You know perhaps already that I am of that odious class of men called democrats, and of that class I shall for ever continue
William Wordsworth, May 1794.Footnote 1Introduction
The significance of William Godwin as a political philosopher in the late eighteenth century is beyond question. Against him, on the one hand, one may locate a copious amount of spite in such hostile characterizations as the one by Thomas James Mathias, who claimed that “Mr. Godwin is at best but a mongrel and an exotick … grafted upon the stock of Condorcet and the French rabble … with all his desolating, unfounded, and silly opinions on all trades, professions, and occupations, wholly subversive of the order of society.”Footnote 2 William Hazlitt, on the other hand, affirmed the intellectual weight of Godwin, who had “secured to himself the triumphs and the mortifications of an extreme notoriety and of a sort of posthumous fame,” by remarking that “Tom Paine was considered for the time as a Tom Fool to him; Paley an old woman; Edmund Burke a flashy sophist.” Even if Godwin’s opinions had been “over-charged,” Hazlitt argued, it did not follow that they had been “altogether groundless”: Godwin had “blazed as a sun in the firmament of reputation” and had “carried with him all the most sanguine and fearless understandings of his time.”Footnote 3
Two centuries later, a more or less common picture of Godwin emerges from the historical, political, and literary studies devoted to him. Godwin was, according to this picture, a “rationalist” in his view of human nature and perfectibility, with an unfailing faith in “reason.”Footnote 4 He was a “dissenter” who regarded “traditional” Christianity as a potential threat to “individual autonomy, integrity and self‐confidence” but did not hold all religious aspects of human nature irredeemably guilty of hindering perfectibility.Footnote 5 He was also a “utilitarian” in his mode of value judgment and an “anarchist” par excellence in his political ideal.Footnote 6 Godwin is recognized as a fascinating theoretical anarchist,Footnote 7 and Colin Ward asserts with confidence that Godwin is the first in line of the forefathers of “the anarchist tradition.”Footnote 8 For Mark Philp he is “one of the earliest advocates of anarchism” with a perfectibilist faith in the primacy of private judgment, and Derry Novak places Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness (1793) at the origin of “a systematic elaboration and formulation of modern anarchist thought.”Footnote 9
While there is no doubt about Godwin’s credentials as a key figure in the history of anarchism, what is often noted with interest is his staunch insistence on gradualism and pacifism as the transition mechanism toward his visionary society, even at the price of his friendship with John Thelwall and other radicals of the London Corresponding Society.Footnote 10 Godwin put forth the idea of a peaceful anarchy, in which no government was needed because the society was divided into batches small enough to make its members feel the weight of their neighbors’ opinion almost as enforcing as penal laws. This was thought to be possible on the condition that the people reach a level of intellectual enlightenment where their reason can be trusted to correctly perceive the “truth” and control the passions accordingly. In Godwin’s view such a state of society could only be attained “by slow degrees.”Footnote 11 Since revolutions were “the produce of passions, not of sober and tranquil reason,” they had to be rejected at all costs: “as it is only in a gradual manner that the public can be instructed, a violent explosion in the community is by no means the most likely to happen as the result of instruction.”Footnote 12
Isaac Kramnick criticizes Godwin in this context for holding the view that the diffusion of enlightenment by education and discussion was the sole tolerable road to the ideal future in which government (necessarily an “evil” for Godwin) is abolished. Kramnick is not wide off the mark when he points out that Godwin considered all contemporary reform movements apt to mislead the multitude away from the “correct” path to progress.Footnote 13 Godwin was clearly targeting Thelwall and the LCS when he warned of the dangers of political passions and demagoguery in Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr. Pitt’s Bills (1795). Andrew McCann remarks that Godwin was at this point “precariously close to the anti-Jacobin propaganda that portrayed Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, Thomas Paine, Thomas Spence, Thelwall, and Godwin himself as the emissaries of a fraudulent print-capitalism peddling words and ideas before a public of ill-educated labourers easily deceived by shrewd marketing strategies.”Footnote 14 On McCann’s account there is a glaring contradiction in Godwin’s theory of government and opinion:
The opposition between unmediated public opinion and the coercive effects of political and legal institutions is, however, one that Godwin can only maintain so long as the public sphere is understood in abstract terms … Whenever he discusses what were the actual institutions of counterhegemonic public interaction—working class organizations like the London Corresponding Society, or popular presses producing cheap editions of libertarian political tracts—the public itself becomes a pathological variant of this ideal, precisely because of the extent to which it is mediated through both popular oration (which Godwin understands as demogogic) and print media (which he understands as manipulative).Footnote 15
But this apparent contradiction in Godwin identified by McCann dissolves when we relocate the focus to what may be termed the “time-regime” of his political philosophy: the business of the present differed from the business of the future, even as the present served as road to the future. The “ideal” of an enlightened and “unmediated public opinion” belonged to the future while the “actual” public belonged to the present. When this time-regime is taken seriously, pace McCann, the public of the present is no longer a “pathological variant” of an “ideal.” The time-regime found in the thoughts of Godwin’s contemporaries operated in a historical framework that regarded the recent past as evidence of society’s capacity for progress driven by the Enlightenment. This framework envisioned a distant future in which the human mind and social institutions would have advanced to such an extent that most of the seemingly insurmountable barriers to progress in the present would have been overcome. This time-regime did not necessarily entail a concrete transition mechanism from one state to another, apart from enlightenment in manners and the sciences, an idea that worked as the philosophes’ trump card. Thus, identifying a time-regime in a given thinker’s work does not in itself promise a novel revelation of their precise strategies for addressing contemporary crises or advancing from one stage to the next within the time-regime. Nonetheless, by delineating the cross-temporal horizon of a thought, a fresh focus on the time-regime allows us to grasp the broader spectrum of a thinker’s intellectual outlook, avoiding the pitfall of asking essentialist questions about their ideological positions.
