Anarchism: a History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements

Godwin’s own words, that Political Justice was meant as a com- prehensive answer to Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution. Godwin was certainly conscious of the need for Burke to be an- swered, since he served on a small committee which arranged for the publication of Paine’s Rights of Man, an avowed reply to the Anarchism: A History of Reflections. But this tells us nothing about his own intentions in Libertarian Ideas and writing Political Justice, and the most we can fairly assume is that a desire to refute Burke may have been one among a number of Movements motives that set Godwin to work. Once begun, the whole conception of Political Justice developed in the process of writing, and, like most of the great seminal works in the world’s literature, it took on a life of its own which carried George Woodcock it far beyond Godwin’s original intent. Indeed, the logically developed structure of anarchist thought that now seems to distinguish the book only appeared as the theme was gradually worked out in the process of writining. Godwin was conscious of this, partic- ularly since the chapters of Political Justice were printed as soon as they were written, a process which did not allow him to elim- inate the inevitable contradictions that appeared as his opinions matured. The ideas of the author became more perspicacious and digested as his inquiries advanced [he explained in an apologetic preface]. He did not enter upon the work without being aware that government by its very nature counteracts the improvement of individual mind; but he understood the full meaning of this proposition more completely as he proceeded, and saw more dis- tinctly into the nature of the remedy. Political Justice appeared in February 1793. Already the political reaction had begun, and the government was persecuting rad- icals who had sympathized with the French Revolution. Barely two months before, Paine had been sentenced to death for publish- 1962 ing The Rights of Man; he had already crossed to France, thanks to 68 My heart beat high with great swelling sentiments of Liberty [he later recollected, in words reminiscent of Wordsworth’s confession]. I had read with great sat- isfaction the writings of Rousseau, Helvetius and oth- ers, the most popular authors of France. I observed in them a system more general and simply philosophical than in the majority of English writers on political sub- jects, and I could not refrain from conceiving sanguine hopes of a revolution of which such writings had been the precursors. Yet he continued, as he remarked, to disapprove of ‘mob government and violence’, and to desire ‘such political changes only as should flow purely from the clear light of the understanding and the erect and generous feelings of the heart’. But, as we have seen, it was not the French Revolution itself that made Godwin a libertarian; he merely saw it as an event by which his already developing ideas might be realized; and this fact largely explains the steadfastness with which, in the days after 1797 when political reaction reigned in England and most of the former friends of the revolution became its enemies, he maintained his radical beliefs. His ideas had been conceived independently of events in France, and when the Revolution declined into violence and dic- tatorship, this did not force him to abandon any of his basic beliefs; on the contrary, it offered a support to his original contention that political changes are fruitless unless they emerge from changes in moral attitudes. While the French Revolution produced an appropriate climate, there is some doubt as to the precise impulse which started God- win on the writing of Political Justice. He himself claimed that the original conception ‘proceeded on a feeling of the imperfections and errors of Montesquieu, and a desire of supplying a less faulty work’ than the French writer’s L’Esprit des lois. On the other hand, it has generally been thought, without any actual confirmation in 67 elements in Godwin’s system; it also demonstrates that Godwin was familiar since boyhood with one form or another of the anti- authoritarian and communistic ideas he later developed. He became an anarchistic thinker by no sudden conversion, but by a gradual process of drawing the logical conclusions from concepts Contents with which his receptive mind had long been familiar. In this sense the French social philosophers, and even such English writers as John Locke and Thomas Paine, were not so much giving him new 1. Prologue 5 ideas as providing the rational arguments and the logical frame- work in which he could develop the individualism that reached him by way of the Dissenting tradition. Of Dissent in its radical PART ONE: THE IDEA 33 form he retains almost all but the religious element — the sense 2. The Family Tree 34 that all we do is a preparation for a Heavenly Kingdom. Political Justice is in fact linked with religion only in terms of its 3. The Man of Reason 59 discarded origins. In itself it presents a characteristically anarchistic combination of the political and the moral, criticizing forms of 4. The Egoist 96 governmental organization but also achieving a solution based on the changing of personal opinion and the reformation of personal 5. The Man of Paradox 109 conduct. And thus Godwin appears as the earliest important social writer to pose consciously within his own work the extreme impli- 6. The Destructive Urge 151 cations of that post-Reformation world in which, as F. W. Maitland 7. The Explorer 193 said, ‘for the first time the Absolute State faced the Absolute Indi- vidual’. 8. The Prophet 234 Thus, springing from the stem of English Dissent, nurtured by two decades of assiduous reading in the Greek classics and in English and French literature from the late seventeenth century PART TWO: THE MOVEMENT 249 onward, Political Justice finally bore fruit in the energizio sunlight with which the French Revolution first rose upon the Western 9. International Endeavours 250 world. In the early phase of the Revolution, when bloodshed was slight 10. Anarchism in France 288 and the factional struggle had not yet culminated in the Terror, 11. Anarchism in Italy 343 Godwin’s enthusiasm was almost unalloyed. 12. Anarchism in Spain 374 66 3 13. Anarchism in Russia 420 scheme for damning ninety-nine in a hundred of the followers of Calvin’. 14. Various Traditions: Anarchism in Latin America, To this creed Godwin was early converted, and he remained Northern Europe, Britain, and the United States 448 faithful to it from his early teens until his middle twenties, for he tells us that he came out of Hoxton at the age of twenty-three with 15. Epilogue 494 his Sandemanian beliefs unchanged and only began to abandon them some time afterwards. In fact, he never wholly shed the influ- Postscript 503 ence of this radical sect, and a glance at some of their basic beliefs Selected Bibliography 516 and practices suggests that many aspects of Political Justice were little more than Sandemanianism secularized. Sandeman held that the Bible contained all that was necessary for salvation; here, of course, Godwin parted from him, but he agreed with many of the conclusions drawn from this belief. The Sandemanians denied the validity of Church government; Godwin denied the validity of all government. They maintained that the religious man had no business with the state; Godwin maintained the same for the moral man. They established an organization of independent congregations, with no ordained ministers; Godwin en- visaged a network of independent parishes, without rulers, as the ideal basic structure for a libertarian society. Finally, the Sande- manians believed in community of property as a desirable ideal and taught that it was sinful to save money, since a surplus should be distributed to those who needed it; it appears to have been a practice in Sandemanian congregations for poor members to be supported by their relatively better-off co-religionists. Once again there is a close parallel with the Godwinian system, which envis- ages a community of goods to be shared according to need, which lays specific stress on the moral evils of ‘accumulated property’, and which maintains, not so much that a poor man has a right to be supported by those more fortunate, but rather that the latter have a positive duty to support him. Sandeman’s doctrine was only one among the many influences that contributed to the eventual form of Political Justice. Yet it clearly contains the first sources of some of the most important 4 65 Godwin’s abandonment of the ministry was preceded by his conversion — through the arguments of Joseph Priestley — from his original Calvinism to the doctrines of Socinius, who denied the di- vinity of Christ and held that the soul of man was born pure — a belief that accorded with Godwin’s later idea of the infant as a 1. Prologue kind of tabula rasa on which experience writes its story. But it was not until 1790, the very year before the beginning of Political Justice, that he finally abandoned any kind of Christian belief and, ‘Whoever denies authority and fights against it is an anarchist,’ said under the influence of his close friend Thomas Holcroft, became Sebastien Faure. The definition is tempting in its simplicity, but an avowed atheist, a position which he only modified so far as to simplicity is the first thing to guard against in writing a history of retreat into a vague pantheism that dominated his later life.

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