A Fantasy of Reason

Don Locke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135026493
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This 'philosophical biography' gives an account of Godwin's life and thought, and by setting his thoughts in the context of his life, brings the two into juxtaposition. It relates Godwin's views on politics and morality, education and religion, freedom and society, to the events of his life, notably the revolution in France and its impact on radicalism and reaction in Britain and the parliamentary reforms of 1832.

1

Reason, truth and justice

I am bound to disseminate without reserve all the principles with which I am acquainted, and which it may be of importance to mankind to know; and this duty it behoves me to practise upon every occasion and with the most persevering constancy. I must discharge the whole system of moral and political truth, without suppressing any part under the idea of its being too bold or paradoxical, and thus depriving the whole of that complete and irresistible evidence, without which its effects must always be feeble, partial and uncertain.¹

Political Justice, 1793

Hidden away in some old library or bookshop you might one day come across the weighty volumes of Political Justice, a work as obscure now as its author. Yet there was a time when it was a popular sensation, a veritable prodigy of imagination and intellect, and William Godwin the most famous, certainly the most notorious, writer in the land. ‘No work in our time’, declared William Hazlitt, ‘gave such a blow to the philosophical mind of the country as the celebrated Enquiry Concerning Political Justice’.² For Godwin captured the spirit of the age, that sense of radical reform and immediate improvement that accompanied the revolutions first of America and then of France, and carried it further, further perhaps than anyone else has ever dared go, in a truly remarkable exploration of how things are and what they yet might be. Even today the book is astonishing, amazing or absurd according to taste, a striking survey of issues both ancient and contemporary: government and law, punishment and property, reason and revolution, benevolence and justice, sincerity and marriage. But in its time it was a revelation, not merely as a piece of moral and political speculation but as an exercise in reason and argument. ‘In the first fervour of my enthusiasm’, wrote Godwin himself, ‘I entertained a vain imagination of “hewing a stone from the rock”, which by its inherent energy and weight, should overbear and annihilate all opposition, and place the principles of politics on an immovable basis’.³ And that basis consisted in three fundamental values, three eternal ideals: Reason, Truth, and Justice. Political Justice is a commentary, a rhapsody – development and variation, digression and interlude – on those three themes.

Truth, first of all, which we ignore at our peril. For error leads inevitably to evil and unhappiness, since ‘all vice is nothing more than error and mistake reduced into practice, and adopted as the principle of our conduct’.⁴ Godwin, like Socrates, believes that the man who acts wrongly has simply mistaken his true interests, that once we know the real nature and tendency of our conduct we will always act rightly. In fact virtue is the means to happiness, and once men appreciate that truth they will be virtuous because they want to be happy, and happy because they are virtuous. But truth also provides the means of social and political progress. The history of mankind has been, and will continue to be, a history of continual improvement, as men have come to learn more about their environment, their society and themselves. As knowledge increases and information is disseminated, more widely and more rapidly than ever before thanks to the invention of printing, man will arrive by degrees at a full and clear understanding of what he is, and what he can make of himself. Our social and political institutions, our very selves, will develop and change accordingly:

There is no science that is not capable of additions; there is no art that may not be carried to a still higher perfection. If this be true of all other sciences, why not of morals? If this be true of all other arts, why not of social institutions?⁵

That is the faith on which Political Justice is founded.

Hardly surprising, therefore, that Godwin’s prime concern in the practical politics of his day should be with freedom of opinion. He does not exactly believe in a right of free speech – indeed he does not believe in rights, as such, at all – but he does believe in a duty, the duty to speak the truth as plainly and as clearly as we can, without fear of the consequences. Accordingly, Political Justice devotes a chapter or two to the supreme virtue of sincerity, an absolute frankness and honesty in everything we say and do. But it is equally the duty of Political Justice itself to speak the truth about society and government, ‘to disseminate without reserve all the principles with which I am acquainted’,⁶ and equally without fear of the consequences.

Truth, therefore, will make us wise, virtuous, happy and free. But how are we to arrive at truth? Not through authority, much less through force, but only through reason, through each individual’s exercise of his capacity to think and judge for himself. The mere fact that someone tells me something is so cannot, by itself, establish that it is so; men cannot be made wise against their wills. Only reason can reveal the truth and bring us to act accordingly:

There is no effectual way of improving the institutions of any people but by enlightening their understandings. He that endeavours to maintain the authority of any sentiment, not by argument, but by force, may intend a benefit, but really inflicts an extreme injury. To suppose that truth can be instilled through any medium but that of its own intrinsic evidence, is the most flagrant of all errors. He that believes the most fundamental proposition through the evidence of authority, does not believe a truth, but a falshood [sic]. … All that he believes is that it is very proper that he should submit to usurpation and injustice.⁷

So if men are to recognize truth, they must be allowed to recognize it for themselves. Yet the function of most social and political institutions is precisely to set some men in power over the rest, requiring individuals to disregard their own reason and bow to the opinion of others, ‘the authorities’, who know better than they. Even worse, governments rely on falsehood, on secrecy and deception, and if necessary on force, to control their subjects. ‘This boasted institution’, says Godwin, ‘is nothing more than a scheme for enforcing by brute violence the sense of one man or set of men upon another.’⁸ It can have no place in a world of reason and truth.

