A year ago, while reading Political Justice, I happened to see a bumper sticker a 4-wheel drive pick-up truck, of the type now so popular in the U.S.A. The sticker read: “We Live, Eat, Sleep, and Love on Our Cycles.” I also glimpsed two motorcycles loaded on that truck. In that bumper sticker, I recognized the typically American assertion of freedom: the truck’s owners were saying “This is the way we choose to spend our lives, and that choice may not be criticized by others, no matter what anyone else thinks of it.” I was about to shrug this off as harmless when I involuntarily thought of something I had been reading in Political Justice. Some of Godwin’s arguments about that which he terms “duty” came to mind. Godwin is a moralist, but he is not being simply moralistic in stating that duty is necessarily central to our lives. He is not claiming that we all have duties to parents, spouses, or children, simply because those are our relatives. It is Godwin who claimed that in some circumstances, it would be necessary to rescue a non-kinsman philosopher from a fire rather than our own brother or even mother. For Godwin, duty is more like a contextual principle of our effects on other people: it tells us, for example, that when we know people we encounter are destitute, then we must expend some of our energies in helping them — and that we have to give them that help instead of selfishly riding our bikes night and day.
Although I hope I have a grasp of what Godwin might have in mind by the term “duty,” I still have my suspicions about the notion. I am not entirely sure that if we were all to help others in need, rather than engaging in the many activities we have an interest in doing, the world necessarily would become a better place. I don’t know that much; Godwin thought he did know that much, and that is one of the problems of reading Political Justice today. Still, when I look inside my own mind and feelings, when I more deeply consider what it is I value and what I distrust, then these doubts about Godwin, while retaining their validity, become far less important. I find I am actually more sympathetic to what Godwin has to say about duty than I am to the kind of sentiment of freedom I see emblazoned upon that bumper. In fact, if I think about it, I realize that Godwin’s principle of duty is too vital to be denied. Lacking his assurance, as I lack his certainty throughout Political Justice, I find myself nonetheless in the position of affirming his principle. I would call duty, in his sense, as I would call several other of his principles, “back to the wall” societal propositions. They are principles which, if denied, would leave us with a world of authoritarian order and its inevitable chaos. If everyone in the world were content with the free disposal of their energy in the manner of the cycle riders, I do know that the world would be even worse than it is now. It is not a matter, as Max Stirner was to argue, of each of us having an ego that we must not and in fact cannot give over to the collective social self (which term is a mere illusion for Godwin as well as for Stirner). But a world of selfish egos would be an extremely bad world. I know that because I have seen plenty of that kind of world, and have been part of it. For me as a reader in the 1990s, Godwin’s principle of duty, like most of the principles he announces in Political Justice, must be questioned and restated so that it would lose its ring of certainty. But could I really reject it? When I reached the roots of the matter, I realized that my back was to the wall, and I could retreat no further: I could throw out duty, in his sense of the word, only if I were willing to accept a perfectly loathsome world.
Let us hear this in some of Godwin’s own words. We will quote him from a later passage on “virtue,” where duty has now become implicit.
If self-love be the only principle of action, there can be no such thing as virtue. Benevolent intention is essential to virtue. Virtue, where it exists in any eminence, is a species of conduct modelled upon a true estimate of the different reasons inviting us to a preference. He that makes a false estimate and prefers a trivial and partial good to an important and comprehensive one, is vicious. (Godwin, 1985; p. 385)
These few sentences bring out major aspects of Godwin’s thought.1) There is qualification as well as firmness: virtue has to reach some eminence or degree, or as we might say, it has to reach a level of critical mass, in order to be worth talking about in this context. It is not virtue in the abstract. Godwin takes pains to support his positions, not only by piling up reasons and assertions in their favor, but also by carefully attending to the scope and precise meanings of his terms. This quality can easily be missed if one notices only those statements which appear to be given as absolutes.) Second, virtue even in its “eminence” is contextual, that is, it is based on a true estimate of the different reasons inviting us to develop a preference. 3) That we can and do make such estimates is a function of our capacity for reason, but, 4) furthermore, human reason is integrally related to “benevolent intention.” As Chris Jones has shown, this is part of a common argument for universal benevolence in late 18th century; it is one that Godwin states coherently. Here we are far away from Freud’s understanding that the intellect is grounded in sadism, or, for that matter, from Jacques Lacan’s notion of the ego as basically paranoic. 5) Finally, we have to absorb the force of Godwin’s concluding word in the brief passage I have quoted: those who settle for “a trivial and partial good” when they know that there are important and comprehensive goods to be had instead, are not merely mistaken: they are ‘’vicious.” What could that mean?
