Summary

William Godwin (Wisbech, March 3, 1756 - London, April 7, 1836) was a British libertarian philosopher, writer and politician.

A thinker of the late Enlightenment as well as the inspiration for some of the Romanticism of the United Kingdom, especially the "second Romantic generation" including John Keats, his son-in-law Percy Bysshe Shelley and George Gordon Byron, radical and republican, he is considered one of the earliest modern anarchist theorists. Godwin's most famous work is the essay Inquiry into Political Justice in which he expresses an ideal of philosophical anarchism.

His wife was writer Mary Wollstonecraft, forerunner of liberal-style feminism and women's rights as well as author of Vindication of Women's Rights. From their union was born Mary Godwin, known, after her marriage to the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, as Mary Shelley, author of the famous novel Frankenstein.

Youth

William Godwin belonged to a Calvinist Puritan-Presbyterian family, and his father was a minister of worship at the local church, in Guestwick, Norfolk, and a member of the dissenting congregation. Godwin was born in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, to John and Anne Godwin, the seventh of thirteen children. The locals, and his ancestors, had participated in the English Revolution alongside Oliver Cromwell, helping to organize the Independents' movement and heeding the teachings of the Levellers ("levelers"), who were in favor of an egalitarian society within the new Commonwealth republic. His father died young, without much displeasure for William, who had a contentious relationship with him; with his mother, despite considerable differences of opinion, there was always great affection, until her death at an advanced age.

At the age of 11, he became the sole pupil of Samuel Newton, who was a disciple of Robert Sandeman. Godwin will speak of him as "a celebrated apostle from the north country, who, after Calvin damned ninety-nine out of a hundred men, devised a system to damn ninety-nine out of a hundred of Calvin's followers." Newton was a powerful figure among Norwich's Puritan dissenters, but Godwin also described him as a "little tyrant" and "resembling a retired butcher, ready nevertheless to travel fifty miles for the pleasure of slaughtering an ox." Newton's aversion to violence provoked in him a hatred of coercion that would last a lifetime.

Godwin attended Presbyterian College in Hoxton in order to learn the same profession as his father. There he studied with biographer Andrew Kippis, and Dr. Abraham Rees, one of the authors of the Cyclopaedia. He began to practice as a Calvinist minister in Ware, Stowmarket and Beaconsfield. At Stowmarket he first read Enlightenment authors, particularly John Locke, David Hume, Voltaire, Helvétius, d'Holbach, Diderot and, above all, Rousseau, and was extremely impressed. Under the influence of his readings, he abandoned his faith and made the decision to leave his ecclesiastical career and devote himself to journalism and treatise writing. He risked arrest for criticizing Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger. He was at first, religiously, a Calvinist, a Socinian, then a Deist, later becoming openly unbelieving and an atheist, and finally in later life approaching a vague nonconfessional theism.

Godwin philosopher

Godwin moved to London in 1782, still nominally as a minister, with the intention of regenerating society with his pen. He adopted the principles of the French encyclopedists, setting as his goal the complete overthrow of all existing political, social and religious institutions. He believed, however, that only quiet discussion was the only thing necessary and useful to bring about change, and from the beginning to the end of his career he advised against any approach to violence. Godwin from this time was a radical philosopher in the strictest sense of the term.

In his early works he still makes references to religion: although he was an atheist, by having a character speak he states: "God himself has no right to be a tyrant." Introduced by Andrew Kippis, he began writing in 1785 for the New Annual Register and other periodicals, also writing three novels that did not make their mark. His main contributions to the "Annual Register" were the "Sketches of English History," which he wrote annually, annual summaries of domestic and foreign political affairs. He was part of a club called "the Revolutionaries," along with Lord Stanhope, Horne Tooke and Holcroft.

He moved closer to the left wing of the English Liberal (Whig) party and, in the wake of the excitement aroused by the French Revolution, felt the need to take a stand, writing and publishing in 1793 the famous treatise "An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness," known as An Inquiry into Political Justice or Political Justice. Godwin conceived the essay as a support for Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man, and a critical response to Reflections on the Revolution in France, by conservative old whig Edmund Burke. Although a pacifist, he supported the underlying reasons and merits of the French Revolution, but condemned the statism of Maximilien de Robespierre's Jacobins, which ended in the Reign of Terror, and shared more of the ideas of Jacques Roux and François-Noël Babeuf, although he disagreed with the methods. Of the thought of Thomas Paine he was a profound connoisseur.Political justice contains basically all of William Godwin

He actively participated in the debates of the "Constitutional Society," and his home became frequented by intellectuals and artists including William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Walter Scott.