This time-regime, with its conception of multiple pasts and futures at varying temporal distances from the present, formed the framework for Condorcet’s celebrated Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795).Footnote 16 Godwin, an avid reader of Condorcet,Footnote 17 became an unintended companion in criticism as both were targeted by Thomas Robert Malthus in his An Essay on the Principle of Population … with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers (1798).Footnote 18 The case of Jacques Pierre Brissot, whom Godwin also read with interest,Footnote 19 demonstrates that Godwin’s ideal of a society of enlightened people living happily in liberty without government was not unique to himself in the age of revolutions. Brissot declared in the preface to his New Travels in the United States (first published in 1791) that “liberty exists in reverse proportion to the extent of governmental powers.” He proceeded, in an extreme rendition of the argument, to state, “Coercive laws and liberty cannot exist together. A free people detest any form of repression. But then, if coercive means are not used, who will execute the laws? Reason and the force of moral principles.” Brissot was adamant that “a people without government” may well be happy “if we can suppose a people all of whom are virtuous.” Though he conceded that such a society did not exist at the time, he stressed that it was “not a utopian dream” since its feasibility was proven by the “American Quakers.” For him this meant that revolutionary France could “go far” and one day reach the state of liberty without government by striving to “become more enlightened,” with a view to the future when “morals and customs can take the place of laws completely and even make them unnecessary.”Footnote 20 This was a statement that went even further than Paine’s claim that, “the more perfect civilization is, the less occasion has it for government, because the more does it regulate its own affairs, and govern itself.”Footnote 21 Brissot’s point was that the French people “will gradually free themselves of political misconceptions … for the essence of reason and of enlightened liberty is endless progress and the universal triumph of truth over error and of principle over prejudice.”Footnote 22 It was an instance of Godwinian philosophical anarchism avant la lettre. After Godwin, we also witness Jean-Baptiste Say declare in 1815 in a letter addressed to Jeremy Bentham that if books like his own Catechism of Political Economy “were circulated in all countries,” reason and enlightenment “would gradually make their way” in time, after which it would be “seen whether governments are really such a necessary part of society; and if they will then be able to make nations pay so dearly for benefits which they do not confer.” Even though Say believed that such time would not come “till we are gone,” his time-regime enabled him to tell Bentham that “our labour will not be lost.”Footnote 23
There is yet an even more crucial point to be made from the time-regime perspective: if Godwin’s anarchy was an ultra-long-term end to be reached by the ultra-gradual means of education and discussion, then “democracy” was for him the form of government that would in the meantime provide the best of opportunities for the amelioration of human reason and happiness. The implied transition mechanism was that this development of reason accelerated by a democratic political environment could eventually bring about a social condition amenable to anarchy. Political agency was needed to establish and maintain democracy, which was already a difficult task, and all the more so to avoid excessive violence in the process. John Clark thus argues against Kramnick that Godwin did not profess “a complete rejection of political activity.” On this account Godwin’s philosophy had a pragmatic side which led him to defend “a type of decentralized democracy as the least evil form of government” and show “support for the Whig Party” with some consistency.Footnote 24 But even as commentators have noted Godwin’s favourable view of democracy in comparison to other forms of government—especially Clark, who stressed that Godwin wished “to establish extremely limited, decentralized and direct democracy in the place of the powerful, centralized and indirect forms”—none has so far conducted a detailed analysis of his idea of democracy with a focus on his time-regime and in the context of eighteenth-century and revolutionary European thought.Footnote 25 This reservation applies as well to other recent studies on Godwin, such as those looking at his thoughts on property,Footnote 26 his novels and children’s books,Footnote 27 his history of the seventeenth-century English Revolution,Footnote 28 his relationship with Mary Wollstonecraft,Footnote 29 or his connection to John Thelwall and their strategies for radical politics.Footnote 30
As a supplement to current literature, this article attempts to analyze Godwin’s idea of democracy in context. This rereading of Godwin as a democrat will place him more firmly within the context of the French revolutionary decade and provide the ground for an account of his political thought in a way richer than what may be suggested by labels such as “anarchist,” “moralist,” “individualist,” or “utilitarian.” It will delve into how widely and why “democracy” was denounced in Godwin’s time, and then place him among various contemporary views on democracy—for and against—to suggest an understanding of what past and contemporary arguments he was reacting to and what his responses might have meant. From this viewpoint, this article stands to demonstrate that the point made by Gregory Claeys—that Godwin rejected “representative forms of democracy” against the “widespread and powerful” tide of his time and opted instead for ancient republicanismFootnote 31—should be revised by placing Godwin within the terms of the eighteenth-century debate on democracy, representation, and virtue. In fact, the idea of “representative democracy” in its 1790s meaning was neither widespread nor powerful. Godwin nonetheless opted for it in ways that only a minority group of radical French democrats would later do in the latter half of the revolutionary decade, as a conscious choice made in rejection of both ancient republicanism and modern commercial republicanism after the death of Robespierre.Footnote 32
Obloquy of democracy in the eighteenth century
