An Uneasy Affair: William Godwin and English Radicalism, 1793-1797

Conclusion

Examine the children of peasants. Nothing is more common than to find in them a promise of understanding, a quickness of observation, an ingenuousness of character, and a delicacy of tact, at the age of seven years, the very traces of which are obliterated at the age of fourteen. They are enlisted at the crimpinghouse of oppression. They are brutified by immediate and unintermitted labour. Their hearts are hardened and, their spirits broken, by all that they see, all that they feel, and all that they look forward to. This is one of the most interesting points of view in which we can consider the present order of society. It is the great slaughter-house of genius and of mind. It is the unrelenting murderer of hope and gaiety, of the love of reflection and the love of life.[1]

The philosophic anarchism of William Godwin was ultimately informed by a wide variety of eighteenth century philosophic, religious and economic strains of thought. Composed as it is of elements from both Sandemanian Dissent and the liberal political economy of Adam Smith, his philosophy was given further impetus by the French Revolution. Godwin did not approach the problem of property and accumulation with the rigor of a modern social scientist, nor did he propose any practical or even remotely possible schemes aimed at the future regeneration of mankind. His idea of a social revolution was one of mind and opinion. Yet, he can be said to be an important part of a much wider movement of social criticism which was composed of thinkers such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey and Shelley. These men were educated in Godwin's philosophy of human perfectibility and his criticism of English society in the 1790s. Though it was said at the outset that Godwin was more or less representative of the aspirations of the English industrial bourgeoisie, by now it must be clear that he was also extremely critical of the mode of production upon which their system was based and which had produced the "great slaughter-house of genius." There was nothing inherently wrong about machines and technology -- machines are the means of man's eventual and quite necessary liberation from the realm of necessity. Yet, under existing social relations, the luxury and vice so prevalent among the opulent rich, and the ignorance and precarious existence of the laboring poor, had made this liberation impossible. But Godwin remained hopeful, however, that a revolution in man's opinions would indeed occur, and thus usher in the dawn of the New Jerusalem.

Godwin met his death in 1836, after nearly fifty years of undaunted literary enterprise. During that time he came into contact with a rather wide variety of English thinkers and their reflections on culture. From Thomas Holcroft, the learned dramatist and major impetus behind the writing of Political Justice, he learned the power of  mind over matter. Mary Wollstonecraft, whom Godwin met in 1796 and married the following year, revealed to him through her love and affection, that cold, rational logic was not enough to promote the regeneration of mankind. Her death on September 10, 1797, after giving birth to their daughter Mary, effected a revolution in Godwin's thought from which he was never to fully recover. Godwin, the dispassionate logician of philosophic anarchism, became the "new man of feeling." Joseph Priestley, the Rational Dissenter, uncovered the gloomy defects of the Calvinist faith. The French materialists reinforced Godwin's religious doubts and in consequence he became an atheist. Coleridge, on the other hand, deep in a study of Spinoza and a religion which identified God with nature itself, became by 1800 the last of Godwin's principal oral instructors, conquering his atheism and teaching him to find divinity in all things.

But perhaps Godwin's deepest convictions were cast in the context of political radicalism in the 1790s. For Godwin was simultaneously aloof from and an integral part of the movement for parliamentary reform. His philosophic anarchism influenced a portion of the London Corresponding Society, including their most important spokesmen, John Thelwall and Francis Place, even as that philosophy and artisanal direct political action, though not necessarily incompatible, came into conflict -- a conflict expressed in Political Justice. In the end, Godwin was to emerge defeated. But he was not deflated, for his thought lived on, animating Shelley's poetry and political tracts, as well as the social and political thought of the Owenites and Chartists of the nineteenth.

What is being suggested here is that Godwin's criticisms, aimed as they are at English government and society, belong to a much wider and important school of social criticism. The sentiments expressed by Godwin in Political Justice were consistent with Blake's recognition of the "dark satanic mills" and Carlyle's equally important revelation of the "cash nexus." The Industrial Revolution, as Raymond Williams has aptly pointed out, was the decisive period in which thinkers such as Paine, Wordsworth, Wollstonecraft, Blake, Southey, Coleridge and Shelley detected the changes in society brought about by the rise of both democracy and industry. These were changes which by their very nature were felt in a personal as well as in a general way.

The changes that we receive as record were experienced, in these years, on the senses; hunger, suffering, conflict, dislocation; hope, energy, vision, dedication. The 'pattern of change was not background, as we may now be inclined to study it, it was, rather, the mould in which general experience was cast.[2]

Godwin too was an integral part of this general experience of social change and dislocation and to reduce his significance to that of a minor figure in the wake of late eighteenth century English radicalism is to completely misconstrue the power and influence of his intellect. For though Godwin's Political Justice was quickly forgotten, his criticism of authority and self-interest, government and political associations, was to live on in the nineteenth century. It was not so much that Godwin influenced a significant number of social critics, but rather that his thought, as a major intellect of the 1790s, has to be seen within the context of a much wider school of social criticism.

Godwin may still be read with advantage today, even though the shortcomings of his system, some of them typical of his age, others peculiar to himself, are to us more necessary than ever. Some of his observations are acute, some of his insights profound. Even his errors are often uncommonly suggestive. Above all, he is a staunch defender of civilized values, the importance of which has become, since his time, increasingly evident. We can still profit by the urgency with which Godwin felt, and the sharpness with which he sometimes defined, the highest ideals of human society.