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NOTE William Godwin (1756–1836)

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William Godwin died 174 years ago this month, in the year 1836, at the age of 80. He was

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largely forgotten by the time of his death, but in the years since, his reputation has

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has slowly grown back, if not to what it was in his prime in the 1790s, then at least to

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something a good deal more impressive than anything he could muster in the 1830s.

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Godwin had been born in Whisbeach, England, a small town on the River Neen, about a hundred

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miles north of London, on March 3rd, 1756.

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He was the son, grandson and nephew of dissenting or nonconformist ministers.

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That is, ministers who rejected both the doctrines and the practices of the Church of England.

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The kind of Protestants who looked back with longing on the period a hundred years before

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when Oliver Cromwell had run the English government.

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The kind of Protestants who, in the seventeenth century, often pulled up stakes, got on a

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boat and left England altogether for, say, the wild and primitive conditions of the Massachusetts

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Bay Colony.

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In the middle of the 18th century, when William Godwin was born, though dissenters or non-conformists

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were legally tolerated, they had been for nearly 80 years, the dissenters were unable

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to have their births registered to enter the national universities or to hold public office.

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Or so, at any rate, reports Peter Marshall, Godwin's latest biographer, whose book, William

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from Godwin was first published a quarter century ago, back in 1984.

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Marshall writes that as a result, the non-conformists formed a separate and distinct cultural group,

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which defended at all costs the right of private judgment and made up a permanent opposition

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to the state of England.

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Marshall reports that as a boy, Godwin, the seventh of thirteen children in his family,

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was deeply religious and intellectually precocious, and aspired, from an early age, to follow

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his father, uncle and grandfather into the ministry.

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And so he did.

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Entry to Cambridge was denied him on religious grounds, regardless of how intellectually

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precocious he was, so he trained for the ministry at the dissenting academy at Hoxton instead,

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which Peter Marshall describes as one of the best centers of higher education in 18th century England.

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Then he tried out as a minister in three different rural communities in the south of England.

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All three congregations rejected him.

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His sermons were serious and high-minded and all that, but perhaps a trifle radical for most small-town nonconformists of the day to swallow.

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Godwin had been continuing his education on his own, you see, reading voraciously.

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Peter Marshall writes that Godwin's intellectual development was rapid.

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The political debate raging over the American War of Independence at the time soon led him

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to support the Whig opposition to the war.

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But the most important influence was to come from a reading of the French philosophes,

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and the 18th century French intellectuals, the most famous is probably Voltaire, who

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promoted deism, classical liberalism and reliance on reason as the best means of learning the

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truth about anything.

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The ideas of these French philosophs influenced the activists responsible for the American

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and French political revolutions of the late 18th century.

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And as Marshall puts it, when Godwin closed the covers of their books, his whole world

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Godwin's worldview had changed. They immediately undercut his Calvinist view of man.

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What's more, the churchgoers in the three small towns where Godwin tried out as a minister

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found him a bit remote, a bit chilly, lacking in the warmth, the openness, the kind of caring

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exterior one would tend to prefer in one's clergyman. It wasn't long before, as Marshall

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Godwin realized that he was not cut out to be a minister. He decided to go to London

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and try to earn his living by teaching and writing.

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It was 1782. Godwin was 26 years old. He set to work with energy and determination. He

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published a collection of his sermons that touched on topics in English history. He wrote

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a biography of William Pitt the Elder. He wrote three short novels. He plunged into

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to Journalism, writing about politics, cultural trends and current books and ideas for various

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weekly and monthly magazines.

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He put together a prospectus for a school he hoped to open, and though, as Marshall

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reports, no pupils turned up, the prospectus remains one of the more incisive and eloquent

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accounts of libertarian and progressive education.

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Godwin believed that, in his words, liberty is the school of understanding.

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Godwin believed that, again in his words, the child from the moment of his birth is

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an experimental philosopher.

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He essays his organs and his limbs and learns the use of his muscles.

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Everyone who will attentively observe him will find that this is his perpetual employment.

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But the whole process depends upon liberty.

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Godwin believed that liberty is the parent of strength.

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Peter teaches the child by the play of the muscles and pushing out his limbs in every

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direction to give them scope to develop themselves.

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Hence it is that he is so fond of sports and tricks in the open air, and that these

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sports and tricks are so beneficial to him.

