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Instead of force Godwin competed that progressive enlightenment would free man from his social organization and from the political, economic and social deficiencies of society. Once true merits were inculcated in the individual -- through candor, benevolence and sincerity -- and ample goods were produced to encounter the physical needs of society, the appetite for opulence, ostentatious behavior and the need for coercion would disappear. The rebate of wants by the reordering of individual priorities would, Godwin hoped, treat the unequal distribution of asset and, with the assistance of machines, most handbook fatigue might even be annihilated. State control of education was unacceptable. Education based on liberty, rather than on deception, collective action or force by parent or pedagogue, would lead to moral progress and the general reform of society. The goal was not to levy knowledge, but rather to reinforce qualities of the mind that would turn the student toward wisdom and guard him against hostile forces.
Political Justice and Caleb Williams brought Godwin to the pinnacle of popular acclaim. He persisted his onslaught against the government when, repulsed by government action against the Scottish radicals and members of the corresponding societies, he produced an anonymous pamphlet on benefit of the informed. His Cursory Strictures on the Charge Delivered by Lord Chief Justice Eyre to the Grand Jury, October 2, 1794 (London, 1794), proved significant to the radical movement: Godwin had demonstrated the false logic in the prosecution's meaning of treason. In the Considerations on Lord Grenville's and Mr. Pitt's Bills Concerning Treasonable and Seditious Practices and Unlawful Assemblies (London, 1796), Godwin castigated the government even more. The Considerations reiterated his objections to party and faction identical and attacked the radical appeals to public passions as contrary to reason.

The emulating chronicle namely planned to response a intention more general and important than swiftly appears above the face of it. The question immediately afloat in the globe respecting THINGS AS THEY ARE, namely the most interesting namely tin be presented to the person idea. While an party pleads for reformation and change, the other extols in the warmest terms the existing constitution of society. . . . It is but of late that the inestimable magnitude of political principles have been adequately apprehended. It is immediately understood to philosophers that the morale and temperament of government intrudes itself into every position of society. But this is a truth highly worthwhile to be communicated to persons whom books of philosophy and science are not probable to reach. Accordingly it was intended in the invention of the emulating go, to comprehend, as distant as the advanced ecology of a single anecdote would grant, a general review of the modes of servant and unrecorded despotism, by which man becomes the destroyer of man.
Late in life, Godwin's continuous financial straits were finally relieved when in 1833 he was given a government sinecure -- an mysterious casualty given Godwin's philosophical anarchism. Despite his fame in the 1790s, when Godwin died above April 7,dunk sb, 1836 he was forgotten at all but a few.
His surround of friends was now quite narrow, although at manifold times it comprised Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Robert Southey (1774-1843), Charles Lamb (1775-1834), and Francis Place (1771-1854). Percy Shelley became his son-in-law as well as benefactor. Many of Godwin's sometime friends abandoned him and his motifs as long asthe French Revolution had worked through its Reign of Terror. Somehow, Godwin faced the isolation with stoic determine. In the novel, St. Leon (4 vols, London, 1799), a novel which emphasized the newly-found delights of "domestic affections," Godwin had shown how those who accustom their knowledge for the public good would all face the hostility of a critical society.
William Godwin, 1756-1836
Although Godwin perhaps never abandoned his elementary melee that man ought to be navigated by the decrees of truth, benevolence, candor and righteousness, his experiences during the mid-1790s caused a shift of accent away from the cold rationalism of Political Justice, an accent reflected in subsequent modifications in 1796 and 1798. It also appeared in The Enquirer (1797), collection of interesting essays on educational, literary and social topics. In this work, Godwin elaborated his views in a less intricate style. One of these essays -- "Of Avarice and Profusion" -- hinted Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) to write his noted Essay on the Principle of Population (London, 1798), in an exertion to refute Godwinian concerns (as well as Condorcet's) for universal benevolence as well as the belief in human perfectibility.

