prostitute, malicious, lying or dishonest. If they be, of what consequence is it that they are mine?”⁴⁰ In the second edition of Political Justice, hoping to pacify his critics, Godwin changed the chambermaid to a valet, and the wife or mother who might be a prostitute to a brother or father who might be profligate.

Toward the end of the book, contemplating the inventions that would enable one man to do what now required the cooperative effort of many (half an hour a day, he predicted, would suffice to provide all of a person’s needs), Godwin cited the “conjecture” of Benjamin Franklin that “mind would one day become omnipotent over matter.” Carrying out that thought (to a point hardly intended by Franklin), Godwin suggested that just as political and social affairs could be conducted in a purely voluntary manner, so could all bodily functions. “If volition can now do something, why should it not go on to do still more and more?” If it could cure all our social ills, surely it could cure our physical and mental ills as well. The result would be an infinite prolongation of life and the “total extirpation of the infirmities of our nature”—disease, sleep, languor, anguish, melancholy, resentment.⁴¹

With the extirpation of all those infirmities would come, finally, the extirpation of that other infirmity: sexuality. Godwin opened his book with the self-evident principle that “the happiness of the human species is the most desirable object for human science to promote; and that intellectual and moral happiness or pleasure is extremely to be preferred to those which are precarious and transitory.”⁴² By the end of the book it appeared that sex was the most “precarious and transitory” of pleasures. “The tendency of a cultivated and virtuous mind is to render us indifferent to the gratification of sense,” especially that of a “mere animal function.” Thus, an enlightened mankind could look forward to the diminution and eventual elimination of sexuality. Anticipating the obvious objection that this would soon lead to the elimination of mankind itself, Godwin introduced an even bolder proposition: that men might become immortal. He did not commit himself to this as a certainty, only as a real possibility within the lifetime of “the present race of men.”

The men therefore who exist when the earth shall refuse itself to a more extended population will cease to propagate, for they will no longer have any motive, either of error or duty, to induce them. In addition to this they will perhaps be immortal. The whole will be a people of men, and not of children. Generation will not succeed generation, nor truth have in a certain degree to recommence her career at the end of every thirty years. . . . There will be no war, no crimes, no administration of justice, as it is called, and no government. Beside this, there will be neither disease, anguish, melancholy, nor resentment. Every man will seek, with ineffable ardor, the good of all.⁴³

After this heady vision of perfectibility, it was anticlimactic to be told that this was a matter of “probable conjecture,” which did not affect the “grand argument” of the rest of the book. ⁴⁴ This disclaimer, coming in the final sentence of the chapter, was too belated and tentative to detract from the dramatic image of mankind in a perfect and perpetual state of reason, virtue, and freedom. Moreover, that promise of perfectibility had pervaded the entire book. From the very beginning, Godwin pronounced the distinctive characteristic of man to be his “perfectibility.” ⁴⁵

In later editions, Godwin qualified some of these pronouncements. In 1796, he reaffirmed the principle of perfectibility, stopping short, however, of predicting the total elimination of sleep, disease, and death. Two years later, he slightly softened the condemnation of feelings, affections, even sensual and sexual pleasures. Marriage, for example, was slightly demoted, from being the “most odious” of all monopolies to being the “worst.” He even conceded that marriage could become a “salutary and respectable institution” if it allowed for liberty and “repentance” (presumably divorce).⁴⁶

What intervened between the first and third editions was Godwin’s meeting and love affair with the writer Mary Wollstonecraft. She had achieved some celebrity in 1790 with her Vindication of the Rights of Men, the first of several replies to Burke’s Reflections, anticipating Paine’s Rights of Man and establishing her credentials as an intellectual and a radical. Written in great haste (it appeared within weeks of the Reflections), her book was not so much an analysis of the rights of men— “men” in the plural—as a rambling, repetitive, passionate attack on Burke.²² Her Vindication of the Rights of Woman two years later (“woman” in the singular, perhaps modelled on Paine’s Rights of Man) was no more cohesive or systematic. Here Rousseau was the villain, his idea of education being especially objectionable because it consigned women to an inferior, domestic role—a role, Wollstonecraft bitterly reported, that most women accepted all too willingly. Few writers at the time, a recent editor of that work observes, were as critical of women. “She did not like women as they were. Indeed, that is putting it far too mildly. At times she seemed to despise her sex. What she wanted above all was nothing short of a transformation of women into their opposite.” ⁴⁸ Like Professor Higgins in Shaw’s Pygmalion, she wanted women to become like men, or, rather, like men at their best—rational, independent, well educated; only then would they be good wives, mothers, and citizens. (Education was a prominent theme in her book, and by far the most original and interesting part.)

Godwin was forty and Wollstonecraft thirty-seven when they met. He was a bachelor and almost certainly celibate. She had an illegitimate child from an earlier affair and had something of a reputation for promiscuity. The well-known author of the scientific tome that denigrated emotions and sexuality as irrational and immoral found himself writing love letters that were almost a parody of the form. The scandal was not their liaison—although that was hardly consistent with his views of sexuality—but their marriage (that “most odious” institution) a year later when she became pregnant. She died giving birth to the child. A few years later Godwin remarried, acquiring, along with a not very congenial wife, a substantial family entailing considerable financial obligations and involving him, in spite of his principled objections to commerce, in several unsuccessful publishing ventures.

