Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (39 page)

Although the tutors were extremely liberal in religion and politics and encouraged free enquiry, Godwin left Hoxton as he entered: a Sandemanian and a Tory. He tried to become a minister, but three times he was rejected by rural congregations in south England. It proved a period of reassessment and self-examination. His intellectual development was rapid. The political debate raging over the American War of Independence at the time soon led him to support the Whig opposition to the war, and a reading of the Latin historians and Jonathan Swift made him a republican overnight.

The most important influence was to come from a reading of the French
philosophes.
In Rousseau, he read that man is naturally good but corrupted by institutions, that private property was the downfall of mankind, and that man was born free, but everywhere was in chains. From Helvétius and d’Holbach, he learned that all men are equal and society should be formed for human happiness. When he closed the covers of their books, his whole world-view had changed. They immediately undermined his Calvinist view of man, although for the time being he became a follower of Socinus (who denied the divinity of Christ and original sin) rather than an atheist. Realizing
that he was not cut out to be a minister, Godwin decided to go to London and try to earn his living by teaching and writing.

In quick succession, Godwin wrote a life of William Pitt, two pamphlets supporting the Whig cause, a collection of literary imitations, and three shorts novels. Eager to get rid of his sermons, he published a selections as
Sketches of History
(1784), but not without the observation that God in the Bible acts like a ‘political legislator’ in a ‘theocratic state’, despite the fact that he has ‘not a right to be a tyrant’. Godwin in this respect was deeply impressed by Milton’s depiction of the Devil in
Paradise Lost
– ‘a being of considerable virtue’, as he later wrote, who rebelled against his maker because he saw no sufficient reason for the extreme inequality of rank and power which had been created. He continued to rebel after his fall because ‘a sense of reason and justice was stronger in his mind than a sense of brute force’.
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The most important political work of this period was undoubtedly
An Account of the Seminary
(1783) which Godwin intended to open in Epsom for the instruction of twelve pupils in the Greek, Latin, French and English languages. Although no pupils turned up, the prospectus remains one of the most incisive and eloquent accounts of libertarian and progressive education. It shows Godwin believing that children are not only born innocent and benevolent, but that the tutor should foster their particular talents and treat them gently and kindly. The ex-Tory student and Calvinist minister had come to recognize that:

Five years before the French Revolution, Godwin had already worked out the main outlines of
Political Justice.
His friendship with the radical playwright Thomas Holcroft further persuaded him to become an atheist and confirmed the evils of marriage and government.

Since none of his early works brought him much money, Godwin was obliged to work in Grub Street for the Whig journals to earn a living. He wrote about the oppression carried out by Pitt’s government in Ireland and
India. In a history of the revolution in Holland, he prophesized in 1787 that the ‘flame of liberty’ first sparked off by the American Revolution had spread and that ‘a new republic of the purest kind is about to spring up in Europe’.
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When the French Revolution broke out in 1789, it was not entirely unexpected. Godwin was thirty-three, and, no less than William Blake’s and William Wordsworth’s, his ‘heart beat high with great swelling sentiments of Liberty’.
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He did not remain idle. When Tom Paine’s publisher faltered, Godwin helped bring out the first part of
Rights of Man
(1791). He also wrote a letter at this time to the Whig politician Sheridan declaring that ‘Liberty leaves nothing to be admired but talents & virtue … Give to a state but liberty enough, and it is impossible that vice should exist in it.’
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As his daughter Mary later observed, Godwin’s belief that ‘no vice could exist with perfect freedom’ was ‘the very basis of his system, the very keystone of the arch of justice, by which he desired to knit together the whole human family.’
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Burke’s
Reflections on the Revolution in France
(1790) had triggered off a pamphlet war, but Godwin decided to rise above the controversies of the day and write a work which would place the principles of politics on an immovable basis. As a philosopher, he wanted to consider universal principles, not practical details. He therefore tried to condense and develop whatever was best and most liberal in political theory. He carefully marshalled his arguments and wrote in a clear and precise style. The result was
An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness
(1793).

As Godwin observed in his preface, the work took on a life of its own, and as his enquiries advanced his ideas became more ‘perspicuous and digested’. He developed a theory of justice which took the production of the greatest sum of happiness as its goal and went on to reject domestic affections, gratitude, promises, patriotism, positive rights and accumulated property. His changing view of government further gave rise to an occasional inaccuracy of language. He did not enter the work, he acknowledged, ‘without being aware that government by its very nature counteracts the improvement of individual mind; but … he understood the proposition more completely as he proceeded, and saw more distinctly into the nature of the remedy.’
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The experience of the French Revolution had already persuaded him of the desirableness of a government of the simplest construction but his bold reasoning led him to realize that humanity could be enlightened and free only with government’s utter annihilation. Godwin thus set out very close to the English Jacobins like Paine, only to finish a convinced and outspoken anarchist — the first great exponent of society without government.

Political Justice
was not the only work to bring Godwin instant fame. In 1794, he published his novel
Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams
, a gripping story of flight and pursuit intended to show how ‘the spirit and character of the government intrudes itself into every rank of society.’
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It too was to be hailed as a great masterpiece. It is not only a work of brilliant social observation, but may be considered the first thriller and the first psychological novel which anticipates the anxieties of modern existentialism.