A discussion of Godwin’s take on democracy may well be situated within the broader context of the prevailing perspectives on that form of politics in the eighteenth century and the French revolutionary decade, during which his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice was published. In the early 1790s Godwin was not riding a huge wave of developing “democratic” thought, which cannot be said to have tangibly existed. He was rather articulating a minority position that appears to have neither influenced, nor been influenced by, the revolutionary democrats across the Channel in any direct way, the latter’s thought having been elaborated well after the publication of Enquiry. Rarely mentioned in practical politics prior to the 1790s, the notion of “democracy” was loaded with many a great burden inherited from the past, namely that it led to disorder, civil war, military government, and decline.Footnote 33 Both before and during the 1790s, the term mainly referred to classical Athens—including Sparta or Rome from time to time—and its principal working mechanism was considered to be sortition instead of election.Footnote 34 Democracy was often deemed tumultuous and ferocious, and most of all unfit for the moderns, who had to devote their lives to labor, unlike the ancients, who had been able to rely on slave labor for production and thus to focus on “public” affairs.Footnote 35 Hardly any “modern” in Europe, not even the radicals of the French Revolution, subscribed to this idea of “democracy” as a practicable norm.Footnote 36 Democratic liberty was considered short-lived because of the tendency of popular assemblies to invite (out of gratitude or ignorance or both) demagogues or ambitious generals to establish a tyrannical or military government.Footnote 37
Signifying a form of government in direct opposition to “representative government,” the word “democracy” referred to a political society of an allegedly mad and ferocious populace ruling over the wise and honest few.Footnote 38 Dutch thinkers such as Johan Luzac, Elie Luzac, and Johan Meerman put forth unswerving criticisms of “democracy” both ancient and modern.Footnote 39 It was argued in France that grave inconveniences resulted from the “excess” necessarily generated by democracies.Footnote 40 Some contemporaries of Jean-Jacques Rousseau considered him a democrat and “a veritable incendiary” who preached the principles of “the absolute democracy, which is the dissolution of all good police.”Footnote 41 But it is now a truism that neither Rousseau nor Voltaire—both were of keen interest to Godwin—recommended democracy for modern states.Footnote 42 If the passions and ignorance of the “populace” provided the ultimate reason for the rejection of democracy, another key problem lay in the perceived difficulty of attaining and sustaining its essential trait: equality. Jean-Louis de Lolme claimed in his Constitution of England, a work praised and deemed important in England and America in the period of the American and the French revolutions,Footnote 43 that democracy was unattainable because history—particularly Roman and Florentine—proved that laws enacted to “restore that equality which is the essence of a democratical government were always found impracticable.”Footnote 44 During the French revolutionary decade the term “democracy” was often employed—even by many republicans deemed “radical” in their own times—to stress how important it was for republics to avoid turning into democracies.Footnote 45 There were exceptions to this rule, among which a notable case was Thomas Paine, with whom Godwin discussed “monarchy, Tooke, Johnson, Voltaire, pursuits & religion” over a dinner table.Footnote 46 More importantly, there existed a small group of French democrats who tried to combine “representation” and “democracy” to formulate a novel political arrangement under the banner of “representative democracy.” But they never succeeded anywhere in winning over the political majority before the Brumaire.Footnote 47
If we move to the British context closer to Godwin, even though the term “democrat” became “a badge of identity” for a handful of English radicals in the 1790s, as seen in the cases of Sir St John Mildmay, John Gale Jones, and Amelia Alderson, the overall intensity of vilification of democracy was not any weaker.Footnote 48 In Reflections on the Rise and Fall of the Antient Republics (1759), Edward Wortley Montagu expressed the commonplace view that Athens had been “truly democratick, and so much convulsed by those civil dissentions, which are the inevitable consequences of that kind of government.”Footnote 49 His verdict was representative of the eighteenth-century English perception of classical Athens:
The history of Athens abounds with instances of the levity and inconstancy of that unsteady people. For how frequently do we find their best and ablest citizens imprisoned or sentenced to banishment by the ostracism, in honour of whom the same people had just before erected statues … This evil was the natural consequence of that capital error in Solon’s polity, when he entrusted the supreme power to the giddy and fluctuating populace. A defect which (as I observed before) was the great leading cause of the loss of that liberty which they had so licentiously abused.Footnote 50
In another instance, democracy was defined as “referring determinations, either legislative or executive, to the people at large,” and subsequently dubbed “the worst form of government imaginable.”Footnote 51 Edmund Burke, whose “prominence … in Godwin’s reading” is noted by Mark Philp,Footnote 52 claimed,
in the forty years of my observation, as much injustice and tyranny has been practised in a few months by a French democracy, as by all the arbitrary monarchs in Europe … This democracy begins very ill; and I feel no security that what has been rapacious and bloody in its commencement, in its final settlement will be mild and protecting. They cannot, indeed, in future rob so much, because they have left little that can be taken.Footnote 53
This was written in early 1790, when hardly any revolutionary in Paris dreamed of establishing a republic, not to mention a democracy, in the Kingdom of France. The term “French democracy” was widely used to denote reprovingly both the French monarchy before 1792 and the Republic afterwards, to warn the Britons against “the establishment of a fanatical democracy just at its door,” to borrow Burke’s words.Footnote 54 By January 1792 Burke considered France to be enslaved under the rule of Jacobins, who, by means of “the bribing of an immense body of soldiers, taken from the lowest of the people, to an universal revolt against their officers, who were the whole body of the country gentlemen, and the landed interest of the nation,” proceeded to “set themselves up as a kind of democratic military, governed and directed by their own clubs and committees.” It was his view that “avowed admirers of the French democracy” permeated England like germs.Footnote 55 Adam Ferguson also believed that, since the early days of the French Revolution, “the French are too busy translating their monarchy into a democracy.”Footnote 56 On the other side of the table, Richard Price tried to shore up the reputation of himself and his fellow “Protestant Dissenters” by quoting from his own speech that he knew “not one individual among them who would not tremble at the thought of changing into a Democracy our mixed form of government.”Footnote 57 Even as “the iniquitous conduct of Russia and Prussia with regard to Poland reconcile again men’s minds to democracy,” remarked David Gray in his letter to Jeremy Bentham discussing the second partition of Poland during the Terror, “the daily enormities committed in France tend to excite disgust in respect to popular governments.”Footnote 58 It is important to note that when Godwin discussed the example of classical Athens in Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, he was challenging those views of democracy commonly held in the British and the wider European contexts. However, before turning to that part of the story we could benefit from clarifying what “democracy” did not mean to Godwin.
