IN July 1789, at the beginning of the French Revolution, Charles James Fox, the leader of the Whig opposition in Parliament, wrote to his friend Richard Fitzpatrick, who was setting out to France: ‘It is not impossible but I may go too. How much the greatest Event it is that ever happened in the World! & how much the best.’1 Fox was far from alone in his enthusiasm. Many welcomed the French Revolution as the dawning of a new age, promising an end to the traditional enmity between Britain and France. William Godwin’s An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness (1793) epitomized the philosophical optimism in Britain in response to events in France and gave it its most distinctive and original voice.
The enthusiasm for France’s Revolution, which followed hard on the heels of the American Revolution, quickly led to expectations in Britain that domestic reforms might counter the power of the Crown and ensure a proper representation of the people. Over the following three years these hopes met increasing opposition, both from William Pitt’s government and from a group of parliamentary Whigs who were concerned at the popular tenor of demands for change. The most outspoken of this group, Edmund Burke, set out his position in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and spawned a huge pamphlet controversy on France and reform in Britain. This evolved into a process of mobilization and counter-mobilization of reform and loyalist associations. Opinions became more polarized, the government became more cautious, and more stringent measures were introduced against sedition, which prompted accusations of tyranny and of a conspiracy against English liberties, and then further state action in response. Following the declaration of war with France in January 1793, reformers were portrayed as subversives and French sympathizers. They, in turn, ratcheted up their rhetoric to enlist those disaffected by brutal recruitment practices, food shortages, and the heavy taxation needed to fund the war. The government became increasingly intransigent, responding with a combination of repressive legislation, prosecutions, and the suspension of habeas corpus that was described by contemporaries as Pitt’s ‘Reign of Terror’.2 Over a period of eight years Britain experienced an intense political controversy that pushed to the limits the government’s ability to retain order (in Ireland there was rebellion and a French landing in 1798).
As befits such moments, it was also an era of extraordinary intellectual ferment and creativity; as Wordsworth later put it, ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, | But to be young was very heaven!’3 Evidence of this creativity encompasses both those who fought for the old order, such as Burke in his Reflections, and those who fought for something new. Godwin’s Political Justice, Burke’s Reflections, Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791–2), Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), and James Mackintosh’s Vindiciae Gallicae are only a fractional part of a stream of pamphlets, novels, plays, poems, and ephemera that explored the political issues of the day, many of which deservedly remain widely read today.
Political Justice was the most philosophically rigorous and, simultaneously, one of the most visionary works of this tumultuous decade. It was published in February 1793, shortly after the execution of Louis XVI and the outbreak of war with France’s regicide republic. The book criticized and synthesized a wide range of eighteenth-century philosophy, and constructed a case for what we would now call philosophical anarchism, combining this with a set of arguments for the perfectibility of mankind and predicting the triumph of mind over body and the elimination of illness and ageing. Despite the increasingly strained political atmosphere, Godwin and his work were warmly received by the capital’s literary and philosophical circles and beyond, and for much of the rest of the decade he enjoyed an enviable reputation. His book became a central part of the literary landscape of the decade and had a profound influence on what we now think of as Romanticism, with Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, Hazlitt, and a host of Britain’s most widely read novelists, dramatists, essayists, and literary men and women reading and reacting to this seminal work. Moreover, even if some of the ideas in Political Justice are now more often associated with Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill than with Godwin, many of the questions he raises remain of central importance to modern ethics and political philosophy.
Godwin’s first substantive philosophical argument appears at the beginning of the second book of Political Justice with the biblical precept ‘that we should love our neighbour as ourselves’. He suggests that, while the precept possesses ‘considerable merit as a popular principle’, it lacks philosophical accuracy. People, he argues, are differentially meritorious, both because their faculties are developed to greater or lesser degrees and, more importantly, because they do not make an equal contribution to the general good of mankind. Godwin uses as an example François Fénelon (1651–1715), archbishop of Cambray. Fénelon was the author of Les Aventures de Télémaque (1699), a major work of French political philosophy in the early modern period, which recounts the moral and political education of Odysseus’ son Telemachus at the hands of Mentor (the goddess Athena, Odysseus’ protector, in disguise). Godwin asks his readers to compare Fénelon with a common chambermaid. If both were trapped in a burning room at the point at which Fénelon conceived his work, and we could rescue only one of them, should we not prefer the person who will make the greatest future contribution to mankind? On what other grounds could we make the decision and with what other conclusion? What if the chambermaid was my wife, or mother, or my benefactor? ‘This would not alter the truth of the proposition.’ The life of Fénelon would still be more valuable ‘and justice, pure, unadulterated justice’ demands that we prefer that which is most valuable (p. 53).
Godwin’s defence of the claim that it is our duty to save Fénelon is an example of a demand for first-order impartiality.4 That is, our decisions should be guided in all matters by judgments about which acts will produce the greatest value or happiness in society, in which our own needs and preferences have no more weight than any other person’s. If first-order impartiality asks us to weigh our own interests and concerns in the balance with all others, second-order impartiality recognizes the legitimacy of personal and private preferences and concerns and asks only that the rules under which we live together are such that they can form the basis for the free and fair agreement of those affected. We are not strangers to second-order impartiality, since the idea underlies many of our institutions and practices; but first-order impartiality seems like a very burdensome morality.
Godwin’s commitment to first-order impartiality has been widely criticized, both in his lifetime and subsequently. One thought is that it is simply over-demanding: someone who acts in this way can give little significance to his or her own projects and commitments. Yet it is a powerful principle. If I have money that I plan to spend on an expensive meal and I meet someone whose life I could save by giving them some of the money instead, should I not do that? Of course, there are issues about the boundaries between necessity and superfluity, questions of levels of urgency, and problems in mapping between collective responsibilities and individual responsibilities (if we all did a moderate amount we could cure global poverty, but do I have a responsibility to pick up the slack when others do not do their share?5). Despite these difficulties, for many people the principle retains some core intuitive appeal.