Marriage and the death of the first wife

In 1796 he began a romantic relationship with feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft creating scandal because she became pregnant with his daughter Mary.

Godwin had met Wollstonecraft a few years earlier when she had intervened in the revolutionary debate against Burke with Vindication of the Rights of Man, followed by Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Wollstonecraft had gone through a bad period when she attempted suicide, but was saved. She ended up getting rid of the depression and returned to work at Johnson's Publishing House and to the old intellectual circle where Mary Hays, Elizabeth Inchbald, Sarah Siddons, in particular, were present and where she found William Godwin again. The latter had read her Letters written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, and commented that that "was a book that could make a reader fall in love with its author. She speaks of her sorrows, in a way that fills us with melancholy, and melts our souls into tenderness, and at the same time reveals a genius that demands all our admiration."

A relationship began between them and they decided to marry after Mary became pregnant. The fact that Mary was an "unmarried mother" and that she married when she was already expecting a child might have scandalized the society of the time, certainly not Godwin who, not surprisingly, in his writing Political Justice, had declared himself in favor of abolishing the institution of marriage. They married only to put an end, as far as possible, to the gossip and ostracism of London society toward Mary: in fact, after their marriage celebrated on March 29, 1797, they went to live in two adjoining houses, so as to each retain their independence.

Their union lasted only a few months: on August 30, 1797, Mary gave birth to her daughter, Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft, a noted future writer, but the aftermath of the birth was fatal to her mother, who died on September 10 of septicemia. William wrote to his friend Thomas Holcroft, "I firmly believe that there was no woman equal to her in the world. We were meant to be happy and now I have not the slightest hope of ever being happy again." Godwin was thus left alone with little Mary and Fanny Imlay, Wollstonecraft's eldest daughter from an affair with American Gilbert Imlay, to whom he decided to give his own surname, raising her as his own child. A year after his wife's death Godwin published Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication of Women's Rights (1798), with which he intended to pay tribute to the memory of his wife. However, the content of the work was considered immoral because of Wollstonecraft's extramarital affairs and illegitimate children, thus affecting the author's fame and works. Mary Godwin would read these memoirs and the works of Mary Wollstonecraft, which helped to strengthen Mary's affection for her mother's memory.

The Godwin family

Godwin, once widowed, remarried in 1801 to Mary Jane Clairmont, who already had two children, Jane, later known as Claire, and Charles, and by whom he had son William: Godwin in fact was often in debt and, convinced that he was unable to care for two girls on his own, changed his ideas about marriage and decided to contract a second one; after two unsuccessful marriage proposals to two acquaintances Godwin persuaded his neighbor, Mary Jane Clairmont, a housewife with two illegitimate children probably fathered by two different partners, Charles Gaulin Clairmont and Claire Clairmont. To support his large family he undertook a publishing business on Skinner Street, amidst considerable financial difficulties.

Many of Godwin's friends despised his new wife, often describing her as a cruel and quarrelsome person, but Godwin was devoted to her and the marriage was successful;little Mary Godwin, on the other hand, detested her stepmother. Godwin's biographer C. Kegan Paul suggested that perhaps Mrs. Godwin favored her own children over those of Wollstonecraft.

In 1805, at the suggestion of his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Godwin founded a children's publishing house, the Juvenile Library, which published such works as Mounseer Nongtongpaw (a work attributed to Mary Shelley) and Charles Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare, as well as Godwin's own works written under the pseudonym Baldwin. The publishing house did not yield profit, however, to the point that Godwin was forced to borrow a substantial amount of money to get by. Godwin continued to borrow money to try to make up for the debts he had incurred, thus worsening his financial situation. By 1809 his business failed and he felt "close to despair." He was saved from prison thanks to some supporters of his philosophical theories including Francis Place, who lent him a considerable amount of money.From then on Godwin devoted himself almost entirely to his daughter's education. Although Mary Godwin received little formal education, her father also contributed to her education in various other fields. He often took his children on educational trips, gave them free access to the home library, and arranged for them to attend visits by intellectuals, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Mary and Claire attend his reading of The Ballad of the Old Mariner) and future U.S. Vice President Aaron Burr.

