ABSTRACT
William Godwin appears to be Burke’s antithesis: a man who believed in individualism, the power of science, human perfectibility through progress, the evil of all external restraints and of all forms of concealment, and that the truth has only to be revealed to make men free. For Godwin, therefore, society needs itself to be analysed scientifically, on the model of ‘taking to pieces a disordered machine, with a purpose, by reconstructing it, of enhancing its value’. Again Godwin draws upon his religious inheritance, turning the protestant tradition of self-surveillance into a scientific process of self-analysis. For Godwin, as for his heir Freud, self-scrutiny can make us free. For Godwin, any external crisis of authority caused by the destruction of old political systems is assuaged by his insistence on the authority within each of us which makes all external systems superfluous. For Godwin, the gothic is already a recognisable literary form, whose conventions are appropriate for social criticism.