Democracy without social contract or legislative sovereignty of the people
In the late eighteenth century, various objections were made to the mainstream rejection of democracy as barbarous, ferocious, and obsolete. One of the most famous among them in the anglophone world was Part I of Rights of Man (1791), which was Thomas Paine’s refutation of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Paine put forth the notion that a modern kind of democratic republic, founded upon the theory of social contract and popular sovereignty and buttressed by the mechanism of election and representation, was superior to the hereditary and constitutional monarchy.Footnote 59 Paine’s view of democracy was a compound of multiple eighteenth-century radical perspectives which also influenced the Girondin proposal of a democratic constitution in February 1793 largely written by Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet. Paine, as a member of the French National Convention at the time, signed the Girondin proposal along with Charles Jean Marie Barbaroux, Bertrand Barère, Condorcet, Armand Gensonné, Jérôme Pétion, Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, and Pierre Victurnien Vergniaud. Although the Convention was eventually moved by the speeches of Montagnards like Maximilien Robespierre and Louis Antoine de Saint-Just to reject the Girondin proposal and adopt a revised version of it, Condorcet’s version became (in)famous thereafter as a radically democratic constitution.Footnote 60
Godwin, unlike the revolutionaries in France, had no truck with the notion of original social contract. Rejection of social contract was not uncommon in eighteenth-century thought, especially among the advocates of “natural sociability.” Theorists of sociability contended that contractualists such as Thomas Hobbes and Rousseau underrated mankind’s potentials for perfectibility as a group, a society, and a species, by making the postulation that men were born solitary and hostile to each other or that the state of society was a degenerate form of human existence compared to the state of nature.Footnote 61 The language of natural sociability elaborated in the works of Hugo Grotius and Samuel von Pufendorf, combined with the rise of the discourse of “commercial society,”Footnote 62 came to the fore in eighteenth-century moral and political discourse.Footnote 63 Speculations on an original contract were redundant, according to this view, since men were naturally born to form societies. After George Turnbull’s declaration that “it cannot be asserted that there is nothing social in our nature, without denying the most evident truths,”Footnote 64 Adam Ferguson laughed at Hobbes for having “made the state of nature to consist in perpetual wars, kindled by competition for dominion and interest, where every individual had a separate quarrel with his kind, and where the presence of a fellow-creature was the signal of battle.” He also criticized Rousseau for having “represented mankind in their first condition, as possessed of mere animal sensibility, without any exercise of the faculties that render them superior to the brutes, without any political union, without any means of explaining their sentiments, and even without possessing any of the apprehensions and passions which the voice and the gesture are so well fitted to express.” Ferguson dubbed their theories of social contract “fruitless inquiries” and “wild suppositions.”Footnote 65
Godwin believed in “perfectibility” and affirmed that the “most desirable condition of the human species is a state of society.”Footnote 66 For him the notion of a social contract exercising a binding effect upon posterity—de jure or de facto—was therefore most unfortunate when human perfectibility was considered, for “little will be gained for the cause of equality and justice if our ancestors, at the first institution of government … could barter away the understandings and independence of all that came after them.”Footnote 67 Some aspects of his rejection of social contract were different from those of the supporters of natural sociability: here he was concerned less with the contractualists’ negative verdict on the prospect of perfectibility or with the defects of their “conjectural” tendencies than with the three logical fallacies that he identified within the contract theory itself. First, if contracts were to be renewed in time, it was difficult to ascertain precisely how long the intervals between them should be. It was even more difficult to know the source of obligation to adhere to the contract during that interval, especially for those who had not given explicit consent to the preceding contract (for reasons such as the contract being one “into which my father entered before I was born”).Footnote 68
Second, since no social contract had been signed by each and every citizen, “the nature of the consent” was often construed as “acquiescence.” In 1748 David Hume discussed with sarcasm the opinion that “by living under the dominion of a prince, which one might leave, every individual has given a tacit consent to his authority, and promised him obedience.” For Hume the theory of consent was “erroneous” and “repugnant to the common sentiments of mankind, and to the practice and opinion of all nations and all ages.”Footnote 69 Godwin, too, fulminated against the theory of tacit consent: “upon this hypothesis every government that is quietly submitted to is a lawful government, whether it be the usurpation of Cromwell, or the tyranny of Caligula.” The theory of tacit consent, on this account, was unjust to “the peasant and the artisan” who in fact lived in a certain country simply because they did not practically “have it in their power to transport themselves to another.”Footnote 70
Third, in the face of the complexity of social life, an act of consent to a code could clarify neither the duration of that consent nor the rigidity of its application to specific cases.Footnote 71 A particularly acute problem for Godwin was that it seemed impossible to justify the imposition of laws enacted by one part of the people on another who had refused to consent to them. If Rousseau had argued this problem away by forcing everybody to submit to the “general will” expressed in the form of the majority after counting the votes, Godwin pointed out that such an easy resolution did not hold well with the Genevan’s own theory of the inalienability of sovereignty:
If a tacit consent be not sufficient, still less can I be deemed to have consented to a measure upon which I put an express negative. This immediately follows from the observations of Rousseau. If the people, or the individuals of whom the people is constituted, cannot delegate their authority to a representative, neither can any individual delegate his authority to a majority, in an assembly of which he is himself a member … no man can transfer to another the keeping of his conscience and the judging of his duties … No consent of ours can divest us of our moral capacity.Footnote 72