Godwin admitted that she did not agree with Mary Wollstonecraft's educational conceptions found in the work Vindication of Women's Rights. (Despite this, Mary Godwin received an unusual and advanced education for a girl of her time. Indeed, she had a governess, a tutor, and had the opportunity to read manuscripts of children's books compiled by her father on Greek and Roman history. In 1811 Mary attended a college in Ramsgate for a period of six months. At the age of fifteen her father described her as "remarkably bold, rather imperious and active of mind. Her desire for knowledge is great and her perseverance in all she undertakes almost invincible."

In June 1812, Godwin sent Mary to reside with the radical family of William Baxter, his friend, near Dundee, Scotland. To Baxter he wrote, "I want her to grow up (...) as a philosopher, indeed as a cynic." Various scholars have speculated that the reason for this trip had to do with Mary's health problems (Muriel Spark in her biography of Mary Shelley speculates that the weakness in her arm from which Mary suffered at certain times may have resulted from nervous reasons given by her bad relations with Clairmont), to get her away from the family's unpleasant financial situation, or to introduce her to radical political ideas. Mary Godwin spent happy times at the Baxter home; however, her stay was interrupted by her return home with one of Baxter's daughters in the summer of 1813; seven months later, however, Mary returned there, accompanying her friend, staying then for another ten months.

Godwin and Shelley

Godwin's political ideas had a decisive influence on some contemporary authors, such as the great Romantic poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron. Shelley, a rebel and nonconformist, author of The Necessity of Atheism, translated Godwinian philosophy into poetry, in works such as Ozymandias, The Revolt of Islam, Prometheus Delivered, Ode to Intellectual Beauty, Ode to the West Wind, and many others. He became close friends with Shelley, but their relationship became strained after he fell in love with his 16-year-old daughter Mary and ran away with her (Mary was pregnant with a daughter who died shortly after her birth, and Shelley was already married, and with two young children, one of whom was born almost at the same time as Mary's daughter), and after he failed to repay Godwin numerous loans he had received (although Shelley himself had lent Godwin some sums). Godwin, once an advocate of free love, for a time did not want to have relations with his daughter and future son-in-law, feeling disappointed at being abandoned by Mary and her disciple.

In the same time frame his adopted daughter Fanny died by suicide, poisoning herself with laudanum, but Godwin spread the rumor that she had died of illness in Ireland. Godwin's radical ideas were now at odds with his quest for "bourgeois respectability," which he demonstrated on the occasions of Mary's engagement and Fanny's death. In reality Godwin's ideas had not changed much, but he felt he had to keep a low profile and a good social appearance, as conservatives wasted no opportunity to discredit him and his writings, reducing him to the ground with a family to support. Suicide also being considered a crime at the time, Godwin wanted to protect his stepdaughter's reputation and avoid legal problems for the family by fictitiously declaring and removing the name "Fanny Godwin" from the suicide note (according to others, it was Fanny herself who at least removed the surname, out of respect for Godwin and the family). Her other stepdaughter, Claire, had also run away with Mary and Percy, however, and she was to have a baby girl, Alba, later called Allegra, by another of Godwin's young friends, Lord Byron.In 1816-1817 Mary wrote the Gothic novel, published the following year under Percy's name, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus, dedicated specifically to Godwin.

Godwin finally reconciled with the Shelleys upon the birth of his grandson William, named in his honor, shortly after the two young men returned from the trip to the continent they had undertaken. Upon the suicide of his wife Harriet, who was found drowned in Hyde Park Lake, because she did not share Percy's ideal of free love and was left by him, Shelley married Mary, an act recommended to him in order to gain custody (which he would lose, however) of the two children he had from his first wife. To avoid trouble for Shelley, Harriet's suicide (possibly pregnant again at the time) was also not publicly revealed. The marriage ceremony between Mary and Percy took place in the presence of Mr. and Mrs. Godwin. During a second and longer trip to the continent, in Italy, William and Clara Everina (Mary's other, recently born daughter), Godwin's two grandchildren, died of illness (Clara in 1818 and William in 1819), and Mary herself risked her life from a miscarriage. Instead, Percy Florence, the only child of Mary and Shelley to survive his parents, was born in Florence, also in 1819.

