Abstract
This chapter addresses Godwin’s thought during the 1790s. Its aim is to draw a link between Godwin’s increasing deployment of the idiom of politeness from the mid-decade onward and his enduring commitment to antiauthoritarianism. It argues that the intersection between politeness and anarchism in his thought is most clearly evident in his conception of a discursive form of liberty based around the ideal of polite conversation that can be located within Godwin’s underlying anarchical vision of a community of free and self-determining individuals.
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Notes
William Godwin, The enquirer: reflections on education, manners and literature in a series of essays (1797) in Mark Philp (ed.) Political and philosophical writings of William Godwin, vol. 5 : educational and literary writings, edited by Pamela Clemit (London: William Pickering 1993).
William Hazlitt, The spirit of the age; or Contemporary portraits (1825) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), pp. 19–20.
The Houyhnhnms represented an ideal of rationality in Swift’s satirical work: Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s travels (London: Everyman, 1991), first published in 1726. Swift’s influence is evident from the outset in the opening pages of Book I, “Of the importance of political institutions,” where Godwin discusses the causes of war, citing Gulliver’s travels.
See also James Preu, The Dean and the anarchist (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1959) and “Swift’s influence on Godwin’s doctrine of anarchism,” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 15, June 1954, pp. 371–383. Jonathan Swift (1667–1745).
Godwin removed the suggestion of immortality from the later editions of the book, qualifying his treatment of human perfectibility also through an explanatory note on his citation of Franklin. See William Godwin, An enquiry concerning political justice: variants in Philp (ed.) Political and philosophical writings, vol. 4 (London: William Pickering, 1993), p. 344. Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790).
See Gregory Claeys, “The effects of property on Godwin’s theory of justice,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. 22, No. 1, January 1984, pp. 81–101.
Mark Philp, “Introduction” in Political and philosophical writings of William Godwin, vol. 1 : Political writings I, edited by Martin Fitzpatrick (London: William Pickering, 1993), p. 21.
“The principal revolutions of opinion (10 March 1800)” in Collected novels and memoirs of William Godwin, vol. 1, edited by Mark Philp with an introduction by Marilyn Butler and Mark Philp (London: William Pickering, 1992), p. 53.
David Hume, A Treatise of human nature: being an attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects, edited by David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of men, manners, opinions, times, edited by Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Hereafter, Characteristics.
See Klein, Shaftesbury and the culture of politeness, pp. 125–131 and Shaftesbury, Characteristics, “Introduction,” p. xix. See also Caroline Robbins, The eighteenth century commonwealthmen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959) and Pocock, The Machiavellian moment.
See Jürgen Habermas, Theory of communicative action, vol. 1 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984) and Theory of communicative action, vol. 2 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987).
See Richard Bourke, “Edmund Burke and Enlightenment sociability: justice, honour and the principles of government,” History of Political Thought, Vol. 21, No. 4, 2000, pp. 632–656. For politeness in Burke’s views on international politics,
see also Iain Hampsher-Monk, “Edmund Burke’s changing justification for intervention,” Historical Journal, Vol. 48, No. 1, 2005, pp. 65–100.
Victoria Myers, “William Godwin and the ars rhetorica,” Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 41, No. 3, 2002, p. 419.
Jon Mee, Conversable worlds: literature, contention and community 1762 –1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
David Fleisher, William Godwin: a study in liberalism (London: George Allen & Unwin 1951), p. 31.
William Godwin, Things as they are: or, The adventures of Caleb Williams, in Mark Philp (ed.) Collected novels and memoirs of William Godwin, vol. 3 edited by Pamela Clemit (London: William Pickering 1992). These words, part of a preface written in May 1794, were withdrawn from the original edition at the request of his publisher and in response to the political climate of those months in which the treason arrests and trials took place.
William Godwin, Fleetwood, or the new man of feeling (London: Richard Bentley, 1853), p. xi.
Pamela Clemit, The Godwinian novel: the rational fictions of Godwin, Brockden Brown and Mary Shelley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 7.
William Godwin, St Leon: a tale of the sixteenth century (1799) in Philp (General editor) Collected novels and memoirs of William Godwin, vol. 4 edited by Pamela Clemit (London: William Pickering, 1993), p. 11
Gary Kelly, The English Jacobin novel 1780–1805 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 227.
Andrew McCann, Cultural politics in the 1790s: literature, radicalism and the public sphere (London: Macmillan, 1999), p. 29.
For recent essays on Godwin and Thelwall, see Mark Philp, “Godwin, Thelwall and the means of progress” and Jon Mee “‘The press and danger of the crowd’: Godwin, Thelwall and the counter-public sphere” in Robert M. Maniquis and Victoria Myers (eds.) Godwinian moments: from the Enlightenment to Romanticism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011).
For the trials, see John Barrell, Imagining the King’s death: figurative treason, fantasies of regicide 1793–1796 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) and
John Barrell and Jon Mee (eds.) Trials for treason and sedition 1792–1794, vols. 1–8 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007).
Philp has argued that “much of the idiom of his philosophical speculation up to and including the first edition of Political justice is derived from debates within British theological circles—predominantly drawn from Joseph Priestley and Richard Price and the pamphlet literature on toleration, albeit also informed by the earlier work by Samuel Clarke, Jonathan Edwards, David Hartley and Anthony Collins.” Philp, “Introduction” in Political and philosophical writings vol. 1, p. 18. See also, inter alia, Peter Marshall, William Godwin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984),
Martin Fitzpatrick, “William Godwin and the rational Dissenters,” Price-Priestley Newsletter, Vol. 3 (1979), pp. 4–28 and
William Stafford, “Dissenting religion translated into politics: Godwin’s Political Justice,” History of Political Thought, Vol. 1 (1980), pp. 279–299.
John Brewer, “English radicalism in the age of George III” in J. G. A. Pocock (ed.) Three British revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 337.
As Knud Haakonssen observes “there has been relatively little investigation of the extent to which Dissenters managed to combine evangelical piety with Enlightenment ways, such as the acceptance of scientific progress and the pursuit of politeness.” Knud Haakonssen, “Enlightened Dissent: an introduction” in Knud Haakonssen (ed.) Enlightenment and religion: rational dissent in eighteenth-century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 10.
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© 2012 Zaheer Kazmi
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Kazmi, Z. (2012). The Polite Anarchist. In: Polite Anarchy in International Relations Theory. Palgrave Macmillan History of International Thought. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137028136_5
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