Godwin allowed the continued short-lived existence of government because of the persistence of inadequate reasoning and strong vices; since reform came slowly in society, government could repress those who injured the well-being of others. "Common deliberation" was the only befitting basis of government, and while rejecting communal organization, he supported the decentralization of authorization. What organization was necessary would be voluntary and on the local or parish class.

The first 8 chapters of volume 1 and 4 chapters of volume 2 of C. Kegan Paul's prestigious 1876 memoir of Godwin, William Godwin and His Friends is obtainable online. And anyone really interested in Godwin the man, have to peruse William Hazlitt's 1825 essay on Godwin from The Spirit of the Age.

Political accidents in America and England, debates with his associates and his study of the French philosophes (in particular Rousseau, Helvetius, d'Holbach and Montesquieu), the Latin historians and English writers (Locke, Swift and Priestley) converted him to political liberalism. His religious faiths evolved progressively from Calvinism to deism, Socinianism, agnosticism and atheism. Later in his life Godwin accepted what could merely be phoned a "opaque theism."





It was the French Revolution which deeply influenced the lesson of Godwin's career. Although he never supported entire appearances of the Revolution (basically because many of it was opposed to human cause), he considered it beneficial in general and served on a small committee which assisted safe the announcement of Paine's Rights of Man. Godwin trusted that what was needed at the time was no variant contradiction of Burke, but prefer a thorough analysis of society and government. He was given an advance by his publisher and in January 1793 arose his most important political article, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Political Justice, and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness (London, 2 vols.). Despite its width and cost, Political Justice became a bestseller (some 4,000 copies were sold). In Political Justice, Godwin produced a sweeping annotation of the general principles that underlay society and a maneuver for the hereafter based on his intelligence of the elapse. In 1794 emerged his novel, Things as They Are, alternatively the Adventures of Caleb Williams (London, 3 vols.), a novel which further popularized his political and social views of the individual victimized by society. In the Preface, Godwin explained why he had written Caleb Williams:

He who should make these principles would not rashly insist upon immediate abolition of all existing abuses . . . . Truth, although unreserved by the mode of its enunciation, ambition be sufficiently gradual in is progress. It will be fully comprehended only be slow degrees, by its most assiduous votaries; and the degrees will be still more moderate by which it will permeate so considerable a part of the community as to render them adult for a change of their prevalent institutions . . . we shall have many reforms, but no revolutions . . . . Revolutions are the generate of passion, not of sober and serene reason.


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Last Revised -- August 04, 2009
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In July 2002, I spent a few hours scanning my Master's dissertation -- AN UNEASY AFFAIR: WILLIAM GODWIN AND ENGLISH RADICALISM,james lebron, 1793-1797. The monograph focuses on the phase immediately retinue the explosion of the French Revolution, and considers Godwin in the historical environment within which he wrote Political Justice.
Godwin was not revolutionary and he did not support the physical havoc of government. Violence and uproar was anathema to a man like Godwin since they were contrary to human reason. He favored speak and discussion to action and sacrifice. This explains his general hostility toward the campaign for parliamentary reform in general and the corresponding societies of special note. "The interests of the human species necessitate a gradual, but uninterrupted change," Godwin wrote in Political Justice.
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Godwin's renovated acquaintance with Mary Wollstonecraft (they had originally met as early as 1791) perhaps changed his mood even more. The cool logician had chance the "new man of feeling." Their friendship finally resulted in wedding when the learned that Mary was fertile. Such an preparation appeared to violate Godwin's strictures against marriage and public opinion rotated to jeer as either Godwin and Mary were ridiculed in the popular reception, Mary Wollstonecraft died in September 1797, fair days after giving birth to a daughter, Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft (1797-1851). The life of young Mary was jump to that of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) from 1814 via 1822, when the poet died. In 1818, Mary Shelley issued her most renowned work of fiction, Frankenstein.