In Godwin’s conclusion, Rousseau was wrong to think that a government could “derive its authority from an original contract.”Footnote 73 Since “reason” developed through time and could change the formerly expressed will for the better, according excessive weight to the will of a certain point in time could prevent individual perfection from fostering social improvement. The focus had to be firmly placed on the time-regime of the development of individual reason and its translation into social perfection. In the same vein Godwin disputed the central tenet of the theory of popular sovereignty, namely that the legislative power was the ultimate mark of sovereignty and that the sovereign people had the exclusive authority to exercise it.Footnote 74 For him the question of who possessed the authority to make laws was misleading, since legislation was “not an affair of human competence”:
Reason is the only legislator, and her decrees are irrevocable and uniform. The functions of society extend, not to the making, but the interpreting of law; it cannot decree, it can only declare that, which the nature of things has already decreed, and the propriety of which irresistibly flows from the circumstances of the case … All political power strictly speaking is executive … To the public support of justice therefore the authority of the community extends. But no sooner does it wander in the smallest degree from the line of justice than its proper authority is at an end, it stands upon a level with the obscurest individual, and every man is bound to resist its decisions.Footnote 75
The last line might have sounded like too outspoken an endorsement of political resistance, for Godwin removed it in subsequent editions of Enquiry (1796 and 1798).Footnote 76 “True” legal authority would emanate solely from “immutable reason,” which was “the true legislator.” Practical authority of the “community” was grounded only on “necessity” and was not the source of “real duty” by itself. Authority did not spring from consent but from truth.Footnote 77 Here he stood miles away from the theory of “legitimacy by consent” in that he preferred to regard the “immutable” rules of justice as inscribed in the “nature of things.”Footnote 78 His thought was also at a distance from the account of God-given laws already written down in the Gospels and sacred histories, in that he believed that human reason was as yet insufficiently developed to grasp those laws but potentially perfectible in his time-regime to the extent of being able to discover the “true” laws, so that coercive authority would be rendered redundant and fade away into nonexistence.Footnote 79 Thereby disposed of the theories of social contract and legislative sovereignty, Godwin’s vision of “democracy” was at once similar to and different from that of many of his contemporaries. The next section is an analysis of what “democracy” meant to him from this perspective.
Democracy, representation, and the time-regime of perfectibility
Without reference to popular sovereignty or social contract, Godwin defined democracy as “a system of government according to which every member of society is considered as a man and nothing more … every man is regarded as equal.” However, this was not to deny the “degree of influence” which “talents and wealth … will not fail to obtain,” but to assure that no “positive institution” recognized such traits by conferring legal, political, or social privileges on them.Footnote 80
Godwin laid out the alleged “disadvantages that may seem the necessary result of democratical equality” before proceeding to refute those claims. On the surface, democracy was “wavering and inconstant,” far away from the immutable truth and “every idea of political justice.” It was argued that this negative dynamism was the result of the “ignorance and folly … of the unwise,” which always formed the majority and chose the “turbulent and crafty demagogue” as their leader. Liberty was therefore precarious in democracies. As people got “tired of hearing Aristides constantly called the Just,” merit became “too frequently the victim of ignorance and envy.”Footnote 81 Before beginning his assault on the above view, Godwin presented a summary of what he thought to be the most serious implication of such a view on the future of mankind:
No form of government can be devised which does not partake of monarchy, aristocracy or democracy … it would seem impossible that greater or more inveterate mischiefs can be inflicted on mankind, than those which are inflicted by [the two former]. If then democracy could by any arguments be brought down to a level with such monstrous institutions as [monarchy or aristocracy], in which there is neither integrity nor reason, our prospects of the future happiness of mankind would indeed be deplorable.Footnote 82
It should be noted here that Godwin neither discussed one of the most powerful and virulent criticisms laid on “democracy” by his contemporaries—that democracy led to military government and to the fall of liberty—nor endeavoured to reply to it. This is an aspect that could have weakened the import of his arguments, but what is significant at the moment is the salient presence of a time-regime in his discussion of democracy. Most importantly, since government could not be abolished overnight in the present state of enlightenment, some government had to be at work. It would be best for the development of human nature if that extant government fostered education and enhanced reason through public discussion. But since monarchy and aristocracy were such terribly obscurantist forms of government, Godwin argued, an eternity of misery would follow unless man could place hope on “democracy” during the process of perfection prior to reaching the “auspicious period” that would finally witness the “dissolution of political government, of that brute engine, which has been the only perennial cause of the vices of mankind.”Footnote 83 Was democracy incurable and mankind doomed? Godwin’s reply was a firm negative: while democracy was widely regarded as “anarchy,” he boldly claimed that anarchy was, though “undoubtedly a horrible calamity … less horrible than despotism”:
Anarchy is a short lived mischief, while despotism is all but immortal. It is unquestionably a dreadful remedy, for the people to yield to all their furious passions, till the spectacle of their effects gives strength to recovering reason: but, though it be a dreadful remedy, it is a sure one. No idea can be supposed, more pregnant with absurdity, than that of a whole people taking arms against each other till they are all exterminated. It is to despotism that anarchy is indebted for its sting. If despotism were not ever watchful for its prey, and mercilessly prepared to take advantage of the errors of mankind, this ferment, like so many others, being left to itself, would subside into an even, clear and delightful calm.Footnote 84
