Enquiry Concerning Political Justice

Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness by William Godwin (1756-1836) was first published in February 1793, the month following the execution of Louis XVI of France.

It proved to be immediately popular and influential. Godwin, the son of a Calvinist preacher, was educated at Hoxton Academy, after which, he became a minister to a dissenter congregation in Ware. However, partially as a result of reading Rousseau, Helvetius and d’ Holbach, his thinking changed and he left the ministry in 1783, the year the American war of Independence ended, by which point he had become a complete sceptic in matters of religion and turned to philosophy and ultimately to anarchism for the truth.

This was to be a period of huge political turmoil and continuing uncertainty, which had seen revolution in America and France, as well as the madness of King George III and the Regency crisis. It was a time of Whigs and Tories, of frenzied political argument and a flood of political pamphlet publishing.

The Enquiry came hot on the heels of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791-1792) in a time that witnessed severe government repression of civil liberties. In essence it is a wide- ranging disquisition on moral and political philosophy. Its central message or theme is that of the potential for human perfectibility through the pursuit of reason and truth.

At times it has a visionary quality, which perhaps explains why its publication was met with such delighted excitement and approval by the young Romantic poets, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and others. It appeared in a moment of great optimism, when there was a sense that the revolution would lead to sweeping reforms and the abolition of ancient abuses of privilege and inequality and hopes that traditional antagonisms and hostilities between England and France would soon come to an end.

For a brief period Godwin was very much the toast of the town, but as the excesses of the Terror mounted in France and the heads rolled beneath the guillotine, thinking changed, attitudes hardened and the mood darkened. Godwin’s star fell as rapidly as it had risen. England and France would go to war and as quickly as Godwin had been taken up by the young radicals he was cast aside by them as they matured into conservatives, both socially and politically, rejecting many of the ideas that had seemed so appealing to their younger selves.