Godwin and the Origins of Philosophical Anarchism

William Godwin (1756–1836), a former Dissenting minister turned radical journalist, published An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice in 1793 through the London publishers G.G.J. and J. Robinson, in the charged intellectual atmosphere that followed the French Revolution and Edmund Burke's conservative Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). The book is widely regarded as the first systematic case in English for a stateless society organized around reason rather than coercion. Godwin's central premise was the doctrine of human "perfectibility": because human beings are rational and indefinitely improvable through the exercise of "private judgment," government — which substitutes external command for individual reasoning — actively entrenches vice, ignorance, and inequality rather than restraining them. Because the first edition sold for the considerable price of three guineas, William Pitt's government reportedly judged it too expensive to reach a mass readership and declined to prosecute Godwin for sedition, unlike several less affluent radical pamphleteers of the same decade.