The argument above, a defense of democracy demonized as “anarchy” rather than a defense of what has come to be known as political or philosophical anarchy nowadays, was an extremely bold move closely resembling the statement made by Condorcet—whose writings permeate Godwin’s diary between 1791 and 1795—in early 1789 that despotism was the cause of “anarchy” or the “despotism of the populace.”Footnote 85 Roland Garrett can thus be given only partial credit for his claim that Godwin “explicitly rejected the disorder of ‘anarchy’ … while not conceiv[ing] of himself as opposing ‘democracy.’”Footnote 86
On top of this, Godwin posited that even if democracy must be taken “with all the disadvantages that were ever annexed to it,” however incurable they may be, that form of government would still be “greatly preferable to the exclusive system” of monarchy and aristocracy. Though filled with “turbulence” and instances of “usurpations of Pisistratus and Pericles” and “monstrous ostracism,” the history of classical Athens still “exhibited a more illustrious and enviable spectacle than all the monarchies and aristocracies that ever existed.”Footnote 87 There had existed, albeit rarely, a minority view of Athens as a “polite polis” earlier in the late seventeenth century and the early eighteenth,Footnote 88 and further into the 1760s Catharine Macaulay had argued in her devastating criticism of Hobbes that the Greeks, “from whom alone we can learn ancient prudence,” had “disdained” monarchy and “called all pretenders to it tyrants and usurpers.”Footnote 89 In a bolder sense, marvelling at the Athenians’ genius and fortitude, Godwin exclaimed, “shall we compare a people of such incredible achievements, such exquisite refinement, gay without insensibility and splendid without intemperance … shall we compare this chosen seat of patriotism, independence, and generous virtue, with the torpid and selfish realms of monarchy and aristocracy?” While scholars insist on Godwin’s adherence to pacifism in the diffusion of enlightenment and subsequent reforms, particularly from the second edition of Enquiry, it needs to be stressed that in the first edition he was joining the band of radicals of Georgian England and revolutionary France by asserting that “all is not happiness that looks tranquillity.” Perfection did not stem from inaction: “better were a portion of turbulence and fluctuation, than that unwholesome calm which is a stranger to virtue.”Footnote 90
More importantly, Godwin argued, traditional and contemporary verdicts on democracy shared an “error,” namely that they took “mankind such as monarchy and aristocracy [had] made them.” Monarchy and aristocracy were “evils” precisely because they tended to “undermine the virtues and the understandings of their subjects” by encouraging “implicit faith, blind submission to authority, timid fear, a distrust of our powers, an inattention to our own importance and the good purposes we are able to effect.” It was “unreasonable” to extrapolate “men as they hereafter be made” from “men as we now find them”: here we witness one of the most crucial elements of Enlightenment philosophy, the time-regime of perfectibility.Footnote 91 In contrast to the reprehensible effects of monarchy and aristocracy, Godwin affirmed, the universally reviled democracy in fact “restores to man a consciousness of his value, teaches him by the removal of authority and oppression to listen only to the dictates of reason, gives him confidence to treat all other men as his fellow beings.”Footnote 92
That democracy was best at fostering patriotic and courageous citizen soldiers was a commonplace among eighteenth-century intellectuals. There were disagreements, however, regarding the desirability of this feature in the modern world. For example, among the many participants in what is now called the “French Revolution debate in Britain,”Footnote 93 Adam Ferguson was particularly worried that the Revolution had given birth to a dangerously expansionist military democracy and that European governments were facing the danger of undergoing the same “fatal revolution terminating in military government.”Footnote 94 Godwin, in contrast, claimed himself to be “one of the most ardent admirers of the French Revolution” and expressed “the highest hopes” for the future of “man imbued with the spirit of this revolution.”Footnote 95 Even though the claim was expressed in a letter addressed to the National Convention of France in 1793, there is not much reason to doubt the sincerity of his declaration; given the political climate in London at that time, he likely had more to lose than to gain by making such a statement.Footnote 96 Regarding democracy, Godwin was of the view that it was not only better than other forms of government at domestic politics and enlightenment but also superior to them in military defense of the state, because “the citizen of a democratical state, when he looks upon the miserable oppression and injustice that prevail in the countries around him, cannot but entertain an inexpressible esteem for the advantages he enjoys, and the most unalterable determination at all hazards to preserve them.”Footnote 97 Since happy and content people would not want to conquer their neighbors, he affirmed, democratic states would shun “the principle of offensive war.”Footnote 98
Democracy’s strength in patriotism could overcome what had often been regarded as its defect, namely that “it [could] not keep secrets” where they were necessary, such as in matters of war. Godwin’s direct response to this criticism was that the “trick of a mysterious carriage [was] the prolific parent of every vice.” This moralist censure of arcana imperii was an insufficient rebuttal in itself, but it pointed to the aforementioned intrepid patriotism of democratic armies.Footnote 99 Refusal of secrecy was in fact to serve a deeper purpose, as the pathway par excellence to perfection was strict honesty. Deception, be it individual or institutional (such as the benevolent yet condescending projects for civil religion), was incompatible with the growth of reason.Footnote 100 As has been noted by scholars of Godwin, it was key to his vision of future society that everybody should always “speak and act the truth” so that discussion and persuasion, as well as “public inspection and censorship,” could work at the level of neighborhood communities.Footnote 101
