1/29/2021 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice - Wikipedia

Enquiry Concerning Political Justice

Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence
on Morals and Happiness is a 1793 book by the philosopher Enquiry Concerning
William Godwin, in which the author outlines his political Political Justice
philosophy. It is the first modern work to expound anarchism.

Contents
Background and publication
Content
Variants
Impact
Manuscript
See also
References
Bibliography
External links Cover, circa 1793
Author William Godwin
Country United Kingdom
Background and publication
Language English
Godwin began thinking about Political Justice in 1791, after the Subject Political
publication of Thomas Paine's Rights of Man in response to philosophy
Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Publication 1793
However, unlike most of the works that Burke's work spawned in date
the ensuing Revolution Controversy, Godwin's did not address
Media type Print
the specific political events of the day; it addressed the
underlying philosophical principles.[1] Its length and expense (it
cost over £1) made it inaccessible to the popular audience of the Rights of Man and probably
protected Godwin from the persecution that other writers such as Paine experienced.[1] Nevertheless,
Godwin became a revered figure among radicals and was seen as an intellectual leader among their
groups.[1] One way in which this happened is through the many unauthorized copies of the text, the
extracts printed by radical journals, and the lectures John Thelwall gave based on its ideas.[1]

Content
Despite being published during the French Revolution, the French Revolutionary Wars, and the lead
up to the 1794 Treason Trials in Britain, Political Justice argues that humanity will inevitably
progress: it argues for human perfectibility and enlightenment.[1] McCann explains that "Political
Justice is ... first and foremost a critique of political institutions. Its vision of human perfectibility is
anarchist in so far as it sees government and related social practices such as property monopoly,
marriage and monarchy as restraining the progress of mankind."[1] Godwin believed that government
"insinuates itself into our personal dispositions, and insensibly communicates its own spirit to our

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enquiry_Concerning_Political_Justice 1/5
1/29/2021 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice - Wikipedia

private transactions".[2] Instead, Godwin proposes a society in which human beings use their reason
to decide the best course of action. The very existence of governments, even those founded through
consensus, demonstrates that people cannot yet regulate their conduct by the dictates of reason.[1]

Godwin argued that the link between politics and morality had been severed and he wanted to restore
it. McCann explains that in Godwin's vision, "as public opinion develops in accordance with the
dictates of reason, so too should political institutions change until, finally, they will wither away
altogether, leaving the people to organize themselves into what would be a direct democracy."[1]
Godwin believed that the public could be rational; he wrote: "Opinion is the most potent engine that
can be brought within the sphere of political society. False opinion, superstition and prejudice, have
hitherto been the true supporters of usurpation and despotism. Enquiry, and the improvement of the
human mind, are now shaking to the center those bulwarks that have so long held mankind in
thraldom."[2]

Godwin was not a revolutionary in the vein of John Thelwall and the London Corresponding Society.
A philosophical anarchist, he believed that change would come gradually and that there was no need
for violent revolution.[1] He argues that "the task which, for the present, should occupy the first rank
in the thoughts of the friend of man is enquiry, communication, discussion."[2] Godwin thus believed
in individuals' desire to reason sincerely and truthfully with each other.[1] In the 20th century, Jürgen
Habermas developed this idea further.[1]

However, paradoxes and contradictions surface throughout Political Justice. As McCann explains, "a
faith in the ability of public opinion to progress towards enlightenment, based on its own exercise of
reason, is constantly undone by actual forms of public action and political life, which for Godwin end
up dangerously subsuming the individual into the collective."[1] For example, Godwin criticizes public
speeches because they rely on sentiment and the printing press because it can perpetuate dogma as
well as enlighten.[1]

The work begins with a list of eight principles which are expounded throughout the work. Generally,
the principles can each be summarized as follows:[3]