The principle of first-order impartiality was central to Godwin’s position as it developed in Political Justice. It was also a crucial component in his distancing himself from a great deal of the reformist literature that attacked Burke. Although Godwin believed in the ‘propriety of applying one unalterable rule of justice to every case that may arise’ (p. 65), he insisted that merits and virtues are not equally distributed, and that these inequalities must be recognized in the way we respond to others. In contrast to an equality of natural rights, he argued that justice could not simply be a matter of equal treatment: it had to be understood as appropriately responding to the individual qualities of, and differences between, people. Godwin rejected rights claims because they imply the existence of a liberty or a sphere of discretion in which we are free to choose. His innovation was to believe that this freedom is always conditioned by our responsibilities or duties. The prior question is always one of duty. As a first-order impartialist I have to ask of myself, at every moment, what duty demands: what I ought to do, with my talents and resources, in this situation, here and now, recognizing these needs and problems. For Godwin, there is no situation in which I do not have responsibilities to my fellow human beings, and ‘I have no right to omit what my duty prescribes’ (p. 68).
This dismissal of the idea of the rights of man in favour of an endorsement of a duty of first-order impartiality did not mean that Godwin thought it unimportant to protect individuals from interference by others. Indeed, his criticism of the idea of rights as liberties ends up doing rather little practical work. If Paine celebrated individual rights as rights not to be interfered with by government, Godwin similarly endorsed that conclusion, but derived it instead from the claim that it is the individual who must judge in what his or her duty consists. In his chapter ‘Of the Exercise of Private Judgment’, Godwin brought to bear a central aspect of his inheritance from his background in religious dissent—the right of conscience in matters of religious belief—and he extended it to encompass all aspects of moral and political life. ‘The universal exercise of private judgment is a doctrine so unspeakably beautiful, that the true politician will certainly resolve to interfere with it as sparingly and in as few instances as possible’ (p. 77). Having set out the principle, Godwin then applied it as consistently as possible across his whole field of enquiry: promises and contracts, government, resistance, law, punishment, property, and marriage. In doing so, he turned away from his original intention, to show the importance of political institutions to virtue, and he came to see them as an increasingly dispensable constraint on the development of individual character and the improvement of society. Godwin pronounced that the sole and proper end of justice is utility, but he conceived of utility as being, as John Stuart Mill later phrased it, ‘grounded in the permanent interests of man as a progressive being’. Indeed, Godwin would also have shared Mill’s endorsement of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s belief in ‘the absolute and essential importance of human development’ as encapsulating the content of utility, with that development being conceived entirely in intellectual terms, tied to the progress of mind and truth.6
Political Justice was originally conceived as a critical compendium of, and reflection on, recent developments in moral and political philosophy. But by the time that Godwin had concluded Book II, he had found his distinctive path, and the principles of private judgment, utility, and first-order impartiality combined to provide the foundation for one of the most powerful works of moral and political philosophy of his age. There was work still to be done: Godwin needed to show why it is reasonable to expect agreement on principles, since continuing disagreement renders the nature and direction of progress contentious and therefore something that must be subject to authoritative regulation (which usurps private judgment). He had to demonstrate that people are capable of appreciating the truth and of being motivated by it, so that our understanding comes to dominate and direct our passions and interests, allowing us to treat ourselves and others with the same impartial regard. He had to make a case for thinking that the development of intellect and virtue is infinitely progressive, so that we can expect ever greater areas of political and social life to be managed on the basis of consensus rather than authority. And he needed to say more about his conception of individual virtue and its connection with utility and to work out in detail the implications of his view for our expectations of future societies. This, in broad outline, is what he devoted the remaining six books of Political Justice to doing.
Godwin was 35 when he began his major work. He had been brought up in a dissenting family and from an early age he had aspired to become a minister. As an 11-year-old he was sent to lodge with and be educated by the Revd Samuel Newton of Norwich, a strict Calvinist with quick recourse to the rod, to which Godwin took strong exception. He lasted four years before withdrawing for six months and then returning briefly to be dismissed as adequately educated at the age of 15. He subsequently attended Hoxton Dissenting Academy, completing his studies with success after five years in 1778.
Throughout his education Godwin subscribed to a very exclusive, hyper-Calvinist, doctrine of the elect (damning ninety-nine out of each of the hundred souls Calvin believed saved), derived from the work of the theologian Robert Sandeman and known as Sandemanianism. When he was released into the world to preach, this doctrine failed him. One of his parishioners in Stowmarket, Suffolk, lent him several key works of the French Enlightenment—Holbach, Helvétius, and Rousseau—and his theology dwindled towards deism, while in politics he turned to support the Whig opposition.7 After failing to recover his vocation, he quit the ministry, took up residence in London, and sought to make a living with his pen. In 1783 his former tutor at Hoxton, Andrew Kippis, rescued him from the penury of his first years in London by inviting him to contribute the ‘British and Foreign History’ section of the New Annual Register (a historical, literary, and bibliographical review of the year established to compete with the more conservative Annual Register). The work kept him in close touch with events in British and overseas politics, and he became acquainted with a number of leading Whig politicians, including Richard Sheridan, the playwright and party manager, for whom he served briefly as editor to the Whig periodical the Political Herald. He also followed closely the growing crisis in the French state from 1787, the onset of the French Revolution, and the developing British reaction to it, most notably, Burke’s excoriating attack on French principles in his Reflections, published in November 1790. Within a year or so over two hundred pamphlets had appeared attacking or defending Burke and France.8 At the same time, events in France became more unstable, culminating in Louis XVI’s flight to Varennes in June 1791, his return to Paris in ignominy, and the beginning of the republican movement in France.
