William Godwin
English political philosopher, novelist and journalist (1756–1836), born in Wisbech into a family of Calvinist religious dissenters, initially trained to become a dissenting minister before progressively abandoning the Christian faith to embrace a radical utilitarian rationalism influenced by the French Enlightenment. His masterwork, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness (1793), published in the immediate context of the French Revolution and achieving remarkable editorial success that briefly made him one of the most celebrated intellectual figures in England, sets out one of the first complete systems of what would later be called philosophical anarchism: starting from an Enlightenment confidence in the unlimited perfectibility of human reason, Godwin argued that all coercive institutions — government, accumulated private property, legal marriage and even penal punishment — were artificial obstacles to human happiness and moral progress, which would eventually become unnecessary as reason and benevolence spread freely among individuals through rational discussion and education, rather than revolutionary violence. This extreme confidence in reason led him to controversial ethical positions, such as his famous claim that, in a fire, one should rescue an eminent sage such as Fénelon before one's own mother, if doing so maximised general utility. Briefly married to the pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who died shortly after giving birth to their daughter Mary (future author of Frankenstein), Godwin saw his intellectual prestige collapse dramatically following the British conservative backlash against Jacobin radicalism, becoming for decades the object of social and intellectual ostracism that contrasted painfully with his earlier fame, though his influence on later thinkers such as his son-in-law Percy Bysshe Shelley, and on the later development of anarchist thought, has been widely acknowledged by modern historiography.
4 works
- An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, Vol. I
- An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, Vol. II
- Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft
- Thoughts on Man, His Nature, Productions, and Discoveries