Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (40 page)

Godwin continued writing in earnest with so many mouths to feed, producing disastrous plays as well as a fine life of Chaucer. He wrote some more powerful novels, especially
Fleetwood
(1805) which showed the shortcomings of the ‘New Man of Feeling’ and revealed a critical awareness of the new factory system, and
Mandeville
(1817), set in the seventeenth century but containing an astonishing account of madness. He returned in
Of Population
(1820) to attack his principal opponent Malthus, with a powerful critique of his philosophical principles and his ratios of population growth and food supply.

Although Godwin lived a quiet and retired life, younger spirits took up his message. A poet called Percy Bysshe Shelley, who had been expelled from Oxford for writing a pamphlet on atheism and spurned by his wealthy baronet father, burst into Godwin’s life in 1812, with
Political Justice
in his pocket and fiery visions of freedom and justice in his imagination. Godwin was at first delighted with his new disciple, although he tried to check his ardour in fomenting rebellion in Ireland. His sympathy however changed to indignation when Shelley proceeded to elope with his sixteen-year-old daughter Mary (a ‘true Wollstonecraft’) in keeping with his own best
theories of free love. His stepdaughter Mary Jane (also known as Claire) joined them and ended up having a child called Allegra with Byron. Mary went on to write
Frankenstein
(1818) and other impressive novels.

For his part Shelley raised vast loans for Godwin on his expected inheritance, in keeping with their view that property is a trust to be distributed to the most needy. On the other hand, Shelley’s intellectual debt to Godwin was immense. What the Bible was to Milton, Godwin was to Shelley. The creed of
Political Justice
was transmuted into the magnificent and resounding verse of the greatest revolutionary narrative poems in the English language. Indeed, in
Queen Mab
(1812),
The Revolt of Islam
(1818),
Prometheus Unbound
(1819) and
Hellas
(1822), Shelley openly professed an anarchist creed and systematically celebrated the Godwinian principles of liberty, equality and universal benevolence.

In his
Philosophical Review of Reform
(1820), he further warned against the ‘mighty calamity of government’, proposed in its place a ‘just combination of the elements of social life’, and declared like Godwin that poets and philosophers are the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’.
¹⁸
Although Shelley was never an uncritical disciple and was increasingly drawn to Platonism, he remained to the end faithful to the radiant vision of
Political Justice.
If Godwin is the greatest philosopher of anarchism, Shelley is its poet.

The most impressive work of Godwin’s old age was
The History of the Commonwealth
(1824–8) in four volumes which treated his favourite period. Although he only makes the briefest mention of Winstanley and the Diggers, whose thought resembled his own so closely, he asserts that the five years from the abolition of the monarchy to Cromwell’s
coup d’état
challenge in its glory any equal period of English history. He defended moreover the execution of Charles I on the grounds that natural justice means that it is sometimes right ‘to reinvest the community in the entire rights they possessed before particular laws were established’. There comes a point when ‘resistance is a virtue’.
¹⁹

Godwin wrote a collection of philosophical essays in
Thoughts on Man
(1831) which show that at the end of his life he still held firm to the fundamental principles of
Political Justice.
In his metaphysics, he recognizes that our feelings and sensations lead us to believe in free will and the existence of matter, but he remains strictly speaking a ‘necessarian’, upholding determinism, and an ‘immaterialist’, claiming that mind is all-pervasive in the world. In his politics, he points out to the reformers who were calling for the secret ballot that it is a symbol of slavery rather than liberty. He is still ready to imagine that ‘men might subsist very well in clusters and congregated bodies without the coercion of law.’
²⁰

Indeed,
Thoughts on Man
is a sustained celebration of the achievements
and possibilities of the godlike being which makes up our species. After a long and difficult life, Godwin’s faith in the perfectibility of humanity remained unshaken, and he ends the book in the confident belief that ‘human understanding and human virtue will hereafter accomplish such things as the heart of man has never yet been daring enough to conceive.’
²¹

Godwin found it increasingly difficult to squeeze out a living from his writing; so when the new Whig Prime Minister Grey offered him a pension at the age of seventy-seven, he reluctantly accepted. His official title was Office Keeper and Yeoman Usher, and he was given lodgings in the New Palace Yard next to the Houses of Parliament. It was the supreme irony of Godwin’s complicated life that he should end his days looking after an obsolete institution which he wished to see abolished. But his story was not without a final twist. In October 1834, a great fire destroyed the old Palace of Westminster. Godwin was responsible for the fire-fighting equipment, but he had quietly absconded to the theatre at the time. No one thought afterwards to accuse him of succeeding where Guy Fawkes had failed!

Godwin eked out his last days with a small pension, his aged wife, his curious library, and his rich memories, principally cheered by visits from his daughter. He died peacefully in his bed on 7 April 1836. He had just turned eighty. Only a handful of friends attended his funeral and he left no organized movement of followers. His final request was to be buried next to his greatest love Mary Wollstonecraft: in death as in life, the union of the first great anarchist and the first great feminist symbolized the common struggle for the complete emancipation of men and women.

Godwin’s principal aim was to examine the philosophical principles on which politics depended and to place the subject on an immovable basis. His approach was strictly deductive, proceeding by argument and demonstration, and he tried to express himself as clearly and precisely as possible. While he addressed the calm friend of truth, this did not prevent him from the occasional burst of fervent rhetoric.

As the full title of his principal work
An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, and its influence on General Virtue and Happiness
implies, Godwin was principally concerned with the relationship between politics and ethics. He further based his ethical principles on a particular view of the universe and human nature. Of all the anarchist thinkers, Godwin was the most consistent in trying to show the philosophical assumptions on which he based his libertarian conclusions.