Also in June 1791 Godwin approached George Robinson, the publisher of the New Annual Register, proposing that Robinson support him financially while he undertook a work on political principles. Gambling on his confidence in Godwin’s abilities, Robinson agreed on a generous contract for the work, and in September 1791 Godwin began his labours. The significance he attributed to his task is reflected in the way that his diary became, from that date, a much more detailed and exacting record of his reading, writing, and conversations.9 Robinson required Godwin to submit his material as it was written, so that it could be typeset (and to allow him to monitor progress in his investment). In his Autobiography Godwin describes his initial purpose as trying to respond to the imperfections and errors of Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois (1748), but it is clear that his own ideas developed quickly.10 The introductory first book critiques Montesquieu’s view that climate, national character, and luxury are the determining forces in politics, with Godwin emphasizing instead the importance of political institutions in shaping nations. But in the concluding chapter he resolved upon the question that subsequently drove his thinking in the rest of the work and reversed his position on the positive role of government: whether the human understanding can be made the recipient of truth. If it can, then progress becomes possible entirely through the development of mind, and Godwin’s distinctive path was opened.
In the process of writing Political Justice Godwin drew on a range of sources, traditions, and influences, coming to appreciate elements on which he had initially placed little weight but that gradually assumed a more central role. This was principally the case with the endorsement and expansion of the doctrine of private judgment. Here he seems to have drawn on his education as a Dissenter and on discussions with key figures in the world of rational dissent who campaigned at the end of the 1780s, and again in 1790, for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, which prevented avowed Dissenters from holding certain public offices.11 The pamphlet literature of the movement consistently emphasized the sanctity of private judgment as a means to true belief. Nonetheless, the move from the sanctity of individual conscience in religious matters to advocating private judgment as a basic principle for matters of politics was a dramatic one. For many Dissenters, conscience was understood as a private matter, and therefore as one in which the state had no legitimate interest; but to say that the individual’s judgment should be sacrosanct in all areas of social and moral life threatened political authority, no less than the principle of conscience threatened church authority.
In making this move, Godwin drew upon a conviction of the discoverability, communicability, and progressive character of truth: ‘Truth is in reality single and uniform’ (p. 102). In its secular domain this truth is grounded in the uniform nature of humanity, and corresponding to that humanity there must be better and worse forms of government and arrangements of society. Godwin combined an Enlightenment confidence in people’s ability to gain a rational understanding of the world, and to order it so as to secure the best possible outcomes for its inhabitants, with a more theological conviction in moral truth that at times seems to have been much influenced by Platonism, perhaps through the work of the dissenting minister and moral philosopher Richard Price.12 But it was his conviction that the human mind is able to grasp the truths of our nature and to act on those truths that turned Godwin’s Enlightenment rationalism into a powerful story of human perfectibility. That conviction was supported by appeal to his reading of the doctrine of necessity, derived in part from David Hartley and Joseph Priestley in England but buttressed too by his reading of Helvétius and Holbach.13 Godwin developed this doctrine by arguing that the association of ideas is also a matter of necessity, and that, as we gain clear and distinct ideas and combine these in propositions, we are moved by those ideas to act. Seeing someone in want and being in a position to relieve their want will, in so far as we have formed the appropriate judgments and deductions, move us to act to assist them. Although Godwin refers to David Hume relatively frequently in Political Justice, he fundamentally rejected Hume’s comment that ‘’Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.’14 Far from separating the spheres of ideas and motives, the understanding and the passions, Godwin treated sensations merely as raw forms of idea, and thereby made possible a view in which the understanding could come to master and direct the passions and the organs of sensation. Rejecting nominalism, in which we call what we want ‘good’, Godwin argued that what we come through the understanding to appreciate as good, we are both moved and enabled to bring about.
The five concluding chapters to Book IV, to which he attached a note for readers who might be ‘indisposed to abstruse speculations’ (p. 154) suggesting that these chapters are unnecessary for an understanding of the rest of the work, are, in fact, the place where Godwin develops his thinking on these issues in detail. It is here that he assesses and rejects ‘the doctrine of self love’, or the idea that we are only ever motivated to act by a concern to promote our own interests. And it is here that he further elaborates the idea that ‘man becomes a moral being’ only in so far as he is directed by the exercise of mind, that ‘the true perfection of mind consists in disinterestedness’, and that the highest form of happiness involves the cultivation of mind and virtue (pp. 186 and 194). In these commitments Godwin stands alongside Socrates in Plato’s Republic: for both, justice is less a distributive principle and more a state of mind and character, involving the self-mastery of the individual under the direction of reason, guided by a knowledge of the good. It is this perfection of mind that Godwin sees as the goal of all rational action and as the true content of utility.
The full practical implications of this doctrine are developed at length in the final four books of Political Justice, but we have already been given several indications of its impact on ordinary conduct. The idea of an original social contract is rejected as violating the duty to judge each situation as it occurs; promises and future commitments likewise interfere with our duty to judge how best to act at these points of time; indeed, all political authority is a usurpation of individual judgment, and can be defended only in so far as it is supported by common deliberation: ‘Private judgment and public deliberation are not themselves the standard of moral right and wrong; they are only the means of discovering right and wrong, and of comparing particular propositions with the standard of eternal truth’ (p. 94). Of course, we have to judge when we should challenge authority and when we should submit as to an unavoidable necessity. And, for Godwin, there were few occasions on which martyrdom would be called for, since ‘The true instruments for changing the opinions of men are argument and persuasion’ (p. 112) and it was by the slow dissemination of truth, through public discussion and the stimulation of private judgment, that authority would gradually be rendered redundant. Godwin was not a hot-headed enthusiast for revolution: he saw the dangers of barbarity and appreciated the fragility of civilization. The virtuous man will seek to inform, rather than inflame, the public. Nonetheless, he believed that the revolutions of America and France involved something close to ‘a general concert of all orders and descriptions of men’ (p. 113). Indeed, had they been delayed somewhat, the majority in favour would have been so extensive that not one drop of blood would have been shed.
