ABSTRACT
William Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice was first published in February 1793. Unlike the texts that have been the focus of previous chapters, it was a philosophical discussion of the underlying political issues, not a direct response to the French Revolution. Mark Philp argues that this makes it a very different kind of text:
It is a book, not a political pamphlet, and as such it obeys different rules both in its composition and its distribution. In consequence, it also lacks the practical political dimension which is the raison d’etre of the pamphlet […] the pamphlets of the debate were increasingly implicated in a struggle to secure the allegiance of an increasingly wide audience on one side or another of what Burke had successfully turned into a polarised debate. Political Justice does not have this broader political intent – it is directed to a highly literate élite. 1
Philp points to some important differences between Political Justice and contemporary political pamphlets, particularly its lack of a ‘practical political dimension’ and its elite target audience. Certainly it does not look like a spontaneous and ephemeral piece of writing. Of the three political pamphlets considered previously, only the second part of Paine’s Rights of Man was even divided into chapters. Godwin’s text, by contrast, is carefully and hierarchically structured: it is divided into two volumes, eight books and eighty-five chapters. Each chapter is headed by a précis of the argument it contains. Chapter Three of Book One, for example, is condensed as follows: ‘no innate principles. – objections to this assertion – from the early actions of infants – from the desire of self-preservation – from self-love – from pity – from the vices of children – tyranny – sullenness. – conclusion’. through this layout, Political Justice visibly claims its own generic kinship with John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (London, 1785) and Dugald Stewart’s Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1792-1827). Furthermore, Political Justice cost £1, 16s when first published: over seven times the price of Burke’s Reflections (which at 5s was itself expensive enough to put it beyond the reach of most people), over twenty times the price of Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1s, 6d) and over seventy times the price of the two parts of Paine’s Rights of Man
1 Mark Philp, Godwin’s Political Justice (London, 1986), p. 73.