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He runs, he vaults, he climbs, he practices exactness of eye and sureness of aim.

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His limbs grow straight and taper, and his joints well knit and flexible.

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The mind of a child is no less vagrant than his steps. It pursues the gossamer and flies

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from object to object, lawless and unconfined, and it is equally necessary to the development

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of his frame that his thoughts and his body should be free from fetters. Godwin believed

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also that, in his words, the project of a national education ought uniformly to be discouraged

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on account of its obvious alliance with national government.

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This is an alliance of a more formidable nature than the old and much contested alliance of

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church and state.

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Before we put so powerful a machine under the direction of so ambiguous an agent, it

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behooves us to consider well what it is that we do.

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Government will not fail to employ it to strengthen its hands and perpetuate its institutions.

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If we could even suppose the agents of government not to propose to themselves an object which

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will be apt to appear in their eyes not merely innocent but meritorious, the evil would not

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the less happen.

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Their views as institutors of a system of education will not fail to be analogous to

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their views in their political capacity.

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The data upon which their conduct as statesmen is vindicated will be the data upon which

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and their instructions are founded.

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It is not true that our youth ought to be instructed to venerate the Constitution, however

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excellent, they should be led to venerate truth, and the Constitution only so far as

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it corresponds with their uninfluenced deductions of truth.

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Had the scheme of a national education been adopted when despotism was most triumphant,

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It is not to be believed that it could have forever stifled the voice of truth, but it

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would have been the most formidable and profound contrivance for that purpose that imagination

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can suggest.

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Still, in the countries where liberty chiefly prevails, it is reasonably to be assumed that

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there are important errors, and a national education has the most direct tendency to

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to perpetuate those errors and to form all minds upon one model.

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By the early 1790s, Godwin had attracted sufficient attention as a journalist and as a writer

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of books that he was able to arrange funding to enable him to devote his full time for

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nearly a year and a half to writing a book-length reply to Edmund Burke's notorious book-length

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Reflections on the Revolution in France, which had been published in 1790.

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It wasn't that Burke's Reflections had not already provoked libertarian reply.

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There had been, in 1790, a Vindication of the Rights of Men, an essay published as a

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pamphlet by the leading woman journalist of the day, Mary Wollstonecraft.

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There had been the two volumes, one in 1791, the other in 1792, of Thomas Paine's book,

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The Rights of Man.

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Godwin had served on the committee that had worked to find a printer willing to take the

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chance of being prosecuted for sedition for putting out an English edition of Paine's

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work.

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But Godwin still felt the need to write a reply of his own to Burke.

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He wanted to attend less to the historical particulars of the French Revolution, as Wollstonecraft

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and Payne had done, and instead devote the lion's share of his attention to what he thought

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of as the fundamental underlying principles of the debate over the French Revolution.

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His publisher, who was paying him to write the work, decided to have each chapter typeset

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as Godwin finished it, so that once he finished the last chapter, the entire book could go

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Go Almost Immediately to Press.

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According to Peter Marshall, the publisher's decision to set the type and even begin printing

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the sheets long before the composition was finished, was based on his belief, shared

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by Godwin, that much of the benefit of the work would depend upon its early appearance.

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Godwin acknowledged in his preface to the finished book, which appeared in 1793 under

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or the title, Inquiry Concerning Political Justice, that some disadvantages had arisen from the circumstance that the printing was commenced long before the composition was finished.

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Chief among these disadvantages, Godwin wrote, was the fact that the ideas of the author became more perspicuous and digested as his inquiries advanced.

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The longer he considered the subject, the more clearly he seemed to understand it.

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This circumstance has led him into some inaccuracies of language and reasoning,

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particularly in the earlier part of the work, respecting the properties and utility of government.

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He did not enter upon the subject without being aware that government, by its very nature,

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counteracts the improvement of individual intellect.

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and Catallact.

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But as the views he entertains in this particular are out of the common road, it is scarcely

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to be wondered at that he understood the proposition more completely as he proceeded, and saw more

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distinctly into the nature of the remedy.

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This defect, together with some others, might under a different mode of preparation have

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been avoided.

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In effect, Godwin set out to write one book and wound up writing another.