Godwin was clear that the political process is one in which people’s passions are often excited, and in which implicit deference to others too frequently corrupts judgment. Although he believed passionately in the importance of candid discussion and conversation, and was an active member of the debating society the Philomaths, he was an active critic of the political associations developed by reformers and loyalists to promote their causes.15 He saw them as encouraging partisanship, intolerance, and faction. He believed that the promotion of the best interests of humanity depends upon the freedom of social communication. Private discussion and conversation will promote the end, but it will cease to do so whenever judgment becomes constrained by fears that our compatriots will disclaim us (pp. 114–21). If we understand things rightly, we are bound by a duty to truth and to the development of the understanding, to speak our minds and to do so with complete candour. To censor our tongues for fear of the consequences is effectively to censor our thoughts, to attach to them fears and concerns that are extrinsic to them and distort their true character and value. For Godwin, that was too high a price to pay.
Godwin’s conception of the virtuous person drew heavily on a set of Stoic traditions and models, among which Joseph Addison’s tragedy about the last days of the Stoic Cato the Younger was a central source.16 The core legacy of the Stoics, for him, was their sense of autarky, or self-direction, their indifference to bodily pains and impulses, and their commitment to intellectual life and to the pursuit of truth. Although Cato was a traditional republican hero because of his defence of his country, this aspect of the classical legacy played rather little role in Godwin’s thinking. What mattered to him was that Cato transcended his sufferings and his personal interests and was wholly committed to doing what he believed was right. If Godwin began Political Justice with a sense of the potentially transformative impact of political institutions on individuals that owed something to the languages of republicanism and civic humanism, as he developed his case he reversed the order of priority, so that individual integrity and self-development, based around the pursuit and communication of truth, replaced the traditional republican motives of honour, fame, and commitment to one’s country.
Godwin was rightly recognized as making a central contribution to political and moral theory by those seeking reform in Britain, with many of whom he was intimately linked. But he was not a partisan or a polemicist: he sought dispassionately to assess the value of propositions and general ideas and claims; he engaged critically with the political writings of those arguing for reform and those defending the status quo; and while his own judgment led him to support and expect reform, he retained a profound respect for the work of Edmund Burke, the man most associated with reaction against France. In contrast to the Enlightenment rationalism of someone such as Thomas Paine, Godwin appreciated the importance of history, tradition, and even prejudice in explaining how social orders cohered and evolved. While he, like Paine, saw history as progressive, and as a process of emancipation from political and religious imposture, he had a deeper appreciation than Paine of the political sociology of the aristocratic societies of Europe, and a stronger sense that the process was a gradual one and that precipitate violence and chaos could undo the benefits of civilization and its accompanying intellectual developments. He contrived to bring together the ideas of both Burke and Paine largely by seeing the progress of truth as embedded in people’s social relations and the political and social systems they inhabited. Even if we are ultimately to transcend those systems, they provide necessary preconditions for the development of the arts and the sciences, for the spread of education and the advancement of mind. We cease to be dependent on their authority, but many of their achievements are critical to the creation of a social and intellectual climate within which people engage in the disinterested pursuit of truth. If this line of thought was most evident in Political Justice in the material on resistance and the improvement of mind, it was also a central theme that he repeatedly revisited in his six mature novels, from Things As They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) to Deloraine (1833). The failures of the aristocratic society that he delineates, and the tragic consequences that flow from those whose lives and convictions are entirely shaped by that society, do not detract from Godwin’s own sense that they contain many of the building blocks that the human mind needs in order to progress beyond them.
One way of reading Godwin is against the downward spiral described in books 8 and 9 of Plato’s Republic. Here a perfect order under the direction of the guardian class becomes successively corrupted as tiny flaws in one generation become magnified in each subsequent generation. Political Justice reverses the process: human reason allows each generation to reflect upon and reform the flaws of the previous generation, in an ever ascending process towards a fuller and deeper understanding of the nature of the good. In that task Godwin brought to bear his extensive reading in French and Scottish Enlightenment literature, and his subtle, if unconventional, engagement with Burke. He utilized Burke’s sense of the fragility of social order and his rejection of the idea that there are natural rights or principles of natural law that provide absolute standards against which to measure any political or social order. In contrast to the natural rights thinking of Paine, Godwin developed a conception of the development of ‘mind’ that was rooted in socio-historical processes. The good of rational self-mastery and self-development was an objective good; but its realization required an evolving interaction between the intellect and the institutions and practices of society and government. As mind conquered the passions and the appetites, so too it would absorb into itself fields of activity in which power and authority once held sway. The individual’s emancipation from nature would be simultaneously a process of emancipation from political and social control.
Accordingly, Godwin turned to explore government, its surveillance of opinion, and the institutions of the law and punishment in three of the last four books of Political Justice. Much as in the opening books, his growing confidence in his vision led him to press his case still further. He finds little positive to say about any form of government, save that in which individual opinion is given maximum liberty, and in which areas requiring authoritative jurisdiction are rooted in consensual decisions based on extensive deliberation. He rejects absolutely the right of government to control opinion. And he sees law as an increasingly redundant procrustean constraint, insensitive to the details of issues and cases, and imposing a single pattern that overrides and distorts people’s judgment. His philosophical anarchism—for this is what his doctrine had become—envisaged an era, at not too great a distance, in which the orbit of government will have shrunk to a bare and diminishing residual.
Godwin is at his most speculative in the final book of Political Justice. Property will cease to be a matter of monopoly and an occasion for exploitation. Since luxury, which is simply a pandering to appetites and passions, will disappear, there will be adequate resources for all with minimal labour. No man will withhold from another what is necessary to his needs. A dramatically more egalitarian order will ensue. When Godwin considers the objections to this hypothesis from the suggestion that population would expand unchecked, reintroducing want (an argument Malthus made more forcibly against Godwin a few years later in his Essay on Population, 179817), he develops some of his most controversial arguments. He proposes ‘as matter of probable conjecture’ that, as mental faculties gain increasing control over our physical wants and subsequently our physiological process, we will learn to retard ageing and decay (pp. 458–9). He rejects marriage as the ‘most odious of all monopolies’, envisaging a world in which men and women will value each other for their virtues and wisdom rather than their appearance, and in which people will associate with each other freely, unconstrained by vows (pp. 447–8). If this sounds too much like free love, he also thought that the ‘grosser’ aspects of attraction between the sexes, just as with other areas of physiological imperfection (such as the need for sleep), would lose their sway as mind advanced, and that, as life is prolonged, the production of further generations will decline, leaving a steady state of population.