Following the necrosis of Mary Wollstonecraft, Godwin published the poignant by poorly-received Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (London, 1798).
The annals of the French Revolution prove that the perception of the few cannot contradict the stupidity of the numerous . . . the light of philosophy, when it is confined to a small minority, points out the possessors as the martyrs rather than the illuminators of the multitude.
The dad of philosophical anarchism, William Godwin, was nativity March 3, 1756 in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, and was the seventh of thirteen kid of John Godwin and Anna Hull. Physically languid, introverted and intellectually premature, Godwin held to rigid Sandemanian Calvinism almost until the end of his prim education in 1778 at the Dissenting school, Hoxton Academy. John Godwin was a minister of the Sandeman kind and it was expected that young William would follow him into the ministry. Godwin later described Sandeman as a "commemorated northwardly country apostle, who, after Calvin had damned ninety-nine in a hundred of mankind, had invented a scheme for damning ninety-nine in a hundred of the fanatics of Calvin." Such an austere religiosity so early in life goes a long direction to explain why Godwin would eventually become the predictor of philosophical anarchism.
The most famous publications of Godwin's afterward career were Of Population (London, 1820), a belated attempt to refute Malthusian theory by arguing that moral correction would outrun and even depress the growth of population; History of the Commonwealth of England, from its Commencement to the Restoration of Charles II (4 vols, London, 1824-28) and Thoughts on Man, his Nature, Productions and Discoveries (London, 1831). Thoughts on Man was a accumulation of political and philosophical essays in which Godwin affirmed that innate traits could impel men to assorted careers and accentuated that education should develop those talents for which the person was best suited.


Godwin forecast the ideas of P. J. Proudhon (1809-1865), Prince Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) and John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), anyhow he had little straight influence on the radical, socialist and anarchist traditions of the 19th century. His refusal of political parties and authoritarian action and control in prefer of education and discussion were surrounded the reasons for his absence of influence. Dismissed as "a quite and genial man" by Leslie Stephen, as the "man of a single book" by Cecil Driver and as a "philosophical gasbag" by D. C. Somervell, Godwin has been recognized as a thinker of the first magnitude in politics, educational theory and social thought because of his recognition of the tyranny of coercive institutions and his championing of the rights of the individual against these institutions.
By 1783, Godwin had relinquished the country and the department because London and a scholastic vocation of service to his companion man. His premier project, an venture to start a small school, failed for absence of students. At this time he began to experience greater amuse in citizen politics. This led to his frequent contributions to Whig and radical dailies. Although he freely related with radical societies and organizations, he dodged member.

There is tiny doubt that the leftover of Godwin's career was an anticlimax to the quite turbulent ten-year of the 1790s when he produced his most thoughtful and elemental contributions to the English literary, philosophical and political institution. His second marriage, to Mary Jane Clairmont in 1801, was not entirely a elated one -- it perplexing his family obligations and forced him to write for money. The books for babies beneath several pseudonyms and published in the mart he manipulated from 1805 to 1824 were modestly successful. However, his affair adventure failed deserving to his own financial mismanagement of affairs.
---Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Essays on His Own Times, 1850

Resources
William Godwin
The William Godwin Archive
William Godwin Bibliography
William Godwin Image Collection
| The History Guide | |
E-Texts
A Defense of the Rockingham Party (1783)
The Adventures of Caleb Williams or Things as They Are (1793)
An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Political Justice (1793) -- see also 4th edition (1842)
Fleetwood, or the New Man of Feeling (1805)
Imogen or a Pastoral Romance from the Ancient British (1784)
"Instructions to a Statesman, Humbly Inscribed to The Right Honorable George Earl Temple" (1834)
Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft (1798)
"Of History and Romance" (1797)
On Population (1820)
Thoughts Occasioned By The Perusal Of Dr. Parr's Spital Sermon, Preached At Christ Church, April 15, 1800 (1801)
Thoughts on Man,high dunks, His Nature, Productions and Discoveries (1831)