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When he began writing, he believed in what a libertarian of today would call a minimal

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state. When he finished writing, 16 months later, he was an advocate of total abolition

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of the state. As Marshall puts it, Godwin set out very close to the English Jacobins

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like Thomas Paine, only to finish a convinced and outspoken anarchist, the first great exponent

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of Society Without Government.

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And so we arrive at the reason for William Godwin's appearance in this audio series on

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the libertarian tradition.

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He was the first great exponent of society without government, the first advocate of

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such a thing to write out at length his reasons for advocating what he advocated.

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He was, then, one of us.

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That's why he can lay just claim to a place in the libertarian tradition.

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Right?

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Alas, it's not that simple. Godwin has been a controversial figure since the moment he first burst upon the public consciousness in 1793, at the age of 36, with the publication of his inquiry concerning political justice.

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For the more than 200 years that have passed since then, Godwin has been like the proverbial elephant that found itself being closely examined by three learned blind men.

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One of the blind scholars, you'll recall, had put his hands on the elephant's trunk

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and insisted that an elephant was a type of snake. Another blind scholar, having seized

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upon one of the elephant's legs, was convinced that an elephant was more like a tree than

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like anything else in all of nature, snakes emphatically included. Godwin is a lot like

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that elephant. One expert says he's an individualist. Another says he's a communist. And the problem

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The problem is, they're both right. Just as the elephant in the old story is both like a snake and like a tree, so Godwin is both an individualist anarchist, one of us, and a communist anarchist, a person of whom people like us are usually very suspicious, to say the least.

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This is, at least in part, because, as has been noted, Godwin's thinking changed and

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grew while he was writing his inquiry concerning political justice.

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He worked off and on over the years at the task of revising his book to reconcile its

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conflicting sections, but it was no good.

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It couldn't be done.

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The man who wrote the final chapters of the inquiry concerning political justice was not

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not the same man who wrote the opening chapters of that work.

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Godwin's inquiry concerning political justice is really, as I have said, two different books

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at the same time, the book it started out to be and the book it ended up being.

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The result cannot be rendered fully coherent except by completely rewriting either the

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first half or the second half, or maybe by rewriting the whole thing.

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No amount of mere revision and touch-up will do the trick.

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Thus when Murray Rothbard, for example, dismisses Godwin in one throwaway line in a short article

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on Edmund Burke in a 1958 issue of the Journal of the History of Ideas, calling him the late

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18th century English founder of communist anarchism, it's not hard to figure out why Rothbard might

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Man, the human animal, is said to have a right to life and personal liberty. This proposition,

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if admitted, must be admitted with great limitation. He has no right to his life when his duty

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calls him to resign it. Other men are duty-bound to deprive him of life or liberty, if that

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That should appear in any case to be indispensably necessary to prevent a greater evil.

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Or perhaps Rothbard might have read this passage.

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Justice is reciprocal.

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If it be just that I should confer a benefit, it is just that another man should receive

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it.

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And if I withhold from him that to which he is entitled, he may justly complain.

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My neighbor is in want of ten pounds that I can spare.

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Therefore, unless it can be shown that the money can be more beneficently employed, his

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right is as complete as if he had my bond in his possession, or had supplied me with

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goods to the amount.

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Or perhaps Rothbard saw this statement of Godwin's.

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For any man to enjoy the most trivial accommodation, while at the same time a similar accommodation

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is not accessible to every other member of the community is, absolutely speaking, wrong.

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The problem is that these passages don't tell us the full story.

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If Rothbard had read a bit further, he might have come upon this passage.

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Every man has a certain sphere of discretion, which he has a right to expect shall not be

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infringed by his neighbors.

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This right flows from the very nature of man.

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Almost all men are fallible.

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No man can be justified in setting up his judgment as a standard for others.

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We have no infallible judge of controversies.

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Each man in his own apprehension is right in his decisions, and we can find no satisfactory

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mode of adjusting their jarring pretensions.

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If every one be desirous of imposing his sense upon others, it will at last come to be a

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The Controversy not of Reason, but of Force.

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Secondly, even if we had an infallible criterion, nothing would be gained, unless it were by

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all men recognized as such.

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If I were secured against the possibility of mistake, mischief and not good would accrue

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from imposing my infallible truths upon my neighbor and requiring his submission independently

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Godwin continued,

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For that purpose each must have his sphere of discretion.

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No man must encroach upon my province, nor I upon his.

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He may advise me, but he must not expect to dictate to me.