1. The object of moral and political discourse is how to maximize the amount and variety of pleasure
and happiness.
2. Injustice and violence produced the demand for government, but due to its propensity toward war
and despotism and its perpetuation of inequality, government has come to embody and
perpetuate injustice.
3. Government's chief object is security, and it achieves this through abridging individual
independence. This prevents the cultivation of the individual's happiness. One should aim to
maintain general security, while minimizing such damages.
4. Justice must aim at producing the greatest sum of happiness and it requires impartiality. Justice is
universal.
5. One's duty is to fulfill one's capacity to bring about the general advantage. One's right is to their
share to this general advantage. Ordinarily, one's contribution to general advantage should be at
their discretion. One's injury to the general good might sometimes warrant political
superintendence.
6. One's actions are based on feelings rather than reason. Reason merely allows the comparison
and balancing of different feelings. Reason, therefore, allows us to regulate our feelings, making
its improvement the best method to improve our social condition.
7. Reason's clarity and strength depend on the cultivation of knowledge. The cultivation of
knowledge is unlimited. Therefore, our social condition is capable of perpetual improvement;
however, institutions calculated to give perpetuity to any particular mode of thinking, or condition
of existence, are harmful.
8. The cultivation of happiness requires that we avoid prejudice and protect freedom of inquiry. It
also requires leisure for intellectual cultivation, therefore extreme inequality is to be avoided.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enquiry_Concerning_Political_Justice 2/5
1/29/2021 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice - Wikipedia

Variants
Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice has various editions. The editions were published in
Godwin’s lifetime. Due to Godwin’s continuous revision of the text, three editions were released. The
first edition was published in 1793, the second edition in 1796 and the third edition in 1798. Each of
these editions was published by G.G and J. Robinson.[4] Political Justice has a complex textual
development due to these changes. The overall tones of these changes portray a move away from pure
reason, yielding more towards the emotive feelings of mankind.

Peter Kropotkin, in his article on "Anarchism" for The Encyclopedia Britannica discusses the
revisions from a far-left perspective, criticizing how new versions seemed to retract earlier, more
radical, positions concerning property:

Speaking of property, he stated that the rights of every one ‘to every substance capable of
contributing to the benefit of a human being’ must be regulated by justice alone: the
substance must go ‘to him who most wants it’. His conclusion was communism. Godwin,
however, had not the courage to maintain his opinions. He entirely rewrote later on his
chapter on property and mitigated his communist views in the second edition of Political
Justice (8vo, 1796).[5]

Impact
Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political Justice presents the first modern defense and articulation of
anarchism.[6] The book was revered by the first generation of Romantic poets, such as William
Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, although they would later turn away from radicalism.
However, as Romantic scholar Andrew McCann explains, "it is in the radicalism of Percy Shelley's
work that Godwin's thinking exerted its greatest influence on the Romantic movement, and ...
Shelley's work was most central to the resurgence of radical sentiment after the end of the Napoleonic
Wars."[1]

In 1798, the Reverend Thomas Malthus published An Essay on the Principle of Population, which
was largely written as a refutation of the ideas of Godwin and the Marquis de Condorcet. Malthus
argued that since population increases geometrically (i.e. doubling in size each generation), while
production can only increase in a linear manner, then disease, famine, poverty and vice are
inevitable. Consequently, Malthus criticised Political Justice for expounding unachieveable
utopianism.[7] In 1820 Godwin answered with Of Population: An Enquiry Concerning the Power of
Increase in the Numbers of Mankind which disputed Malthus' population growth predictions.[8]

The work merited a place in Peter Kropotkin's overview of the history of anarchism that he wrote for
The Encyclopedia Britannica.

It was Godwin, in his Enquiry concerning Political Justice (2 vols., 1793), who was the
first to formulate the political and economical conceptions of anarchism, even though he
did not give that name to the ideas developed in his remarkable work. Laws, he wrote, are
not a product of the wisdom of our ancestors: they are the product of their passions, their
timidity, their jealousies and their ambition. The remedy they offer is worse than the evils
they pretend to cure.[9]

Manuscript
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enquiry_Concerning_Political_Justice 3/5
1/29/2021 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice - Wikipedia

The surviving holograph manuscript for Political Justice is held in the Forster Collection at the
Victoria and Albert Museum, along with several other works by Godwin. Following Godwin's death in
1836, many of the writer's manuscripts were bought at auction by the collector Dawson Turner. In
1859 the texts for Political Justice, Caleb Williams, Life of Chaucer, and History of the
Commonwealth of England were all acquired by John Forster, who died in 1876. Forster's will
stipulated that his extensive collection should be given to the South Kensington Museum after his
wife's death. In the event, Eliza Ann Forster transferred the Godwin manuscripts to the Museum
straight away.[10]