Godwin’s
Political Justice
was published a fortnight after Britain declared war on revolutionary France — at a time when the public was ‘panic struck’ with ‘all the prejudices of the human mind … in arms against it’.
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Pitt’s government tried to crush the growing reform movement by arresting its leaders Holcroft, Home Tooke, Thelwall and others for High Treason. Godwin sprang to their defence in some well-argued
Cursory Strictures
(1794). Partly due to the influence of Godwin’s pamphlet, a jury threw out the charge. Again, when the government introduced its notorious Gagging Acts to limit the freedom of speech, assembly and the press, Godwin responded with some incisive
Considerations
(1795) signed by ‘A Lover of Order’. The pamphlet was mainly a denunciation of Pitt’s policy of repression but it also criticized the methods of the new political associations, particularly the London Corresponding Society, for simmering the ‘cauldron of civil contention’ through its lectures and mass demonstrations.
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While Godwin was as vigorous and uncompromising as ever in defending hard-won liberties, he believed that genuine reform was best achieved through education and enlightenment in small independent circles. Such circles anticipated the ‘affinity groups’ of later anarchists. His criticisms of the inflammatory methods of his contemporaries, however, meant that he was bitterly attacked by Jacobin agitators like Thelwall.

In the mean time, Godwin had become intimate with Mary Wollstonecraft, the first major feminist writer who had asserted in her celebrated
Vindication of the Rights of Woman
(1792) that mind has no sex and that women should become rational and independent beings rather than passive and indolent mistresses. Although Godwin was diffident and occasionally pedantic, Wollstonecraft recognized in him an independent spirit who was capable of deep emotion as well as high thinking. They soon became lovers, but aware of the dangers of cohabitation, decided to live apart.

Wollstonecraft had an illegitimate daughter by a previous relationship and had experienced the full force of prejudice in the rigid society of late eighteenth-century England. She had already tried to commit suicide twice. When she became pregnant again with Godwin’s child, she felt unable to face further ostracism and asked Godwin to marry her. Although Godwin had condemned the European institution of marriage as the ‘most odious
of all monopolies’, he agreed. His enemies were delighted by this apparent turnabout, and the accusation that he had a hot head and cold feet has reverberated ever since. Godwin however as a good anarchist believed that there are no moral rules which should not give way to the urgency of particular circumstances. In this case, he submitted to an institution which he still wished to see abolished out of regard for the happiness of an individual. After the marriage ceremony, he held himself bound no more than he was before.

Although Governmental Terror was the order of the day, Godwin still believed that truth would eventually triumph over error and prejudice. He therefore revised carefully
Political Justice
, a new edition of which appeared in 1796. Wollstonecraft had helped him recognize the importance of the feelings as a source of human action and the central place of pleasure in ethics. Godwin also made his arguments more consistent by showing from the beginning of the work the evils of government and by clarifying the section on property. Kropotkin was therefore wrong to follow De Quincey in thinking that Godwin had retracted many of his beliefs in the Second Edition.
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It not only retained the great outlines of the first but offered a more substantial and convincing exposition of his anarchism. In the Third Edition of 1798, he further removed a few of the ‘crude and juvenile remarks’ and added a ‘Summary of Principles’.

While revising the second edition of
Political Justice
, Godwin also wrote some original reflections on education, manners and literature which were published as a collection of essays called
The Enquirer
(1797). The work contains some of the most remarkable and advanced ideas on education ever written. Godwin not only argues that the aim of education should be to generate happiness and to develop a critical and independent mind, but suggests that the whole scheme of authoritarian teaching could be done away with to allow children to learn through desire at their own pace and in their own way.

Godwin’s thoughts on economics in
The Enquirer
are no less challenging. Indeed, the essay ‘Of Avarice and Profusion’ offered such a trenchant account of exploitation based on the labour theory of value that it inspired Malthus to write his tirade against all improvement, the
Essay on the Principle of Population
(1798). Godwin’s devastating survey ‘Of Trades and Professions’ in a capitalist society also led the Chartists to reprint it in 1842 at the height of their agitation.

The period spent with Wollstonecraft was the happiest in Godwin’s life: it was a union of two great radical minds. Through them the struggles for men’s freedom and women’s freedom were united at the source. But it was to be tragically short-lived: Wollstonecraft died in giving birth to their daughter Mary. Godwin consoled himself by editing her papers and by
writing a moving and frank memoir of her life which was predictably dismissed by the Anti-Jacobins as a ‘convenient Manual of speculative debauchery’.
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Godwin never got over the loss of his first and greatest love. All he could do was to recreate her in his next novel
St Leon
(1799) which showed the dangers of leading an isolated life and celebrated the domestic affections.

Godwin did his best to stem the tide of reaction in some calm and eloquent
Thoughts. Occasioned by the Perusal of Dr Parr’s Spital Sermon
(1801), the apostasy of a former friend. He took the opportunity to clarify his notion of justice by recognizing the claim of the domestic affections. He also refuted his chief opponent Malthus by arguing that moral restraint made vice and misery unnecessary as checks to population. But it was to no avail. Godwin was pilloried, laughed at and then quietly forgotten. Never again in his lifetime was he able to capture the public imagination.

The rest of Godwin’s life is a sad tale of increasing penury and obscurity. He married a neighbour called Mary Jane Clairmont who already had two illegitimate children and bore him a son, thereby increasing the family to seven. But there was no great passion or intellectual inspiration between the two, and she alienated his close friends like Coleridge and Charles Lamb. To earn a living, they set up a Juvenile Library which produced an excellent series of children’s books but involved Godwin in endless worry and debt. A government spy correctly noted that he wished to make his library the resort of preparatory schools so that in time ‘the principles of democracy and Theophilanthropy may take place universally’.
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