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He may censure me freely and without reserve, but he should remember that I am to act by

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my deliberation and not his.

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Force may never be resorted to but in the most extraordinary and imperious emergency.

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I ought to exercise my talents for the benefit of others.

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But that exercise must be the fruit of my own conviction.

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No man must attempt to press me into the service.

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I ought to appropriate such part of the fruits of the earth as by an accident comes into

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my possession and is not necessary to my benefit to the use of others.

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Act.

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They must obtain it from me by argument and expostulation, not by violence.

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It is in this principle that what is commonly called the right of property is founded.

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Whatever then comes into my possession without violence to any other man or to the institutions

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of society is my property.

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This property I have no right to dispose of at my caprice.

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Every shilling of it is appropriated by the laws of morality, but no man can be justified,

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in ordinary cases at least, in forcibly extorting it from me.

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You'll note that in this second set of passages, Godwin still believes that humans have a duty

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to give any property they don't need to those who do need it, and that those who need it

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have a right to it.

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When Godwin still believed in limited government, he wanted to protect these rights.

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But after he saw that coercive government should be abolished, he began to espouse a

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view that modern libertarians should have no difficulty sharing.

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If you want my property, you have to get it from me by convincing me to give it to you

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or sell it to you.

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You may not take it from me by force.

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Man was still a communist of sorts, but the communism he advocated was purely voluntary.

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I don't know about you, but I can live with that.

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It reminds me of something certain libertarians used to say to each other back in the 1970s

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when they were discussing the need to increase our recruitment efforts among leftists.

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Many leftists, we used to assure each other, are really just libertarians who don't understand

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economics.

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This seems to me to be a very good description of William Godwin.

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And just as, back in the 70s, I favored welcoming leftist newbies, so today I favor welcoming

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William Godwin into the libertarian tradition.

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Godwin's inquiry concerning political justice was a big success, as was his next book, a

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novel, a thriller, really, with social, political and philosophical implications, called Things

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The English journalist and essayist William Hazlitt recalled, looking back on the 90s, when he himself had been a teenager, that in those days, Godwin was in the very zenith of a sultry and unholy life.

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It was a good deal more than 15 minutes of fame, but it was almost as fleeting.

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As Peter Marshall puts it, it was Godwin's misfortune to have his name closely linked

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to the French Revolution.

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Basically, he was thrown up by the vortex of that revolution, and he sank when it subsided.

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As the reaction against the revolution built up, Marshall reports, Godwin was at first

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vilified and then rapidly forgotten.

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By 1812, his eclipse was so great that it was with inconceivable emotions that his future

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son-in-law, the poet Percy Shelley, found the author of the Inquiry Concerning Political

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Political Justice was still alive. Godwin's Inquiry Concerning Political Justice had been

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published in 1793 when Shelley was an infant. Now Shelley was 20, had read Godwin's book

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and wanted to meet the author. He found the author in London, married for the second time,

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writing, running a bookshop, and running also, with the assistance of his wife, a small publishing

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Company that brought out educational children's books.

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Shelley met Godwin as he had hoped to do.

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He also met Godwin's 16-year-old daughter, Mary, the product of a brief marriage in the

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90s to the girl's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, who had died less than two weeks after her

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daughter's birth.

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When Shelley eloped with the 16-year-old Mary, Godwin was only 57 years old.

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He still had another 23 years to live.

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He managed to support himself for 20 of those 23 years. But by 1833, when he was 77, he

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had run out of both money and realistic prospects of getting any more of the stuff. He found

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it necessary, if somewhat distasteful, to accept an offer from the British government

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to become office keeper and yeoman usher of the exchequer at an annual salary of 200 pounds

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for Little or No Actual Work.

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As Peter Marshall writes, he was given lodgings in the new palace yard next to the Houses

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of Parliament. It was the supreme irony of Godwin's complicated life that he should

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end his days looking after an obsolete institution which he wished to see abolished.

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He died in obscurity, as Marshall puts it, on April 7, 1836, at a time when the world's

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His attention was elsewhere. His final request, Marshall writes, was to be buried next to

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his greatest love, Mary Wollstonecraft. In death, as in life, the union of the first

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great anarchist and the first great feminist symbolized the common struggle for the complete

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emancipation of men and women.

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This is Jeff Rigenbach.

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The Theory of Money and Credit