The V&A's manuscripts for Political Justice and Caleb Williams were both digitised in 2017 and are
now included in the Shelley-Godwin Archive.[11][12][13]

See also
List of books about anarchism

References
1. McCann, "Enquiry Concerning Political Justice".
2. Qtd. in McCann, "Enquiry Concerning Political Justice".
3. Godwin, William. An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/An_Enqui
ry_Concerning_Political_Justice).
4. Philp, Mark (1993). Political And Philosophical Writings of William Godwin. Pickering & Chatto
Limited. ISBN 1 85196 096 1.
5. Kropotkin, Peter. "Works of Peter Kropotkin" (https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/kropotki
n-peter/1910/britannica.htm). www.marxists.org. Retrieved 2017-06-03.
6. De George, Richard T. (2005). Honderich, Ted (ed.). The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (http
s://archive.org/details/oxfordcompaniont00hond_495). Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 31 (ht
tps://archive.org/details/oxfordcompaniont00hond_495/page/n51). ISBN 0-19-926479-1.
7. Pullen, 'Malthus'.
8. Medema, Steven G., and Warren J. Samuels. 2003. The History of Economic Thought: A Reader.
New York: Routledge.
9. Kropotkin, Peter. "Works of Peter Kropotkin" (https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/kropotki
n-peter/1910/britannica.htm). www.marxists.org. Retrieved 2017-06-03.
10. Clemit, Pamela (2017). "Political Justice: A Description of the Holograph Manuscript" (http://shelle
ygodwinarchive.org/contents/msl_1876_forster_222_1-3/introduction/). The Shelley-Godwin
Archive. Retrieved July 9, 2020.
11. Dodds, Douglas (2018). "From Analogue to Digital: Word and Image Digitization Projects at the
V&A" (https://doi.org/10.1093%2Fjvcult%2Fvcy020). Journal of Victorian Culture. 23: 222–230.
doi:10.1093/jvcult/vcy020 (https://doi.org/10.1093%2Fjvcult%2Fvcy020).
12. Godwin, William. "Political Justice" (http://shelleygodwinarchive.org/contents/political_justice/).
The Shelley-Godwin Archive. Retrieved July 9, 2020.
13. Godwin, William. "Caleb Williams" (http://shelleygodwinarchive.org/contents/caleb_williams/). The
Shelley-Godwin Archive. Retrieved July 9, 2020.

Bibliography
McCann, Andrew. "Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Modern Morals and
Manners." The Literary Encyclopedia. 8 January 2001. Retrieved on 20 April 2008.
Pullen, J. M. "Malthus, (Thomas) Robert (1766–1834), political economist", Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enquiry_Concerning_Political_Justice 4/5
1/29/2021 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice - Wikipedia

External links
Godwin, William (1793), Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/econ/ug
cm/3ll3/godwin/pj.html) (1st ed.), London, England: G.G.J. and J. Robinson, OCLC 680251053 (h
ttps://www.worldcat.org/oclc/680251053), 642217608 (https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/642217608),
504755839 (https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/504755839), retrieved 1 September 2012, from
McMaster University
Godwin, William (1842), POLITICAL JUSTICE (http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/go
dwin/PJfrontpiece.html) (4th ed.), London, England: J. Watson, OCLC 65310813 (https://www.wor
ldcat.org/oclc/65310813), 798899008 (https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/798899008), 805238766 (htt
ps://www.worldcat.org/oclc/805238766), retrieved 1 September 2012 from the Anarchy Archives
Godwin, William (1890), Salt, H.S. (ed.), Godwin's 'Political justice.': A reprint of the essay on
'Property,' from the original edition (https://books.google.com/books?id=IvIHbih8fTcC),
OCLC 169723 (https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/169723), retrieved 1 September 2012

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Enquiry_Concerning_Political_Justice&oldid=1002826714"

This page was last edited on 26 January 2021, at 06:13 (UTC).

Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this
site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia
Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enquiry_Concerning_Political_Justice 5/5