GODWIN, WILLIAM

(1756–1836)

William Godwin was an English Dissenting preacher, a utopian philosopher, a novelist, a man of letters, the founder of philosophical anarchism. He married Mary Wollstonecraft, famous as the author of Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), who died after the birth of their daughter, Mary. Later, Mary married Percy Bysshe Shelley. As the father-in-law of so famous a poet, Godwin was an influential member of a literary circle that included also William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Lord George Gordon Byron. Among Godwin's works of fiction, Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) is an extraordinary combination of a mystery story and an epic of conflict between social classes.

The work for which Godwin is best remembered is An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Political Justice (1793), which denounced all political and social regimes as obstacles to human development. The good life is based entirely on reason, Godwin argued, which is a quality only of discrete individuals; government, law, wealth, marriage, and all other man-made institutions should be abolished. "Everything that is usually understood by the term cooperation is, in some degree, an evil." Since every principle incorporated in a person's mind affects his conduct, "the perfection of man [is] impossible [only because] the idea of absolute perfection is scarcely within the grasp of human understanding." Godwin held that a cultivated person is less eager to gratify his senses, and when sustenance is no longer available, humans will "probably cease to propagate. The whole will be a people of men and not of children." Concurrently, "the term of human life may be prolonged by the immediate operation of the intellect beyond any limits which we are able to assign."

Godwin's prolonged interaction with T. R. Malthus began with the first edition of Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), which judged Godwin's portrait of the future as no more than "a beautiful phantom of the imagination." Within days Godwin wrote Malthus, and they met to discuss their differences. Godwin agreed to drop the word "perfectibility," and Malthus conceded that, unlike other species, humans can apply their reason and avoid the dire effects of a limited food supply; the second and subsequent editions of Malthus's book in effect acknowledged that Godwin's criticism was well based. Following this amicable exchange, Godwin wrote a small book, Parr's Spital Sermon (1801), in which he expressed his "unfeigned approbation and respect" for Malthus, who had made "as unquestionable an addition to the theory of political economy as any writer for a century past."

This favorable judgment was reversed in a subsequent work, Of Population (1820). It is a prolix book and difficult to summarize, with four principal points: Malthus had changed his position from the first edition of the Essay (indeed, partly at Godwin's instigation); the world is not full (repeated a dozen times); the two ratios, arithmetic and geometric, misrepresent the potential increase of mankind and its subsistence; the population data cited in the Essay did not support its argument. He upbraided Malthus for failing to mention the Bible, not even Adam and Eve as the progenitors of all humanity. China and India, he asserted, "carry back their chronology through millions of years." The enumerated populations of England and Wales in 1801 and 1811 showed a growth of 1.3 million; Godwin announced a possibility that "there was not one human creature more." In an anonymous review of the book in Edinburgh Review (June 1821), probably written by Malthus himself, Of Population was characterized as "the poorest and most old-womanish performance that had fallen from the pen of any writer" over the past several decades, the product of an "enfeebled judgment." The principal modern edition of Political Justice, published by the University of Toronto Press, omits the section on population, ostensibly because its substance is available in Of Population.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SELECTED WORKS BY WILLIAM GODWIN.

Godwin, William. 1793 (1946). 1946. Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness. Dublin (Toronto: University of Toronto Press).

——. 1797. The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature. London: G. G. and J. Robinson.

——. 1801 (1968). Thoughts Occasioned by the Perusal of Dr. Parr's Spital Sermon (1801). In Uncollected Writings … by William Godwin (in facsimile), ed. Jack W. Marken and Burton Pollin. Gainesville, FL: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints.

——. 1820. Of Population: An Enquiry Concerning the Power of Increase in the Numbers of Mankind, Being an Answer to Mr. Malthus's Essay on That Subject. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown.

——. 1831. Thoughts on Man, His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with Some Particulars Respecting the Author. London: Effingham Wilson.

SELECTED WORKS ABOUT WILLIAM GODWIN.

Albrecht, William P. 1955. "Godwin and Malthus." Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 70: 552–555.

Everett, Alexander H. 1826. New Ideas on Population: With Remarks on the Theories of Malthus and Godwin, 2nd edition. Boston: Cummings, Hilliard.

Paul, C. Kegan. 1876. William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries. 2 vols. London: King.

Petersen, William. 1971. "The Malthus-Godwin Debate, Then and Now." Demography 8: 13–26.

Stephen, Leslie. 1963. "Godwin, William." Dictionary of National Biography: 64–68.