Godwin’s Political Justice brought him immediate renown, perhaps above all as a philosopher who had raised issues of contemporary political debate to a more elevated sphere. Hazlitt’s account of Godwin’s reputation, written nearly thirty years later, captures some of the reaction:
he blazed as a sun in the firmament of reputation; no one was more talked of, more looked up to, more sought after, and wherever liberty, truth, justice was the theme, his name was not far off.… No work in our time gave such a blow to the philosophical mind of the country.… Tom Paine was considered for the time as Tom Fool to him, Paley an old woman, Edmund Burke a flashy sophist. Truth, moral truth, it was supposed, had here taken up its abode; and these were the oracles of thought.18
There were criticisms of the work, although these were few and relatively slow to come. Many reviews published long extracts and comments across a number of issues, with the more conservative reviews generally starting positively, and then reacting negatively as the thrust of Godwin’s argument became clear. The loyalist British Critic, for example, denounced the work as a reductio ad absurdum of French Enlightenment principles, mixed with the influence of ‘some English writers of equal extravagance’.19
Political Justice was published in mid-February 1793. It was not a propitious time. The execution of Louis at the end of January precipitated war with Britain, adding further fuel to the upsurge of loyalist activities against British advocates of reform. Indeed, what had begun as a pamphlet dispute centred on Burke’s Reflections had spiralled into an increasingly ill-tempered and practical struggle for ascendancy between loyalists and reformers. The government had become alarmed at the resurgence of the Society for Constitutional Information and the emergence of the artisan-based London Corresponding Society at the end of 1792, both of which spread reformist literature and drew into political debate and discussion men (and sometimes women) from the middling and artisanal classes who were largely excluded from parliamentary representation. The parallels with the sansculottes of Paris were not lost on the government. At the same time, those advocating reform found increasing reason for believing that the government was orchestrating a campaign to attack the basic rights and liberties of the people. Prosecutions for seditious speech were brought against reformers for comments made in coffee-houses (a traditionally private sphere), or for words uttered when under the influence.20 In May 1792 a royal proclamation against seditious writings was issued, aimed partly, but certainly not exclusively, at Paine and those circulating his work. In that summer loyal addresses were solicited in the counties and sent to the Crown. In November, Paine was tried in absentia for the publication of Rights of Man: Part the Second (1792) and was outlawed. In December the loyalist Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property Against Republicans and Levellers was founded, with tacit government support.
On 25 May 1793 Godwin noted in his diary, ‘Prosecution of P.J. (Political Justice) debated this week’. Although there is no corroboration to show that the Privy Council discussed it, the matter of the book could well have been regarded as being just as incendiary as Paine’s. On the other hand, the Attorney-General had defended his prosecution of Paine on the grounds that ‘with an industry incredible, it [Paine’s Rights of Man] was either totally or partially thrust into the hands of all persons in this country, of subjects of every description … to the ignorant, to the credulous, to the desperate’.21 That claim could not be made about Godwin’s work: the two substantial quarto volumes sold for £1 16s. as against the cheap editions of Rights of Man, which could be had for sixpence. Nonetheless, an Irish octavo edition was quickly produced, and the work was extensively excerpted in periodicals and popular literature in ways that ensured that Godwin’s readership was not confined to the elite.
Following publication of Political Justice, Godwin was taken up by society: indeed, between 1791 and 1794 the number of people he saw each year quadrupled.22 Nonetheless, he maintained the rhythms established while writing Political Justice. He would read and write in the morning, receive or visit friends and dine in the afternoon, and attend the theatre or have supper with friends in the evening. But in addition he was now called on and written to by all and sundry, and was sought by and introduced to a far wider circle of acquaintance, developing friendships with a range of artists, sculptors, historians, antiquarians, classical scholars, politicians, scientists, medical men, poets, and novelists. This wide and eclectic mix of acquaintance was something he worked hard to retain throughout his life, sharing an interest in their intellectual concerns but also being attracted to variety of character as a source of insight into human frailties and possibilities. He dined regularly with the reprobate money broker John King, but when King asked him to appear for him as a character witness in a court case, Godwin refused point blank: ‘Remember, I can dine at a man’s table, without being prepared to be the partisan of his measures and proceedings.’23 Although his social life blossomed, he sustained his writing: letters to newspapers (signed Mucius, after the legendary Roman hero Gaius Mucius Scaevola); an essay against the war; and in April 1793 he began work on what was to be his most famous novel, Things As They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams. He completed the work in May the following year, and its success consolidated his reputation as one of the country’s leading writers. Almost immediately he commenced work revising Political Justice.
