from William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness, 2 vols (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1793); vol. 2, book 7, chapters 1, 3, 6, and 8.

William Godwin was born in Cambridgeshire, son of a Dissenting clergy-man and a shipowner's daughter, and received a progressive modern education at Hoxton Dissenting Academy, north of London, to prepare him for the ministry. He read widely in Enlightenment materialist philosophy and eventually became and atheist and anarchist. This approached the increasingly virulent and divisive public debate on the Revolution indirectly, based on the idea of justice as a rational principle regulating social relations without need of political or other institutions – in short, philosophical anarchism. Political Justice argues that social and political circumstances construct the individual in a necessary process of cause and effect, or 'necessitarianism'; perverting humanity's innate benevolence and powers of reason. Jails are to a proverb seminaries of vice; and he must be an uncommon proficient in the passion and the practice of injustice, or a man of sublime virtue, who does not come out of them a much worse man than he entered.