Godwin’s Enquiry
More celebrated in its own day was the response her husband-to-be William Godwin aimed at Burke, a utopian manifesto brimming with confidence in men's natural virtues. William Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, published in 1793 as France declared war on England, launched an attack on inequalities of wealth rather than of gender.
Godwin shared Condorcet’s optimism regarding perceptions of the common good, but was largely uninterested in women’s rights. A radical individualist, he attacked the inheritance of both political and economic privilege: men should not be able to inherit offices from their fathers, nor should they be allowed to inherit wealth. Rather, they should be forced to rely on their own efforts and abilities.At the same time Godwin attacked Smithian confidence in the pursuit of individual self-interest. Educated men should hue to civic virtue and recognize that equality would foster human development. It would, of course, be a slow process. Indeed, in his first edition, Godwin suggested that Negroes in the West Indies should continue in slavery until they could be gradually prepared for a state of liberty (his friends persuaded him to drop this comment from the second edition).13
Unlike Paine, Godwin wanted to eliminate private property itself. He was convinced that economic ambition was a dangerous force, ‘‘of all the passions of the human mind, the most extensive in its ravages’’.14 Dismissive of merchants and money-grubbers, he felt that men should devote themselves to more noble causes. True, equal distribution of wealth would undermine the incentives that the poor currently had to work. But, in a chapter titled ‘‘Of the Objection to this System from the Allurements of Sloth’’, Godwin argued that the labor of one man in twenty would be sufficient to support the rest—or equally divided so that it occupied only the twentieth part of every man’s time—if people were willing to resign themselves to a life of elegant simplicity.15
Godwin’s description of subsistence requirements did not include any domestic labor.16 Only a man who had never worked with his hands or prepared his own meals could so romanticize the concept of necessary labor.
Mathematicians and poets would, he argued, derive a ‘‘new stock of cheerfulness and energy’’ from their small but regular assignments.17 Godwin himself had a reputation for extensive begging and borrowing from his friends, suggesting he was not entirely fond of remunerative work himself. 18But Godwin's idealism cannot be reduced to its self-serving elements. It resided in an almost religious concept of benevolence closely related to Smith's concept of moral sentiments. What Smith had restricted to family and friends, Godwin extended to society as a whole. Central to his concept of political justice was the claim that men should treat their fellows as if they were kin. His chapter on justice asserted at the outset, ‘‘We are not connected with one or two percipient beings, but with a society, a nation, and in some sense with the whole family of mankind, of consequence that life ought to be preferred which will be most conducive to the general good.''19 Later, he suggested that the paternity of children was irrelevant, because all should be equally well cared for.20
Godwin, like Smith, placed women outside the realm of reason. As a result his egalitarian fantasy did not bode well for them. Conjuring the image of a palace in flames he asked his readers to imagine that, of two people in danger, only one can be saved—a famous French writer named Fenelon or an ordinary chambermaid. Fenelon's life, Godwin argued is the more valuable to society.21 In later editions of the Enquiry he changed the example from chambermaid to valet. But one could argue that Burke's chivalry offered more advantages to women, especially in the event of fire.
Godwin is sometimes listed as a feminist because he criticized marriage, and, when he reluctantly capitulated to it, wedded the most notorious feminist of his day. But his opposition to marriage grew out of general opposition to any state regulation of personal life.
Unlike Smith, he carried the principle of laissez faire to its logical conclusion, terming marriage the ‘‘most odious of all monopolies''.22 He ignored the possibility that men might abuse or exploit women even further without the restraints of marriage or the protection of the state. His hatred of greed freed him of any responsibility for lust. Indeed, he seemed to deny its very existence. In a well known passage of the Enquiry, famously ridiculed by Malthus, he prophesied that in the family of the future, ‘‘Reasonable men then will propagate their species, not because a certain sensible pleasure is annexed to this action, but because it is right the species should be propagated.''23Few men have suffered such unlucky confrontations with their own best principles. In 1796, when Godwin fell in love with Mary Wollstonecraft, she had been abandoned by her first lover, Gilbert Imlay, and was struggling to support herself and her daughter. Reason followed passion: when it became apparent that Wollstonecraft was bearing Godwin's child they married, though keeping separate residences. Wollstonecraft died in childbirth shortly after, leaving a new infant daughter, as well as three-year-old Fanny Imlay, in Godwin's care. While he garnered royalties from his biographical Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft, both his reputation and his earning power soon declined.
His daughter Mary, named after her mother, later eloped against her father's wishes with the poet Percy Shelley, who was married to another woman at the time. Experiments in family life as well as constitutional reform could easily go awry. Mary Shelley drove this point home when she later spun the tale of Frankenstein, a man-made monster who also rebelled against his own creator.