A number of Godwin’s critics and commentators have accused him of having ‘bent before the blast’, of turning conservative and cautious in the light of political repression.24 That charge is difficult to support since he was certainly aware of the changing atmosphere in 1792, at the same time that he was writing the most radical concluding parts of Political Justice. He also remained closely in touch with developments as the tensions between reformers and the government continued to increase after the declaration of war. In Scotland, in September 1793, four reformers, Thomas Muir, William Skirving, Maurice Margarot, and Thomas Fyshe Palmer, were accused of sedition and sentenced to terms of between seven and fourteen years’ transportation to the penal colony in Botany Bay. And after a ‘British Convention’ was held in Edinburgh at the end of that year, Judge Braxfield handed out draconian sentences at the subsequent trials in March 1794. Godwin visited Muir and Palmer in the Woolwich prison hulks, where they were awaiting transfer to the transports to Australia, and he called regularly on his friend Joseph Gerrald, another victim of Braxfield’s zeal, who was incarcerated in Newgate awaiting transportation, where he also met a number of other reformers. Rather than inducing caution, these experiences bore fruit in the prison scenes of Caleb Williams,25 in which he denounced the injustices of the British legal and penal system. Even as he was completing the novel, further storm clouds were gathering. He set down his pen on 10 May 1794. The following day he walked across London to Wimbledon to visit the leading radical John Horne Tooke for one of his traditional open-house Sunday dinners. William Sharp, John Thelwall, Henry Richter, and Jeremiah Joyce were among those present.26 Within days all had been arrested and interrogated by a special parliamentary committee of secrecy, and were languishing in the Tower or Newgate. Others present, though not Godwin, were sought for interrogation by the government. Habeas Corpus was suspended and the list of those incarcerated grew. In October, Lord Chief Justice Eyre issued a charge to the grand jury, which accused twelve of the reformers of treason, including Godwin’s close friends Thomas Holcroft, the dramatist, Thelwall, and Horne Tooke.
When the charge was issued, Godwin was in Worcestershire visiting friends. He immediately returned to London and undertook an analysis of Eyre’s case. Cursory Strictures on the Charge Delivered … to the Grand Jury was published anonymously. It was a forensic demolition of the case of constructive treason assembled by Eyre and the Attorney-General. It aroused widespread public interest and helped galvanize the legal talents defending the men. At the end of 1794, after the unsuccessful trials of Thomas Hardy (founder and general secretary of the London Corresponding Society), Horne Tooke, and Thelwall, the prosecutions were abandoned and the remaining prisoners released. Godwin proudly recorded that, at another dinner in the May after the acquittal of his friends, Horne Tooke asked him whether he had written the pamphlet. When Godwin acknowledged that he had, Horne Tooke seized and kissed his hand, saying he could do nothing less by the hand that had given existence to that production.27
Although the revisions to Political Justice certainly do not seem to be the result of prudence in the face of government repression, they were extensive. Moreover, not content with these, he revised the text still further in the first seven months of 1797 for a third edition, and had a further fit of corrections (no longer extant) in the autumn of 1832 in anticipation of a fourth edition. The revisions systematically eradicate the early references to the positive role of political institution, they moderate some of the more Platonic language of truth, they introduce greater empiricism in Godwin’s account of the nature of human knowledge, and they weaken some of the more speculative claims made in the final book. The essayist Thomas De Quincey later announced that ‘The second edition, as regards principles, is not a recast, but absolutely a travesty of the first: nay, it is all but a palinode.28 That judgment is too harsh, and the suggestion of increasing conservatism (or fearfulness) similarly misses the mark; but it is clear that Godwin’s work was the fruit of considerable further thought and discussion, and that, as his social circles expanded, he was brought into contact with a range of new ideas and challenges to his position. In a note in his papers written in 1800, Godwin reported that his Political Justice was blemished by three principal errors: ‘1. Stoicism, or an inattention to the principle, that pleasure and pain are the only bases upon which morality can rest. 2. Sandemanianism, or an inattention to the principle, that feeling, not judgment, is the source of human actions. 3. The unqualified condemnation of the private affections.’ He also noted with some insight ‘how strongly these errors are connected with the Calvinist system, which had been deeply wrought into my mind in early life, as to enable these errors long to survive the general system of religious opinions of which they formed a part’.29 He also recorded that he thought that he had rooted out the Stoicism in his revisions to the first edition, while his changed assessment of the place of feeling and private affections, which he ascribed to the perusal of Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, was only incompletely integrated in the final chapters of each volume in the second edition. It is a perceptive analysis, and yet Godwin persisted in the belief that it was possible to remedy such errors and leave the principles intact, when it is plausible to think that a great deal falls apart if we remove his Stoicism and his relative indifference to worldly and bodily things, his emphasis on intellect over passion, the motivational power of truth, and the centrality of impartiality in judgment. Moreover, as a result of these changes, Political Justice becomes a rather different book—one that no longer offers the same powerful and visionary account of the progressive perfectibility of mankind that astonished and inspired the literary world at the beginning of 1793 and that so perfectly expressed that moment of intellectual aspiration sparked by the revolutions of America and France.
John Thelwall, the poet, radical, and popular lecturer, whom Godwin candidly criticized for his willingness to stir up the passions of his audiences in his even-handed critique of government oppression and radical populism in his 1795 pamphlet Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr Pitt’s Bills, responded to the criticism by accusing Godwin and his ‘visionary peculiarities of mind’ of both recommending ‘the most extensive plan of freedom and innovation ever discussed by any writer in the English language’ and coupling this with a conviction that it was necessary ‘to reprobate every measure from which even the most moderate reform can rationally be expected’.30 This is a plausible attack, although it ignores Godwin’s sense of the interconnection between opinion and government and the importance of avoiding precipitate action that might derail the gradual emancipation of mankind through intellectual progress. It also ignores one major area in which Godwin’s practice did answer to his philosophical speculation, and in which his experiences probably did lead him to reconsider elements of his doctrine, especially concerning the role of private affections and marriage.