Let me tackle that question by pointing out two basic approaches we might take. One of these is simply to chalk up the word “vicious” to Godwin’s moralist bias, in which he had been well schooled. Motorcycle riders, after all, are not usually “vicious,” and it is hardly desirable that we be led into thinking of them as such. On the other hand, if we search for Godwin’s meaning in more empathic ways, we can see that the huge aggregate of human devotion to trivial pursuits is indeed what vitiates social improvement. The reason is that we thoughtlessly channel so much of our constructive energies into activities that make no contribution to lifting any of humankind’s burdens, such as the continual resurgence of famine, the prevalence of displaced people, or the use of torture by governments. Such displacement can well be called “vicious.”
This approach to Godwin is experiential in John Dewey’s sense of the term. I seek to validate Godwin’s principles by appealing to all that I know, and by trying to understand his own experience in so far as it bears on his argument. In the mass of argumentation that makes up his 750-page text, I propose that we each start again, and that we ask what is valid now? But we must ask this about basic principles that matter to us, rather than give this text primarily an historical reading. This is the opposite of the validation performed recently by George Crowder, in his book Classical Anarchism. Crowder assures us that Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin all make very good sense, and that they basically agree with one another. But, we can say this only if we notice the underlying premise of their thinking, which was in each case a form of scientism, or the faith that scientific progress would sooner or later bring us into an enormously improved, virtually utopian world. But while the great classical anarchists may have thought that, that cannot be what makes them important for us now. Scientism is a rightly discredited faith.
Fortunately, even if Political Justice is indebted to scientism, the book is not all of a piece. Even the assurance of the triumph of reason is sometimes tempered with realization that it may never happen: “It may be to a certain degree doubtful,” writes Godwin in a chapter on obedience, “whether the human species will ever be emancipated from their present subjection and pupillage, but let it not be forgotten that this is their condition” (p. 248). We are not obliged to accept or reject the book’s arguments as a whole, and we have good indications within it that we need not do so. What Political Justice is, is a mass of arguments as well as one overall massive argument. Godwin may have believed that he had systematically laid out his case, but despite the form of the book, with its carefully counterpoised arguments and their opposing viewpoints, and despite its systematic division into 8 sequential “books,” Political Justice has an undeniable experimental quality. As Godwin recalls in the preface to the first edition, the book was not fully planned out. He only came to see what he was saying while writing it. The major revisions for the second edition of 1796, he admits, are not completely satisfactory, and in the third edition of 1798, he made further minor and major changes and deletions. All of this is well-discussed by Peter H. Marshall, in his biography of Godwin. Marshall also shows us a Notebook entry where Godwin planned still further important changes which he did not have opportunity to write (Marshall, 1984; p. 199), and other modifications were included in a book of essays Godwin published in 1797 but did not incorporate into his text (Marshall, pp. 163–68). Rather than apologizing for the book’s rough edges, Godwin says that he did not think it wise to “suppress any opinion because it was inconsistent with the prejudice or persuasion of others” (p. 72). Marshall also states, correctly, that the summary Godwin added in the 3rd edition is inconsistent with the text, and that he realized this. The book was intended to exhibit “perfect explicitness and unreserve,” and if this purpose turned out to be “an improper one,” no reversal was possible. For one thing, any impulse to reverse that experimental quality came too late into the writing process, and for another, the work would lose all integrity if the author “rescinded sentiments originally advanced as true,” as long as those statements could still be presented with their “original evidence” (p. 72).
A major dissonance that Godwin allows to remain in the book is its absolute faith in the certainty of truth alongside a recognition that human situations are immensely varied. Godwin greatly honors the “immutable” quality of truth (p. 117, etc.) and at the same time makes the strikingly modern statement that “Everything in man may be said to be in a state of flux; he is a Proteus whom we know not how to detain.” (p. 186). These claims may not be in formal contradiction, but they point to different intellectual worlds: the first toward the Age of Reason, and the second to an acceptance of change so inclusive that it must deny anything immutable, including truth. It is as if Godwin is saying that Reason, the greatest of human powers, and our only way of determining truth, is itself unchanging and not in flux; yet everything human is in flux. A number of students with whom I have read Political Justice are troubled by this disjunction.
But this is where I am going to draw a line of resistance to our modern preoccupations. It would be too easy to ‘”deconstruct” Political Justice, showing that its arguments are undercut by its own admissions. That would be sterile; and instead of accepting the book’s experimental quality and responding to it accordingly, we would only be reading it from a safe observational station. That the book undercuts its own propositions is a conclusion we would be foredoomed to reach anyway, given the assumptions of deconstruction. What would be valuable to do, however, is something quite different: to reconstruct (the term is John Dewey’s) this book’s central anarchist arguments by clearing our own pathways within it, and linking them, selectively, to the trails of reasoning that Godwin has provided. Based on my own thirty-five years of reading in this work, I am willing to predict that if we adopt such a procedure, we will find that lines of Godwin’s arguments will first seem to collapse — and then will be reconstructed.