The last few years

On July 8, 1822, Percy Shelley died by drowning at sea near Viareggio, and Mary returned the following year to the United Kingdom, becoming much closer to her father: in 1823 she and her son lived, briefly, at 195 The Strand, in Godwin and his wife's apartment. Godwin's last years, which continued his literary activity, were peaceful, despite the death of his son William Jr. in 1832, spent with his second wife and frequent visits from Mary and his grandson Percy Florence, who would inherit the title of baronet from his paternal grandfather. Claire, whose daughter, in the care of her father Lord Byron, had long since died in an Italian convent, would also return to live in London (Byron himself instead ended his life in Missolonghi, Greece, stricken with malaria). His stepson Charles Clairmont, on the other hand, would become a man of letters and an instructor, and would be one of the tutors of the future emperor of Austria, Franz Joseph.William Godwin died in his eighties, stricken with bronchitis, on April 7, 1836, and was buried, as per his request, next to Mary Wollstonecraft in the churchyard of Old St. Pancras. Pancras in London; a few years later (1851), at the behest of his nephew Percy Florence and his wife, Mary St. John, the couple's mortal remains would be moved to Bournemouth Churchyard and buried alongside their daughter Mary Shelley, who died that same year.

Godwin is considered one of the main pioneers of anarchist thought.Disillusioned by the French Revolution and Jacobin dictatorship, he devised a social order based on administrative and judicial decentralization, the building of free independent communities and the abolition of central government: a gradual change of liberating society from the state, based on the maturation of an ethic that is both individualist and communitarian.

Reason as a guide

The basis of his thinking is Enlightenment: Reason is the light that illuminates the human path and is the beacon to follow. Society can change, albeit gradually, the more men's minds are opened to reason.The basic political assumption is that all forms of power are not based on reason and impose laws that do not arise from the free will of the members of society: even the best form of government (democracy) is based on strength of numbers, and therefore on demagoguery.

Against liberal contractualism

Godwin challenges the contractualist theory of the liberal school: the covenant originally entered into tends to eternalize, causing subsequent generations to be forced to obey the will of those who preceded them, and even when today's citizens are called upon to renew the covenant, still "covenants and promises do not constitute the foundation of morality" and do not guarantee the success of reason.

The maintenance of order and anti-authoritarianism

Godwin so radically criticizes the principle of authority that he contrasts it with the opposite principle of anarchy: "each man is wise enough to govern himself" and "no satisfactory criterion can place one man, or a group of men, in command of all others." Institutions should only limit evil, since man is not perfect: the improvement of society, the creation of a civilization of free and equal, however, will gradually eliminate the "causes of crime" making repressive institutions unnecessary, since man's character is not given by nature but by society (so-called "perfectibility of man"). Godwin concludes his libertarian criminology, anticipating the anti-Lombrosian criminology of Peter Gori, not by calling for the immediate abolition of the police, but a gradual overcoming through a less coercive guard as long as there is a need, but by arguing that evildoers should be locked up only as a temporary expedient and treated with as much respect and courtesy as possible.

Direct Democracy

In the meantime, since the complete overcoming of any government can only occur with the maturation of a high civil consciousness, a social system based on popular participation must be sought.

From here Godwin departs to theorize direct democracy, decentralization and federalism, defending a form of communitarianism: a recipe applicable to every society, since the unifying datum common to all is reason; therefore, homeland love is deceptive, because it arbitrarily separates men and sets the interests of one against the interests of others. Similarly, offensive war and colonialism are also immoral, as is the exploitation of workers.

Human existence and ethics

For Godwin Reason, Justice and Happiness coincide: since reason is universal, the universality of justice also follows, which in turn leads to individual and collective happiness and true freedom. He also adheres to sensectivism and utilitarianism, while also advocating a libertarian pedagogy, drawn in part from Rousseau. While reaffirming the centrality of the individual as the subject of rights, from which all the rights of society derive, he advocated philanthropy.In his later years, he also devoted himself to science fiction, hypothesizing scientific discoveries that could make human beings achieve immortality; Godwin's interest in these topics is also believed to have influenced his daughter Mary Shelley to write her Frankenstein. Godwin and his intellectual circle (Shelley in the lead) also viewed animal rights and vegetarianism with interest.

Political justice

Godwin began thinking about the Inquiry into Political Justice in 1791, after the publication of Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man in response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). However, unlike most of the works that sprang up in the wake of Burke's work during the so-called revolutionary controversy, Godwin's did not address the specific events of the time, but dealt with the underlying philosophical principles. Its length and price (it cost over £1) made it inaccessible to the popular audience of The Rights of Man and probably protected Godwin from the persecution that other writers such as Paine experienced. Nonetheless, Godwin became an honored figure among radicals and progressives and was seen as an intellectual leader among their groups. One of the ways this happened was through the many unauthorized copies of the text, excerpts printed in radical newspapers, and lectures given by John Thelwall based on his ideas.

