Don Locke - A fantasy of reason : the life and thought of William Godwin

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ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS: POLITICAL SCIENCE

A FANTASY OF REASON

A FANTASY OF REASON

The Life and Thought of William Godwin

By

DON LOCKE

Volume 29

First published 1980

This edition first published in 2010
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
1980 Don Locke

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 10: 0-415-49111-8 (Set)
ISBN 13: 978-0-415-49111-2 (Set)

ISBN 10: 0-415-55569-8 (Volume 29)
ISBN 13: 978-0-415-55569-2 (Volume 29)

Publishers Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.

Disclaimer
The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and would welcome correspondence from those they have been unable to trace.

Don Locke

A fantasy of reason

The life and thought of William Godwin

First published in 1980
by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd
39 Store Street, London WC1E 7DD,
Broadway House, Newtown Road,
Henley-on-Thames, Oxon RG9 IEN and
9 Park Street, Boston, Mass. 02108, USA

Photoset in 10 on 11pt Linocomp Baskerville by
Rowland Phototypesetting Ltd, Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk
and printed in Great Britain by
Page Brothers Ltd, Norwich, Norfolk

Don Locke 1980
No part of this book may be reproduced in
any form without permission from the
publisher, except for the quotation of brief
passages in criticism

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Locke, Don
A fantasy of reason
1 Godwin, William
I Title

192 JC176.G82 79-40937

ISBN 0 7100 0387 0

This, more than any
To Ann, more than ever

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

It was a brief passage in Alisdair MacIntyres excellent Short History of Ethics which first aroused my interest in William Godwin. Since then I have benefited most from the work of Burton R. Pollin, and especially from his monumental bibliography of Godwin Criticism. Without that it would have been impossible for a novice in matters historical and biographical to have written a book such as this. Professor Pollin dug the ground for me, and planted the seeds; I have picked the fruit. I hope that he will regard the result as some tribute and reward for his labours.

Inevitably I also owe a great deal to the many scholars who have researched the life and works of Percy Shelley, and especially to the editors of the Pforzheimer Library manuscripts, whose Shelley and His Circle serves both as a guide and a model to anyone working in this area. For personal encouragement, advice and information I would like to thank Professor Pollin, Professor Christoph Clairmont, Professor Lewis Patton, Mr J. C. Sainty, Mr Peter Opie, Professor Marion K. Stocking, Lady Mander and Mme Mary Claire Bally-Clairmont, and the librarians and archivists of the Bodleian Library, Keele University, Norfolk County Records Office, Tullie House, Bristol City Art Gallery, Camden Library, the Guildhall, and the National Portrait Gallery. I also owe thanks to the University of Warwick, for a period of sabbatical leave, and to the Pforzheimer Library, the Dr Williams Library, Tullie House, the British Museum, and in particular Lord Abinger, for permission to use or quote from unpublished manuscript material.

But I would especially like to thank Alan Bainbridge, for extremely useful suggestions at an early stage of the manuscript, and my wife Ann, who had to endure William Godwin for some seven years, on and off, and still emerged game enough to comment in detail on a final draft.

1 Reason, truth and justice

I am bound to disseminate without reserve all the principles with which I am acquainted, and which it may be of importance to mankind to know; and this duty it behoves me to practise upon every occasion and with the most persevering constancy. I must discharge the whole system of moral and political truth, without suppressing any part under the idea of its being too bold or paradoxical, and thus depriving the whole of that complete and irresistible evidence, without which its effects must always be feeble, partial and uncertain.

Political Justice, 1793

Hidden away in some old library or bookshop you might one day come across the weighty volumes of Political Justice, a work as obscure now as its author. Yet there was a time when it was a popular sensation, a veritable prodigy of imagination and intellect, and William Godwin the most famous, certainly the most notorious, writer in the land. No work in our time, declared William Hazlitt, gave such a blow to the philosophical mind of the country as the celebrated Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. And that basis consisted in three fundamental values, three eternal ideals: Reason, Truth, and Justice. Political Justice is a commentary, a rhapsody development and variation, digression and interlude on those three themes.

Godwin, like Socrates, believes that the man who acts wrongly has simply mistaken his true interests, that once we know the real nature and tendency of our conduct we will always act rightly. In fact virtue is the means to happiness, and once men appreciate that truth they will be virtuous because they want to be happy, and happy because they are virtuous. But truth also provides the means of social and political progress. The history of mankind has been, and will continue to be, a history of continual improvement, as men have come to learn more about their environment, their society and themselves. As knowledge increases and information is disseminated, more widely and more rapidly than ever before thanks to the invention of printing, man will arrive by degrees at a full and clear understanding of what he is, and what he can make of himself. Our social and political institutions, our very selves, will develop and change accordingly:

There is no science that is not capable of additions; there is no art that may not be carried to a still higher perfection. If this be true of all other sciences, why not of morals? If this be true of all other arts, why not of social institutions?

That is the faith on which Political Justice is founded.

Hardly surprising, therefore, that Godwins prime concern in the practical politics of his day should be with freedom of opinion. He does not exactly believe in a right of free speech indeed he does not believe in rights, as such, at all but he does believe in a duty, the duty to speak the truth as plainly and as clearly as we can, without fear of the consequences. Accordingly,

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