Godwin’s starting-point is a belief in universal determinism or ‘necessity’ as he called it: nature is governed by necessary laws. In history as in
the lives of individuals, nothing could have happened otherwise. The regular succession of causes and effects has the advantage of enabling us to make predictions and to model our judgements and actions accordingly. At the same time, Godwin admits that we cannot know the exact nature of causality and that any prediction is based only on high probability.

It was Godwin’s meditations on this doctrine of ‘necessity’ that led him to become an atheist whilst writing
Political Justice
, ‘Religion’, he concluded, is merely ‘an accommodation to the prejudices and weaknesses of mankind’.
²²
Nevertheless, Godwin’s early religious beliefs clearly affected his moral and political beliefs. His anarchism was largely the application of the Protestant right of private judgement from the religious to the moral and political sphere. His early exposure to the Sandemanian version of Calvinism encouraged his rationality and stoicism as well as his democratic and egalitarian sympathies.

Godwin only remained an atheist for a few years, and like most anarchists believed in a kind of cosmic optimism. Just as nature when left to itself flourishes best, so society thrives when least interfered with. Under the influence of Coleridge, Godwin adopted later in life a kind of vague theism, and came to talk of some ‘mysterious power’ which sustains and gives harmony to the whole of the universe.
²³

Human nature no less than external nature is governed by laws of necessity. Godwin rejects the theory of innate ideas and instincts and asserts, as one of his chapter titles puts it, that the ‘Characters of Men Originate in their External Circumstances’. We are born neither virtuous nor vicious but are made so according to our upbringing and education. Since we are almost entirely the products of our environment, there are also no biological grounds for class distinctions or slavery. It follows for Godwin that we have a common nature and substantial equality. From this physical equality Godwin deduces moral equality: we should treat each other with equal consideration and recognize that what is desirable for one is desirable for all.

But while Godwin argues that human nature is malleable, it does have certain characteristics. In the first place, we are social beings and society brings out our best abilities and sympathies. At the same time, we are unique individuals and cannot be truly happy If we lose ourselves in the mass. Secondly, we are rational beings, capable of recognizing truth and acting accordingly. In the great chain of cause and effect, our consciousness is a real cause and indispensable link. Thirdly, because we have conscious minds, we are voluntary beings, that is to say, we can choose our actions
with foresight of their consequences. As Godwin puts it in another chapter tide: ‘The Voluntary Actions of Men Originate in their Opinions’. The most desirable condition in his view is to widen as far as possible the scope of voluntary action.

It is through reason that Godwin reconciles his philosophy of necessity and human choice. While every action is determined by a motive, reason enables us to choose what motive to act upon. Rather than making moral choices impossible, Godwin believed that the doctrine of necessity enabled us to be confident that real causes produce real effects, and that new opinions can change people’s behaviour.

The fourth characteristic of our species is that we are progressive beings. Godwin based his faith in the ‘perfectibility of man’ on the assumptions that our voluntary actions originate in our opinions and that it is in the nature of truth to triumph over error. He made out his case in the form of a syllogism:

Since vice is nothing more than ignorance, education and enlightenment will make us wise, virtuous and free. Thus we may be the products of our environment, but we can also change it. We are, to a considerable degree, the makers of our destiny.

Several objections have been raised to Godwin’s view of the perfectibility of man, but they usually overlook his own clarifications. In the first place, by perfectibility, he did not mean that human beings are capable of reaching perfection but rather that they can improve themselves indefinitely. Indeed, he was well aware of the power of evil, the disrupting force of passion, and the weight of existing institutions. Progress, he stressed, will be gradual, often interrupted, and may even have to pass through certain necessary stages.

Next, it is sometimes claimed that there is no immutable and universal truth and that truth does not always triumph over error. Although Godwin talked of immutable truths in a Platonic way, he made it clear that he did not mean absolute truth but ‘greater or less probability’. He was moreover fully informed of the fragility of truth and the strength of prejudice and habit. Nevertheless, Godwin assumed like John Stuart Mill that truth can fight its own battles, and put error to rout On this reasonable assumption, he based his eloquent defence of the freedom of thought and expression.

Finally, Godwin has been accused of being too rational. Certainly, in
the first edition of
Political Justice
, he argued that an action can flow from the rational perception of truth and described the will as the last act of the understanding. But he also stressed that passion is inseparable from reason and that virtue cannot be ‘very strenuously espoused’ until it is ‘ardently loved’. In subsequent editions, he gave even more room to feelings, and suggested that reason is not an independent principle but from a practical view merely ‘a comparison and balancing of different feelings’.
²⁵
Although reason cannot excite us to action, it regulates our conduct and it is to reason that we must look for the improvement of our social condition. It is a subtle argument which cannot easily be dismissed.

From these substantial assumptions about human nature, Godwin developed his system of ethics. He considered it the most important of subjects; indeed, there was no choice in life, not even sitting on the left or the right hand side of the fire, that was not moral in some degree. Ethics moreover was the foundation of politics.

Godwin is a thoroughgoing and consistent utilitarian, defining morality as that ‘system of conduct which is determined by a consideration of the greatest general good’.
²⁶
He is an act-utilitarian rather than a rule-utilitarian. While he recognizes that general moral rules are sometimes psychologically and practically necessary, he warns against too rigid an application of them. Since no actions are the same, there can be no clearer maxim than ‘Every case is a rule to itself.’
²⁷
It is therefore the duty of a just man to contemplate all the circumstances of the individual case in the light of the sole criterion of utility. Such reasoning led Godwin to become an anarchist for he rejected all rules and laws except the dictates of the understanding.