Godwin was a somewhat stiff and formal man, candid to the point of bluntness, and yet easily hurt by the comments of others. In the 1780s and early 1790s he lived a relatively secluded life. The list of acquaintances he drew up around the year 1803, and in which he identified the years in which he met certain people, was a resolutely masculine one, until Helen Maria Williams appeared in 1787. And she remained a solitary exception until 1791. However, his circles of female acquaintance grew dramatically after the publication of his book. He became friendly with Elizabeth Inchbald, the playwright and novelist; Maria Reveley, the wife of his acquaintance Henry Reveley; Amelia Alderson, the daughter of a Norfolk friend; Mary Hays, the novelist who wrote him such long and detailed letters that Godwin insisted on responding in person to save time; Mary Robinson, who had previously been mistress to the prince of Wales; and many others. In contact with admiring women, and subject to some unorthodox approaches, Godwin discarded his usual drab ‘ministerial’ dress and became caught up in a certain amount of flirtation and teasing. It was not his natural métier. Then, in January 1796, Mary Hays invited him to take tea with her and her new friend Mary Wollstonecraft, who had returned from Paris in 1795. The pair had met occasionally earlier in the decade, most famously when they dined together with Thomas Paine at Joseph Johnson’s publishing house in November 1791. That occasion had not gone well. Godwin had not read her work and was curious to hear Paine: ‘Paine, in his general habits, is no great talker; and, though he threw in occasionally some shrewd and striking remarks, conversation lay principally between me and Mary. I, of consequence, heard her, very frequently when I wished to hear Paine.’31 Their reacquaintance was more positive and they were soon meeting on a regular basis. Wollstonecraft was known in London as Mrs Imlay, after the father of her child Fanny, whom most people assumed she had married in Paris. But Wollstonecraft had long entertained rather unorthodox views about relationships, and her relationship with Imlay was extramarital; it was also over, a fact that occasioned such despair that she twice tried to kill herself in 1795.
In August 1796 Godwin and Wollstonecraft became lovers, staying late into the evenings at each other’s lodgings, always wary of the prying eyes of Wollstonecraft’s landlady. Their notes and letters to each other are both charming and moving: it is clear how vulnerable Wollstonecraft felt, and how ill-prepared Godwin was for such an intense physical and emotional relationship. Within four months Wollstonecraft was pregnant, and in March 1797 the couple married, with some philosophical embarrassment, although they maintained their own circles of acquaintance and Godwin even took a room near to their now shared lodgings so as to preserve an independent place of work. Several friends promptly cut Wollstonecraft from their acquaintance since the marriage revealed her relationship to Imlay to be illicit, but most accepted the couple. The six or so months they spent prior to the birth of their child, and jointly caring for Mary’s daughter Fanny, were largely happy ones, and probably contributed to Godwin’s revaluation of his austerity towards the private affections and to the emotions and feelings. When Wollstonecraft died ten days after the birth of their daughter Mary (later Mary Shelley), Godwin was bereft and he threw himself into publishing her works, including much personal correspondence, and commemorating her in his candid Memoirs of the Author of ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’ (1798).
With the publication of the Memoirs, Godwin exposed himself to the full backlash against the radical intellectual culture of the 1790s. The poet Robert Southey accused him of a ‘want of all feeling in stripping his dead wife naked’ and putting her on display,32 and anti-radical publications had a field-day in lampooning Godwin and denouncing Wollstonecraft as a common whore. At a time when popular politics was taking a more bitter, dangerous, and, in Ireland, more insurrectionary form, Godwin had offered himself up as a target for the spleen of the anti-Jacobin and loyalist press.
While Godwin’s volume of essays, The Enquirer (1797), and the third edition of Political Justice (1798) both suggest Wollstonecraft’s influence in concession to emotions and feeling, his second major novel, St Leon (1799), in which a man sacrifices an idyllic family life to gain knowledge of eternal life, only to find himself an outcast to every form of human society, is unequivocal testimony to her impact. In his Thoughts Occasioned by the Perusal of Dr Parr’s Spital Sermon (1801) he made still further philosophical concessions to the importance of private affections and the emotions. But, while he sought to answer his critics in measured philosophical tones on those issues on which he felt he had a case to answer, the political and cultural climate of candid discussion and argument had fundamentally changed. He found himself denounced by an increasingly virulent loyalist press, and former friends and allies turned against him. He was not an outcast. His circle of acquaintances remained extensive, although many of his closest friends from the early 1790s were now absent. He remarried in 1801, but this rather added to his burdens since his new wife, Mary Jane Clairmont, brought two more children to the family and they had a son together in 1803. Moreover, their relationship was not altogether happy, which led other old friends to steer clear of them. The family also faced mounting debts, which they sought unsuccessfully to meet by establishing a children’s publisher and bookshop, but Godwin’s reputation and fortunes never recovered.
Nonetheless, his work endured. It brought him the attention of the social reformer and utopian philosopher Robert Owen, people came to see him from across Europe and America, and he sustained a succession of young acolytes whom he tried to groom in the principles of Political Justice. The most famous of these was Percy Bysshe Shelley, who helped bring Godwinian ideas to a younger generation, and who purported to be acting out of respect for them when he ran off to France with Godwin’s daughter Mary and her stepsister Jane in 1814, leaving behind his pregnant wife and young daughter. Neither Mary nor Shelley found Godwin’s subsequent rejection of them easy to bear, and the resulting tensions in Godwin’s household probably exacerbated Fanny Imlay’s despair, resulting in her suicide in October 1816. Nor were these wounds wholly healed when Godwin welcomed Shelley and Mary back into his circles on their marriage, after Shelley’s first wife took her own life in December of that year. Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818) is in part a reflection on this traumatic period for the family, and on Godwin and Shelley’s commitment to truth, and was in dialogue with Godwin’s Political Justice and St Leon. All three texts raise questions about the power and importance of family and personal ties and reflect on the uneven progress of truth, the responsibilities of those who are more advanced, and the potential of ignorance to thwart the progressive development of mankind if new ideas are not introduced with care.
The studious and reflecting only can be expected to see deeply into future events. To conceive an order of society totally different from that which is now before our eyes, and to judge of the advantages that would accrue from its institution, are the prerogatives only of a few favoured minds … they cannot yet for some time be expected to be understood by the multitude. (p. 115)
This concern with the communication of truth, which was central to Godwin’s Political Justice, returned over and over again in his later work, revisited in the light of his changing experience. The Enquirer (1797) adopts a more tentative approach than Godwin’s earlier fierce didacticism, and treats private judgment as something that he aims to stimulate as widely as possible, by furnishing materials for reflection rather than seeking directly to instruct it. And Godwin’s forays into the theatre, while partly motivated by the hope of making substantial amounts of money, also gave a central role to the communication of ideas: ‘[Drama] does that, which sermons were intended to do: it forms the link between the literary class of mankind & the uninstructed, the bridge by which the latter may pass over into the domain of the former.’33 Godwin’s turn to writing and publishing books for children was equally driven by an interest in instruction and the improvement of mind, both to generate the intellectual elite and to ensure that ordinary people would also develop their capacities for judgment. But his slightly restless experimentation with different forms and audiences seems to echo the anxiety expressed early in Political Justice that literature could not alone be ‘adequate to all the purposes of human improvement’ (p. 22).