The only major aspects of his thought that I think must be unequivocally rejected, insofar as these are critical for anarchist thought, are the two obvious ones which have been pointed out many times by Godwin scholars: one, that he falls into authoritarianism in his uncritical confidence that the opinion of one’s peers will form a non-coercive kind of pressure to control our tendencies toward anti-social behavior; and two, that we need not undertake any action “in concert,” that is, in cooperative consultation with other people. I have found that these strands in his argument tend to be written in a manner that betrays their unsoundness. The arguments for the fine effects of social pressure exerted by one’s fellows tend to be given in flat, confident declarations, lacking the usual density of consideration that Godwin gives to other topics.
As for his suspicions about more than two people managing to work together in a rational manner, his assertions tend to slip by without being properly argued. At one point Godwin asks, theoretically, why “men in a collective capacity” cannot be just as fully entrusted to follow the discipline of reason as men in their individual existences (p. 692), but this uncharacteristic admission is quickly passed over. Then later, Godwin seems to be anxious and impatient about the whole topic of cooperative reasoned action, and reaches for the easy answer that this may not even be necessary: “We ought to be able to do without one another” (p. 761). In the context of the many vigorously considered problems in the book, this vacuous “ought” is a low point, Godwin’s equivalent of mumbling under his breath.
Locating these major weak points is not difficult; what is interesting about them is their conjunction with weak writing, as if Godwin himself could not identify adequately with what he was trying to say. The real problem for readers sympathetic to anarchism, is how best to deal with the many strong points of the argument, points which often need to be restated, qualified, reconstructed and — if there is to be any anarchist future — defended.
I propose that a creative method for accomplishing such a reading is to do what I was beginning to do in my example of the motorcycle riders: consider the various propositions put forth and ask, by bringing to bear our own fullest experience and knowledge, if we dare to reject what Godwin is saying. I have found that very often, I could not reject: my back was put to the wall, and I had to take my stand with Godwin.
Here then are a few such examples, which I focus upon for their value in thinking in anarchist ways about the future of social relations.
Here we are dealing with Godwin’s apparent naivete. In a comment on Part IV of Gulliver’s Travels Godwin is more than eager to take the satiric text at face value, while regretting that “its mere playfulness of form” prevented it from instructing mankind effectively (p. 552). From the example of Swift’s Houyhnhnms, Godwin draws support for his belief that after government is abolished, it will become feasible to persuade people, solely by means of “reasonableness,” to cooperate for their common benefit (pp. 552–53). No co-ercion will be necessary; truth will triumph — although not immediately. It is much easier to assume such a thing if you believe, as Godwin apparently did, that “the obvious use of the faculty of speech is to inform, and not to mislead” (Godwin, p. 217), and that deception seldom would be attempted if people were to recognize what they owe to one another. Of course he knows that in political matters, deception is rampant and inevitable, but this does not prevent him from claiming that we know human beings enough to be sure that “the motives to deceive can but rarely occur, while the motives to veracity will govern the stream of human actions” (p. 217).
That is a wonderful wish, but can it be any more than that? In reading Political Justice, we will encounter such claims for the invincibility of truth. It is virtually mandatory to doubt them, but it is also necessary to not surrender the values which they hold. The undefended generalization that speech exists to inform rather than mislead must rouse our doubts, but when the process of doubt has run its course, will we actually reject the principle? In Godwin’s favor, we can try to support it genetically. Lying, widespread as it is in society, is not something people do at birth. The infant prior to language knows nothing of such use (or of irony, wit, or double meanings) and in the early stages of language acquisition, I venture to say that lying plays no part. Lying is learned behavior, and authoritarian society encourages such behavior by pressuring people to pretend that they are in compliance with society’s mores and its political presumptions. Godwin knows all about such things. I suppose that we will be unable to assert, with Swift’s noble horses, that it is unimaginable why anyone would “say the thing which is not,” but the high position of veracity in human motivation might be supportable after all. If not, maybe we should forget about social anarchism, which depends on being able to trust people to communicate honestly.
