INFLUENCE

William Godwin, an unassuming ex-minister and political journalist, woke up one day in 1793, to find that he was famous. His Enquiry concerning Political Justice, inspired by the explosive experience of the French Revolution and the vigorous political debate which followed in Britain, swept the board. 'He blazed', his fellow radical William Hazlitt wrote later, 'as a sun in the firmament of reputation; no one was more talked of, more looked up to, more sought after, and wherever liberty, truth and justice was the theme, his name was not far off. ... No work in our time gave such a blow to the philosophical mind of the country as the celebrated Enquiry concerning Political Justice.'

William Pitt's government, shaken by the revolutionary ideas sweeping the country and the formation of political associations clamouring for reform, fully realized the danger of Godwin's work, which offered the first clear statement of anarchist principles. Pitt however decided not to prosecute Godwin for treason (which carried the death penalty) on the grounds that 'a three guinea book could never do much harm among those who had not three shillings to spare'. The book in fact was sold at half the price, and while this was still more than half the average monthly wages of a labourer, working people banded together in hundreds of places to buy it by subscription and to read it aloud at their meetings. Pirated editions appeared in Ireland and Scotland; radical publishers issued lengthy extracts in cheap collections. There was sufficient demand for Godwin to revise the work for cheaper editions in 1796 and 1798. It not only influenced artisan leaders like John Thelwall and Francis Place, who were laying the foundations of the British labour movement, but obscure young poets like Wordsworth, Southey and Coleridge. Indeed, Godwin's ideas expressed the aspirations of the emerging working class and dissenting intellectuals to such an extent that a contemporary observed that 'perhaps no work of equal bulk ever had so many proselytes in an equal space of time'.

The very success of Godwin's work, despite its philosophical weight and elegant style, shows how near the Britain of the 1790s was to revolution. The war declared by Pitt on revolutionary France however soon raised the spectre of British patriotism. His systematic persecution of the radical leaders and the introduction of Gagging Acts in 1794 eventually silenced and then broke the reform movement for a generation. Godwin came boldly to the defence of civil liberties and of his radical friends in a series of eloquent pamphlets but by the turn of the century, he too had fallen into one common grave with the cause of liberty. Thrown up by the vortex of the French Revolution, he sank when it subsided. Most people in the ruling class, De Quincey wrote, felt of Godwin with 'the same alienation and horror as of a ghoul, or a bloodless vampyre'.

But not all was lost. It was with 'inconceivable emotions' that the young Percy Bysshe Shelley found in 1812 that Godwin was still alive and he went on not only to elope with his daughter but to become the greatest anarchist poet by putting Godwin's philosophy to verse. Robert Owen, sometimes called the father of British socialism, became friendly soon after and acknowledged Godwin as his political master. In the l830s and 1840s, at the height of their agitation, the Owenites and Chartists reprinted many extracts from Godwin's works in their journals and brought out a new edition of Political Justice in 1842. Through the early British socialist thinkers, especially William Thompson and Thomas Hodgskin, Godwin's vision of the ultimate withering away of the state and of a free and equal society began to haunt the Marxist imagination.

Yet despite Godwin's influence on the British labour movement, he was virtually lost to the main international anarchist tradition in the nineteenth century. Proudhon, the first self-styled anarchist, only mentions Godwin twice as a communist of the same school as Owen. There is no evidence that Bakunin read him. Tolstoy spoke of Godwin as providing the answer to the question of how society could be established without a state authority, quoted him on law, and shared his views of reason and perfectibility, but he worked out his ideas independently. It was Kropotkin who rediscovered Godwin for the anarchist movement in the twentieth century, recognizing that the author of Political Justice was the first person to state 'in a quite definite form the political and economic principles of anarchism'. The anarchist historian Max Nettlau concurred. The sentiment was further echoed by Rudolf Rocker and confirmed by the studies of George Woodcock.

Since the Second World War, complete English editions of Political Justice have appeared in Toronto and London, a Spanish translation in Buenos Aires and a French translation in Toronto, and abridged versions in Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, Bombay, Naples and Oxford. In 1953, the Belgian anarchist Hem Day (i.e., Marcel Dieu) devoted the first issue of his Cahiers de Pensée et Action to a collection of penetrating and sympathetic essays by an international symposium of anarchists on 'Un Précurseur Trop Oublié'. A host of academic studies and articles have further recognized Godwin as a serious political philosopher, an original moral thinker, a pioneer in communist economics and progressive education and a powerful novelist.

Godwin is no longer a 'neglected prophet of individual freedom'. He is not only the greatest radical British philosopher but the most profound exponent of philosophical anarchism. He is moreover not merely of historical interest. Political Justice finds echoes in the 'counter culture' of the sixties and seventies which questions the validity of the modern industrial state and celebrates the values of simplicity and sincerity and the joy of freedom. He speaks directly to the new radicalism which has emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first century, which seeks a libertarian way between the bureaucratic centralism of socialist states and the organized lovelessness of the capitalist world. The more they fail, the more attractive anarchism appears. As governments East and West grow more authoritarian, secretive and centralized, Godwin's insights are being increasingly appreciated. Never since the time of the French Revolution has his message been so urgent, relevant and interesting.

THE MAKING OF AN ANARCHIST

Godwin at first sight would appear an unlikely candidate to become the first and greatest philosopher of anarchism. He was born in 1756 in Wisbech, the capital of North Cambridgeshire, at a time when Britain was expanding its empire in America and India and the Industrial Revolution was about to begin. Britain was developing into a powerful nation state, but the landed gentry still controlled power and Parliament was corrupt and dependent on the Crown.

The region of East Anglia in which Godwin grew up had a long tradition of rebellion....