All of the above discussion was fruitless unless one could establish and maintain a democracy in modern Europe. Among the handful of philosophes in favor of the institution of republican or even democratic governments in the eighteenth century, the most popular means of implementing them was “representation.” An endless list of commentators from the second half of the eighteenth century can be produced on the question of political representation. In England, along with John Cartwright and Macaulay,Footnote 102 Paine had been an outspoken advocate of representation “ingrafted upon” the Athenian kind of democracy. In Part II of Rights of Man (1792) he claimed that combining representation with democracy would ensure the exclusion of both “the ignorance and insecurity of the hereditary mode, and the inconvenience of the simple democracy.” He expected to see, to borrow Nadia Urbinati’s expression, “a perfection of democracy.”Footnote 103 Godwin, for his part, endorsed the idea of representation. His concept of representation, though designed less to check than to aid democracy, involved free rather than imperative mandate. Delegation, “an act which has for its object the general good,” was grounded upon the expectation that delegates were “more likely from talents or leisure to perform the function [of representatives] in the most eligible manner.”Footnote 104 Thus for Godwin the aim of representation was not to strictly relay the sovereignty of the people to a national assembly but to ascertain that important decisions concerning the political community were made, after ample discussion, by “persons of superior education and wisdom.”Footnote 105 Godwin was in fact hereby approving what Claeys considered him to have rejected, namely “the elective system of representation” and “the democratic process.”Footnote 106 Representatives, on Godwin’s account, were “authorised upon certain occasions to act on [the constituents’] part, in the same manner as an unlearned parent delegates his authority over his child to a preceptor of greater accomplishments than himself.” They were, in sum, expected to provide intelligent guidance to the less enlightened population.Footnote 107
Eighteenth-century discussion of political representation contained much apprehension about the possibility of the delegates’ usurpation of constituent power.Footnote 108 In the 1790s French theorists of “representative democracy” advocated a form of electoral “recall” so that the elected representatives were constantly held in check by the people whose “sovereignty” should never be alienated. If a good balance between the electors and the elected could be found, it was argued, a veritable system of representative government would avoid at once the “anarchy of the many” and the “tyranny of the few.”Footnote 109 Godwin summed up this tension as follows: “by this happy expedient we secure many of the pretended benefits of aristocracy, as well as the real benefits of democracy.” However, his approval of representation was predicated on a resolutely democratic condition that the elector must stay alert “in all his political concerns” and hold back for himself “his censorial power over his representative.” Most of all, in case the representative fails to persuade the elector over to his opinion, the elector must be willing and “accustomed” to revoke his representative’s authority and elect another in his place.Footnote 110
This was entirely intelligible to Godwin’s contemporaries, for whom the notion of democracy primarily evoked a political structure more akin to that of ancient Athens than to that of modern commercial and parliamentary polities. Within the framework of Godwin’s era that contrasted democracy with representative government, “representative democracy” differed markedly from modern republicanism. The conflict between the terms “democracy” and “representation” was thus far more explicit in the political languages of the 1790s than it is today. This point is insufficiently considered in the argument made by Claeys about Godwin’s supposed rejection of “representative democracy,” in which Claeys finds an anticipation of “radical” criticisms of modern republicanism “which would later become integral elements of socialist theory.”Footnote 111 The difficulty with this view lies in the fact that the notion of representative democracy was regarded as far more “radical” in the 1790s than it would become in the nineteenth century. In this context, the key is to move beyond Claeys and point out that Godwin was not merely rejecting representative democracy in favor of ancient republicanism; rather, he was grappling with the predicament of a modern political philosopher who was resolved to support democracy with representation, while remaining acutely aware of the many defects that such a combination could produce. Even as he accorded representation the role of checking the potentially pernicious characters of democracy, the elements of “representation” and those of “democracy” were contradicting each other: the talented and enlightened few should guide the many, but then the many could and should step in to impose their will on the few. This was a puzzle not to be solved until one either (1) gave up on improvement and settled for political tutelage of the entire population by representative assemblies or (2) brought the diffusion of enlightenment to a level at which the majority (but not all) of population could discern correct judgments from incorrect ones.
On this point, Godwin made a significant revision in the third edition of Enquiry (1798) and stated his position more clearly. To begin with, as an antidote to ancient republicanism, he affirmed that the modern institution of representation could counteract the “defects” of popular assemblies such as those in ancient “Athens and Rome.” For him, however, representation was “necessarily imperfect” in that it “aggravated” the problem underlying all governments by removing “the power of making regulations one step further from the people whose lot it is to obey them.” The price to pay for the representative government’s function of refining democracy was the violation of the sanctity of individual judgment, a violation that Godwin was not willing to tolerate for long. Thus, even if the design of representative government incorporating democratic traits was “a palliative for certain evils,” it was crucial never to lose sight of the fact that it was “not a remedy so excellent or complete, as should authorise us to rest in it, as the highest improvement of which the social order is capable.” The solution, in the end, lay in the perfection of the human mind, not the perfection of the representative mechanism. Godwin’s time-regime made his ideas of political representation fundamentally different from those of Paine and many other radicals of his day: for Godwin the combination of democracy and representation was a temporary treatment, although it was the best option available at the current point of his time-regime.Footnote 112
Conclusion
This article has shown that one needs to pay close attention to the question of time in order to make sense of Godwin’s political thought regarding anarchy and democracy. While his defense of “democracy” and Athens had elements in common with ideas proposed by Paine and Macaulay, who dared speak in support of the ancient polis, his views on the political machine of “representation” differed from those of other radicals in several respects. This was because Godwin’s vision of human perfection in the future made his perception of the place of democracy in the time-regime differ from the views of his contemporaries.