The term “equity” for Godwin counters the apparent exception to the “moral equality of mankind.” For while we all “partake of a common nature,” the great benefactors of mankind appear to be so exceptional that their equality with the rest of us is not apparent. But this is only an appearance, because we all have some “equity,” meaning some human share, in their accomplishments. We identify with the great liberating minds not because we feel we are their equals, but because as reasoning human beings, we share something with them. The important claim for an anarchist future is that equity “is calculated to infuse into every bosom an emulation of excellence” (pp. 183–84). As readers coming to this book 200 years after its publication, we can easily confute this claim of the emulation of excellence by pointing to the many instances of slavish, fanatic following, by masses of people, of some of the worst leaders in history. But can we afford to rest with this refutation? To do so would be to accept that humans have such a large, innately irrational principle built into their behavior that the only way to preserve society would be through authoritarian trickery, as Godwin, alluding to Edmund Burke’s faith in “salutary prejudices and useful delusions” (p. 118), has already pointed out. This would mean that human reason, since it could not be used for the regulation of life, had discovered the most rational principles of society only to find them all “abortive” efforts. Thus the mind itself would have been some huge evolutionary error. The latter, in fact, is a thought Godwin wants us to face: if we become aware of the “havoc” that the human species exhibits under the rule of its political institutions, and if we assume that such chaos is “the unalterable allotment of our nature,” then “the eminence of our rational faculties must be considered as rather an abortion than a substantial benefit…” (p. 88). No doubt by now Nietzsche has considered that possibility for us. If we are satisfied with that line of inquiry, we can forget about any genuine connection between human reason and “benevolent intention.”
But for the anarchist as well as for the democrat, or for anyone else who hopes for a more humane and genuinely free society, these are speculative, misanthropic conclusions not to be adopted. The emulation of the excellence of those who have benefited mankind, such as those who realized that slavery is wrong, is not guaranteed. But such emulation has happened some of the time, and it is our constructive task to find reasoned ways to encourage it.2 Otherwise we allow the realization to go to waste.
There is of course much more in Godwin’s great book, but it has not been my aim to provide a commentary upon it. That has already been well done by such scholars as Marshall and John P. Clark. What I have tried to convey is a way of reading Political Justice for our own time. Reading it over a period of time, taking within our selves some of its massiveness, is a very different experience than reading about it, or reading excerpts drawn from it. Reading Political Justice provides an extensive terrain in which to encounter and reconstruct a huge range of anarchist thinking about the basic relation between uncompromising intellectual freedom and non-authoritarian social organization. As far as I am aware, there is no other work in the anarchist tradition that can offer us this opportunity. By accepting both the labors and the delights of reading this book, we can still join with Godwin in his love of the “universal exercise of private judgment” (p. 208), a principle which he finds “unspeakably beautiful.” It is also one that remains central to anarchism.
1 As for the motorcycle lovers, we could quote this Godwin statement: “According to the usual sentiment, every club assembling for any civil purpose…has a right to establish any provisions or ceremonies, no matter how ridiculous or detestable, provided they do not interfere with the freedom of others. Reason lies prostrate at their feet…” William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Modern Morals and Happiness, ed. I. Kramnick, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985; p. 196. All further page references to Political Justice refer to this edition.
Here Godwin is incautiously denying the sacredness of what has come to be called “negative freedom,” although he even more strongly defends as the last fortress of reason, the right of individual private judgement. Undoubtedly there would be grave dangers in attempting any prohibition of the silly or mystifying conventions of various voluntary groups, and as anyone involved with anarchism would say, coercion must not be used for such an end. Godwin would be the last to deny each person his or her “sphere of discretion” (p. 198). But he is also saying that humanity will continue to pay a huge price for the waste of energy that goes into uncritically accepted activities.
2 Godwin would hardly have dreamt that today “the emulation of excellence” has become abstracted from its benevolent base. Thus every American child is encouraged to emulate the great professional athletes or/and the body-constructs of the advertising world, even though these have no value in alleviating the pressing problems of humanity and could well be harmful to such. I think of the “game-playing” mentality of the populace during the Gulf War, which treated the killing as a kind of sports contest; and, with regard to the emulation of advertisements, of the undergraduate student born in India who said that only in the past year had she come to accept that she would never look like those “ads.” For Godwin, emulation is properly based on the admiration due to humane reasoning, not to hero-worship or mindless following.
Clark, John P. 1977. The Philosophical Anarchism of William Godwin. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Crowder, George. 1991. Classical Anarchism: The Political Thought of Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press.
Godwin, William. 1985. Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Modern Morals and Happiness ed. I. Kramnick. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Jones, Chris. 1993. Radical Sensibility. London: Routledge.
Marshall, Peter H. 1984. William Godwin. New Haven-London: Yale University Press.
Priestly, F. E. L. (ed.). 1946. William Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
St. Clair, William. 1989. The Godwins and the Shelleys: A Biography of a Family. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press.
John Clark, by way of a book review, introduces us to Elisée Reclus, the 19th century French geographer, and “by far the greatest scholar in the history of anarchism.” While Reclus has long been neglected in the anarchist canon, Clark opines that his theories and work deserve substantially more attention than they have garnered. Having lived through the Paris Commune, worked with Bakunin, and established himself as a pioneering geographer (as well as precursor to modern social ecology), Reclus left us with a legacy of neglected riches.
Originally published in issue 22.