William Godwin (1756–1836)

was an English political and miscellaneous writer, considered one of the important precursors of both utilitarian and liberal anarchist thought. He is also famous for the women in his life: he married the early feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft in 1797 and together with her had one daughter, also named Mary, author of Frankenstein, whom he brought up on such strict principles of rational enlightenment that her only possible rebellion was to elope at sixteen with the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Caleb Williams

Political Justice condemns all government interference with individual judgment. He claims that over time history has seen gradual progress as knowledge has developed and has spread and as men and women have liberated themselves from their political chains and their subordination to the fraud and imposture of monarchical and aristocratic government and established religion. His optimistic belief in the impotence of government against advancing opinion (which partly glosses and extends Hume's comment that all government is founded on opinion) is balanced by some sociologically perceptive comments on the baleful influence that certain types of political power have on those who exercise it or are subject to it. These insights are also explored in The Enquirer, but it is in Godwin's later novels, from Caleb Williams (1794) onward, that it is given its fullest rein. As Godwin indicates in his unpublished essay, ‘On History and Literature’ (1798), literature can be used to show how the cultures and institutions into which we are born come inexorable to shape our lives, leading us to act in ways which destroy our chances of happiness. The six mature novels effectively follow through the critical enterprise launched in Political Justice by their narrative histories of men who are brought to grief by the aristocratic and inegalitarian principles of their societies.

In 1794 appeared his novel, Things as They Are, or the Adventures of Caleb Williams, a novel which further popularized his political and social views of the individual victimized by society. In the Preface, Godwin explained why he had written Caleb Williams:

The following narrative is intended to answer a purpose more general and important than immediately appears upon the face of it. The question now afloat in the world respecting THINGS AS THEY ARE, is the most interesting that can be presented to the human mind. While one party pleads for reformation and change, the other extols in the warmest terms the existing constitution of society. . . . It is but of late that the inestimable importance of political principles have been adequately apprehended. It is now known to philosophers that the spirit and character of government intrudes itself into every rank of society. But this is a truth highly worthy to be communicated to persons whom books of philosophy and science are never likely to reach. Accordingly it was proposed in the invention of the following work, to comprehend, as far as the progressive nature of a single story would allow, a general review of the modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism, by which man becomes the destroyer of man.