Godwin was himself aware of the extent to which his own thinking was a product of the times and circumstances in which he lived, and that it was profoundly shaped by those with whom he conversed at length and in depth. He named in particular the influence of Joseph Fawcett (dissenting minister and poet), with whom he was a student at Hoxton; Thomas Holcroft (the novelist and dramatist), who was a powerful influence while he was writing Political Justice and whom Godwin credited with his conversion to atheism in the 1790s; George Dyson, a young and somewhat volatile follower of Godwin, who led him to revise his thinking on the principles of pleasure and pain after the first edition; and the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who induced Godwin to doubt his atheism at the turn of the century. In his Thoughts Occasioned by the Perusal of Dr Parr’s Spital Sermon, Godwin, in reflective mode, noted that ‘The human intellect is a sort of barometer, directed by the variations that surround it.’34
The central theme of Godwin’s life’s work was his sense of the extent to which people’s thoughts are rooted in their context, that it is only a few who are able to break free of the merely conventional, and that it is then a challenge to know how best to communicate their insights in a way that can produce a gradual, non-violent progress in the public mind. It was born of his distinctive intellectual background and his passion for the examination of ideas. But it needed the heady days of the 1790s for him to see in private judgment and the pursuit of the public good a pair of principles that would enable the dramatic progress of mankind, ushering a new kind of social world in which political authority was increasingly discarded in favour of individual moral judgment and public discussion. Despite his marginalization and his victimization by the increasingly ascendant loyalist culture, he never lost that faith, although he did recurrently reflect on the best way of communicating such truths.
Godwin’s developing domestic relationships, and the intense conversational world in which he lived, led him to revise details and features of his position, often substantially, and often in ways that leave the reader unclear about how far the new synthesis really holds together. The introduction of a strong Humean train of scepticism in the third edition of Political Justice, for example, leaves one uncertain whether Godwin, in spite of his protestations to the contrary, still has grounds for thinking that there is a truth to be communicated. If it cannot be, then the thought that there can be convergence of ideas breaks down and the entire programme collapses. Also, Godwin became more consistently utilitarian, but, while his characterization of the content of utility remained primarily intellectual in form, he now identified the pleasures of benevolence as a key component. That move compromised his earlier resistance to self-love and his commitment to first-order impartiality, since the pleasure of performing our duty becomes part of the motive for our actions. It remains unclear whether Godwin thinks this compromises the impartial assessment of our duty, but the alloyed motivation suggests that it does.
Since Godwin’s death at the age of 80 in 1836, interest in his work and life has grown steadily. He was a favourite author among early and later socialists—Engels described him as ‘almost exclusively the property of the proletariat’—and he was an important influence on the anarchist tradition, partly through Kropotkin.35 An exemplary first biography by Charles Kegan Paul appeared in 1876 and has been followed by several serious and weighty competitors. An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice has attracted a certain amount of philosophical analysis, partly because of the fruitfully unstable balance of ideas that mark his developing thought. His novels and plays have also drawn substantial recent critical attention, and while Romanticists have tended to retain the Lake Poets’ ambivalence to Godwin and his work, he has increasingly been recognized as a literary figure both in his own right and as the linchpin of the most famous literary family of the period. A scholarly edition of his diary is available online and the first meticulously edited volume of his letters has recently been published.36
Philosophers remain, for the most part, both sceptical about the force of claims for first-order impartiality and drawn to the principle. Peter Singer’s The Life You Can Save37 starts from a less demanding claim: not that we should do everything in our power to achieve the greatest possible good, but that we should not let people die when we are in a position to save their lives at relatively low cost to ourselves. This less demanding claim still seems too much for most people, who are reluctant to sacrifice their own interests in order to contribute more to eradicate malaria or Third World starvation. But the normative power of Godwin’s principle in such cases is difficult to resist. Just as Singer rightly points out that we would treat with abhorrence the man who refused to save a drowning child when it was perfectly safe for him to do so, on the grounds that he would have got his suit wet, so too we can see that our own concerns should sometimes be set aside when there is a more pressing claim. How much more pressing is an important issue philosophically. It is not especially troubling practically, since it seems clear that the very great majority of people in the West are not prepared to sacrifice the relatively small amounts that would end the attrition suffered by populations in other parts of the world from curable illnesses, remediable malnutrition, and predictable disasters. We might treat this as a demonstration that Godwin was simply wildly over-ambitious in his expectations of people’s capacity for selflessness and disinterested benevolence. But we might also think, as many of his contemporaries did, that he had a point: that we are over-invested in the personal pronoun ‘mine’, and that we wrong other people when we fail to provide them with support when they are in need. Writing at the height of public optimism about the future, arising from the collapse of French absolutism, Godwin and many of his friends believed that this heralded a new dawn. Many writers subsequently have had similar moments, although many of these have thought that a bit of violence might help speed the plough. In contrast, Godwin resolutely rejected force, appealed to private judgment, and sought to stimulate and educate it and to encourage people to think for themselves and to take responsibility for their lives, their actions, and their relations with their fellows; that is, to think for themselves and to ask themselves: What ought I to do? And, in weighing my own claims in comparison to others at such and such a value, am I assessing them justly? This essentially Socratic question remains an important and enduring one, and it underlines the fact that, while Political Justice is a central text for literary studies, for Romanticism, and for our appreciation of the 1790s in Britain, it is so, in part, by having more than merely historical significance.