Although published during the French Revolution, the French Revolutionary Wars and the events leading up to the 1794 treason trials in Britain, Political Justice argues that humanity will inevitably progress, siding with human perfectibility and enlightenment. McCann explains that "Political Justice is ... first and foremost a critique of political institutions. Its view of human perfectibility is anarchic in that it sees government and related social practices such as monopoly over property, marriage and monarchy as holding back human progress." Godwin believes that government "creeps into our personal inclinations and imperceptibly transmits Its spirit to our private transactions." Instead, Godwin proposes a society in which human beings use their reason to decide the best course of action. The very existence of governments, even those founded through consensus, shows that people still cannot regulate their conduct according to the dictates of reason.

Godwin argued that the link between politics and morality had been severed and he wanted to restore it. McCann explains, quoting phrases from the essay, that in Godwin's view, "as public opinion develops in accordance with the dictates of reason, so too should political institutions change until, eventually, they wither away altogether, allowing the people to organize themselves into what would be a direct democracy." Godwin believed that the public could be rational; he wrote, "Opinion is the most powerful engine that can be brought into the sphere of political society. False opinion, superstition and prejudice, have hitherto been the real supporters of usurpation and despotism. Inquiry and the improvement of the human mind, are now shaking to the core those bulwarks that have so long held mankind in bondage."

Godwin was not a revolutionary of the tenor of John Thelwall and the London Corresponding Society. A philosophical anarchist, he believed that change would come gradually and that there was no need for violent revolution. He argued that "the task which, at present, should occupy the first place in the thoughts of man's friend is inquiry, communication, discussion." Godwin thus believed in the desire of individuals to reason sincerely and truthfully with one another. In the 20th century, Jürgen Habermas developed this idea further.

However, paradoxes and contradictions surface throughout Political Justice. As McCann observes, "a faith in the ability of public opinion to progress toward enlightenment, based on its own exercise of reason, is constantly nullified by the actual forms of public action and political life, which for Godwin end up dangerously including the individual in the collective." For example, Godwin criticizes public speeches because they appeal to feeling rather than reason and the press because it can enlighten but also perpetuate dogma.

Reception of thought

The greatest popularizer of Godwin's thought was his son-in-law Percy Shelley, with his poetry. The English thinker would influence the work of Herbert Spencer.

In his daughter Mary's Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus (the theme of Romantic titanism already appears in the title), a strong influence of her father and his anarchist ideas has also been noted: William Godwin in Political Justice argues that institutions such as government, law or marriage, though positive, tend to exert despotic forces on people's lives; he aspires to a new social order based on universal benevolence, contradicting Thomas Hobbes' seventeenth-century vision of an essentially selfish society. In Rousseauian style, it is the institutions and behavior of others that make man, in most cases, prey to evil instincts. The Creature, completely estranged from society, sees himself as an evil demon and demands justice precisely in the Godwinian sense: "Do your duty toward me," says the Monster to Victor Frankenstein who brought him into the world, later abandoning him because of the horror it aroused in him; Frankenstein refuses, and the Monster, as he promised in case of denial (and as he has already done after being abandoned and repudiated by all), will take revenge by killing his friends and family, then leading the scientist himself to his death; finally, however, he will commit suicide out of remorse. Not surprisingly, as an epigraph is placed Adam's quote from John Milton's Paradise Lost (a radical Christian revolutionary like Godwin's ancestors): "Did I ask you, Creator, to make me man from clay? Did I ask you to draw me out of darkness?"

There is in Frankenstein, more generally, a reminiscence of style and characters from Godwin's repertoire, and the morality implying a return of evil done or good omitted, as punishment on the perpetrator, sooner or later; the Monster is in fact born good (generous, reasonable and even vegetarian, a kind of good savage), but is made extremely evil by men's contempt for him; Frankenstein himself, having created him in defiance of the laws of nature and having then rejected him despite being his "son," is responsible. The Monster is thus transformed into a kind of fierce avenger of himself:

Robert Owen will also take up his concepts. Proudhon, on the other hand, mentions Godwin only once, and even Bakunin does not refer to him much. Marx, a reader of Shelley, ignores him as a utopian thinker in his own view. It would only be in the 20th century that interest in his thought would be revived, although some of his ideas were already to be found among the revolutionaries of the Paris Commune, even though Godwin had come out against the insurrections. Also interested in his thought were Pyotr Alekseevič Kropotkin and, outside the anarchist sphere, John Stuart Mill.

Sources

1. William Godwin
2. William Godwin