The rest of Godwin’s life was no less at odds with his great work. He doted on his daughter Mary, and was dismayed when, at the age of sixteen, she ran off with Shelley, who was married and a father. Shelley, a great admirer of Godwin, acting on his mentor’s professed principles—the pursuit of freedom and happiness and the contempt for such oppressive conventions as monogamy or marriage—left his pregnant wife and took up residence with Mary, with whom he eventually had three children (while also having affairs with at least one, and possibly two, of her stepsisters). Godwin was unreconciled to this ménage and refused to see his grandson until, two years later, after Shelley’s wife had committed suicide, Shelley reluctantly agreed to marry Mary. Relating this happy event to his brother, Godwin boasted of his daughter’s marriage to the eldest son of a baronet. “You will wonder, I daresay,” he wrote, “how a girl without a penny of fortune should meet with so good a match. . . . For my part I care but little, comparatively, about wealth, so that it should be her destiny in life to be respectable, virtuous, and contented.”⁴⁹ If these sentiments were inconsistent with his principles, his behavior was even more so. So far from caring little about Shelley’s wealth, he cared enough about it to make repeated, and successful, demands for money—this even before the marriage, when they were barely on speaking terms.

Godwin had hoped to realize Benjamin Franklin’s dream of the triumph of mind over matter. Instead, he experienced the triumph of matter (the exigencies of his own life) over the creations of his own mind. This dramatic personal story may distract attention from the true drama of Political Justice, which looked forward to a polity that denied the very idea of polity (government, law, property, political economy), and envisaged a reformed humanity that defied the very idea of human nature (fallibility, mortality, sexuality, family). In his last important work, a four-volume history of England, Godwin reluctantly conceded the improbability of his millennial visions. “It is comparatively easy for the philosopher in his closet to invent imaginary schemes of policy, and to show how mankind, if they were without passions and without prejudices, might best be united in the form of a political community.” Unfortunately, he added, “men in all ages are the creatures of passion.”^{50 23}

If it is difficult to understand how Godwin could have entertained these illusions, it is even more difficult to understand why so many of his contemporaries were taken in by them. Political Justice appeared at a most inauspicious time, in February 1793, after France declared war on Britain and radicalism of any kind smacked of sedition. (Paine had been indicted and had fled to Paris only weeks before.) Yet the book was instantly hailed as a masterpiece and Godwin declared a genius. Three thousand copies of the two large volumes were sold at the considerable price of three guineas—which may have been its salvation, for the prime minister, William Pitt, refrained from proscribing it on the grounds that it could do no harm to those “who had not three shillings to spare.”⁵² Although it did reach some of the poor in cheap pirated editions and extracts, it had its greatest success among intellectuals. In London and at the universities, it was greeted as a new dispensation, with Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge declaring themselves Godwin’s disciples. His novel Adventures of Caleb Williams, published the following year and expressing some of the same views, was also enthusiastically received. Within a few years, however, the tide turned, partly because of the mockery caused by his private life, but also because events in France and at home created a more sober intellectual and political climate. It was only then that some of his most ardent admirers began to repudiate his views, as he himself, although only partially and regretfully, was eventually to do.

The initial popularity of Political Justice, however, takes some explaining. Some of its most audacious precepts seemed all the more plausible because they were familiar, carrying to the logical conclusion principles enunciated by his predecessors. As early as 1757, in his first book, Price announced that “reason alone, did we possess it in a higher degree,” was the basis for all human relations. “There would be no need of the parental affection were all parents sufficiently acquainted with the reasons for taking upon them the guidance and support of those whom nature has placed under their care, and were they virtuous enough to be always determined by those reasons.”⁵³ Similarly, Paine’s disparagement of government—“society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness”— came close to illegitimizing all government, providing the rationale for Godwin’s anarchic view of the state.²⁴ So, too, Priestley’s vision of a “glorious and paradisiacal” future anticipated by decades Godwin’s secularized millennium.

Then there was the French Revolution. One winces now at those all too familiar lines from Wordsworth’s Prelude: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, /But to be young was very Heaven!” Godwin himself was not young; he was thirty-seven when Political Justice was published. But the poets who were enraptured by it were young—Wordsworth was twenty-three, Coleridge twenty-one, Southey nineteen. They were attracted to the French Revolution, as Wordsworth put it, as to “the attraction of a country in romance!”—and to Godwin’s philosophy, as to a philosophy in romance. It might have been Godwin, rather than Wordsworth, celebrating Reason as the “prime enchantress,” liberating mankind from “the meagre, stale, forbidding ways / Of custom, law and statute.” To be sure, by Godwin’s time, the Revolution was beginning to lose its glamour. The execution of the king and queen, the declaration of war against Britain, and the establishment of the Terror—all of this was beginning to take the bloom off the revolution. But the romance of reason, of “human nature seeming born again” (Wordsworth again), died hard, and it took a while before the Romantics became reconciled to the death of that idyll.

Finally, over and beyond radicalism and romanticism there was the long tradition of millenarianism, which derived from a more ancient source. Seeking salvation in gnosis, in absolute knowledge or reason, the early Christian Gnostics rejected the institutions and arrangements of this world as profoundly, irremediably defective. Theirs was a consciously esoteric cult confined to those select few who could aspire to absolute reason. Modern millenarians democratized and secularized that ideology, making available to all of mankind what had been the privilege of the elite, and seeking to establish in this world the perfection of reason and virtue that Gnosticism had assigned to another world.

With Godwin, the radical Enlightenment in Britain reached its apogee. And with him, it died. What remained was the other Enlightenment, less dramatic but more practical and durable. Unlike the radicals who aspired to transform and rationalize Britain, the moral philosophers sought to reform and humanize it, to create an age of Enlightenment that was not an age of reason but, as one contemporary put it, “an age of benevolence.”⁵⁵