Though Godwin reserved some points of disagreement with Rousseau and regarded himself as possessing an intellect superior to that of Paine, and though he had many misgivings about ultraradicals such as Robespierre, he still held philosophes and reformers in general in respect. While discussing the price to be paid for speaking the truth in public in 1791, he mentioned the case of Paine favorably as proof that parrhesia was worth “stand[ing] in the breach.” In his eyes, “the period of sacrifices” was over for Paine, who had “secured to himself the gratitude of ages.”Footnote 113 In late September 1793, after the Law of Suspects was decreed, Godwin could still write in the face of the quasi-unanimous denunciation in Britain of Robespierre and the Jacobins, “Do not exclaim so bitterly upon Robespierre! I, like you, will weep over his errors; but I must still continue to regard him as an eminent benefactor of mankind.”Footnote 114 Years later, severely criticizing James Mackintosh for his Discourse on the Study of the Law of Nature and Nations (1799), which was regarded as a disavowal of his former reformist inclivities, Godwin angrily asserted that “Rousseau, Turgot or Condorcet” should not be labelled “promulgators of absurd and monstrous systems” and that they were as “pure and philanthropical” as “Grotius, Puffendorf [sic], Wolf, Burlamaqui or Vattel.”Footnote 115 Another fact to note is that Godwin, notwithstanding his aversion to “revolutions,” had celebrated the American and the French revolutions in the first edition of Enquiry as having been well prepared by “a general concert of all orders” rather than as stir-ups of demagogues or divisions within the nation such as had happened in the case of “the resistance against our Charles the First.” For him the cause of this difference between the revolutions of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries lay in the Enlightenment that had progressed for more than a century in between, during which “Sydney and Locke and Montesquieu and Rousseau” and their “philosophy had already developed some of the great principles of political truth.”Footnote 116
Godwin thus believed in the power of the Republic of Letters. The prospect of pure-hearted luminaries working for human improvement was the source of hope for him, as it was for Condorcet and many others. But Godwin was no impractical dreamer; he knew very well that “where there is a government, there must be a will superseding that of individuals.”Footnote 117 Among the multiple modes of determining the dominant will from the dominated will, Godwin considered democracy to be at once the best government and the least evil one. At present, democracy was a better choice than monarchy or aristocracy in that it encouraged reason and dignity, while it did not necessarily offer a specific transition mechanism to a future of enlightened anarchists. Even the question of how to proceed to democracy was not answered, except, again, for the hope that enlightenment could prevail in the future.
Moving from the present and the near future to a much longer view of humanity’s possible future, democratic government appeared as an evil in that it was a form of collective coercion upon individual judgments and actions. Given the indefinite scope of human perfectibility, coercion was to be deemed an unfortunate nature of government, the perennial job of which seemed to be “enslaving mankind.” During the long course of history, political systems inevitably generated “bloodshed, violence and murder.” “By the long duration of their wars,” the Romans were “to be ranked among the foremost destroyers of the human species.” The rise of states by means of war was followed by war-inflicted decline: the Romans “suffered the penalty of their iniquitous deeds; and the world was vexed for three hundred years by the irruptions of Goths, Vandals, Ostrogoths, Huns, and innumerable hordes of barbarians.” The same applied to France, Austria, Prussia, and England.Footnote 118 History had been staging time and again the grim scene in which “men deliberately destroy each other by thousands without any resentment against or even knowledge of each other.”Footnote 119
In assessing Godwin’s shifting evaluations of democracy, the time-regime of this shift has been more or less overlooked in existing studies, including John Clark’s incisive book, on the perceived tension between Godwin’s conception of democracy as a form of government preferable to monarchy or aristocracy and his deep anxieties about the coercive power of political institutions over individual judgment. Precisely at this point, the “time-regime” perspective allows us to move beyond the theoretical dilemma of choosing between a participatory yet coercive democratic government, on the one hand, and a decentralized anarchy grounded in enlightened individual judgment, on the other—a dilemma that Godwin himself does not appear to have really confronted, if only because it did not arise within the framework of his time-regime.Footnote 120
Godwin may have despaired, like Edward Gibbon and others, at the French Republic’s wars over Europe after Thermidor, since the prospects for democracy and reform seemed to grow increasingly dim as the turn of the century approached.Footnote 121 As yet, however, we have no hard proof of Godwin’s renunciation of the hopes of 1789. In 1793, at least, war seemed to him an evil of the present, possibly to disappear in the enlightened future. Condorcet had argued that on certain conditions the larger number of people participating in a case meant a larger probability of reaching the “correct” judgment. This argument was based on mathematical demonstrations, which served to support his approval of democracy as a political form and election as its working mechanism.Footnote 122 An optimism of this kind was inscribed on Godwin’s time-regime, an optimism that anticipated a future in which the “reasonings of one wise man [would] be as effectual as those of twelve” and the “competence of one individual to instruct his neighbours [would] be a matter of sufficient notoriety, without the formality of an election.” When such time arrived it would surely be “one of the most memorable stages of human improvement,” one which would still be furthered because human capacity for perfectibility was infinite. Until that day, for Godwin, mankind’s best interim measure at hand was democracy.Footnote 123
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Nathan Alexander, Richard Whatmore, and the anonymous readers for Modern Intellectual History for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this article.
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