And if governments must go, it is clear that laws cannot be far behind. For the system of law and punishment — ‘coercion’, as Godwin likes to call it – is contrary to justice and truth as well as to reason. Contrary to justice because all conduct is determined by laws of cause and effect, the inevitable result of the particular education and environment that has made each man what he is, so that ultimately we are no more responsible for what we do than an apple is responsible for falling to the ground: ‘The assassin cannot help the murder he commits any more than the dagger.’⁹ Contrary to truth because courts depend for their existence on obscurity, deception and dishonesty, as each advocate seeks to impose the interpretation that best suits himself: ‘Law was made that a plain man might know what to depend on; and yet the most skilful practitioners differ about the event of my suit.’¹⁰ And contrary to reason because punishment appeals to force and to fear, not to argument:

It includes in it a tacit confession of imbecility. If he who employs coercion against me could mould me to his purposes by argument, no doubt he would. He pretends to punish me, because his argument is strong; but he really punishes me, because his argument is weak.¹¹

Instead, in a world of truth and reason, men will do voluntarily, in the light of their own understanding, what at present we misguidedly, impossibly, try to force them to do:

Reason is the only legislator, and her degrees are irrevocable and uniform. The functions of society extend, not to the making, but the interpreting of law; it cannot decree, it can only declare that, which the nature of things has already decreed.¹²

Reason is shared by all men, and truth too is one and uniform, the same for everyone in every country, so groups of people, meeting together freely and discussing their problems openly, relying on proof and not on power, appealing to argument and not to authority, will ultimately arrive at an agreement where each man can see the truth for himself and act appropriately. It will be a world with no governments and no need of them, no laws and no need of them, a world governed by truth and reason alone.

But there are other conclusions, no less surprising, to be drawn from the primacy of private reason. If it is essential that people learn to think for themselves, influenced solely by the evidence and uncorrupted by authority and the pressure of public opinion, then, as Godwin subsequently put it, ‘we should avoid all those practices that are calculated to melt our opinions into a common mould.’¹³ It follows, therefore, that ‘everything that is usually understood by the term cooperation, is in some degree an evil’, ‘that all supererogatory cooperation is carefully to be avoided, common labour and common meals.’¹⁴ And the argument extends to cohabitation, and even to marriage, an institution which – like punishment – is found to be contrary to reason, truth and justice, all three. A world of rational men will be a world of wholly independent, wholly self-sufficient individuals, prepared to regulate their conduct in accordance with their own opinions, and never deferring their judgment to that of another:

For example: shall we have concerts of music? The miserable state of mechanism of the majority of the performers is so conspicuous as to be even at this day a topic of mortification and ridicule. Will it not be practicable hereafter for one man to perform the whole? Shall we have theatrical exhibitions? This seems to include an absurd and vicious cooperation. It may be doubted whether men will hereafter come forward in any mode gravely to repeat words and ideas not their own. … All formal repetition of other men’s ideas seems to be a scheme for imprisoning for so long a time the operations of our own mind.¹⁵

Nothing was safe, nothing sacred, once Godwin set off in pursuit of reason and the truth!

But what will this world be like when, as it seems, none of our present institutions and conventions survive? The answer is that a world of pure reason will be a world of political justice, that is, a state of society organized along moral lines. As the very title of the book makes clear, morality is as important to Godwin as is politics, and the moral doctrines certainly pack as many surprises. For what, more specifically, is morality, or justice? ‘If justice have any meaning’, Godwin tells us, ‘it is just that I should contribute every thing in my power to the benefit of the whole.’¹⁶ Duty, likewise, is ‘the mode in which any being may best be employed for the general good’.¹⁷ Any other action will be unjust; in failing to produce all the good that I can, I perform an injustice against my fellow men.

To us, perhaps, this seems a curious use of a notion which seems to have more to do with equality and fairness than the benefit and welfare of everyone. But the fact that Godwin uses ‘justice’ as a synonym for morality in general already tells us much about the way he applies this test of the greatest possible good. Morality, for him, is not simply a matter of doing good unto others, but a matter of doing good unto all men equally, as befits their capacities and abilities. This means, in particular, that it must be immoral, unjust, to make exceptions of particular people just because they happen to be our family or our friends, let alone ourselves. ‘If the extraordinary case should occur in which I can promote the general good by my death, more than by my life, justice requires that I should be content to die.’¹⁸ Equally it would be wrong for me to do something for someone close to me just because he is close to me, when I might perhaps be of greater benefit to someone else; that too would be an injustice against my fellow men. So what Godwin came to call ‘the private and domestic affections’ are actually a source of vice and error, in so far as they lead me to favour my family and friends not because I can do them most good, but simply because they are mine. Nor has he qualms about remarking, in the midst of a discussion of the foundations of political obligation: ‘It is of no consequence that I am the parent of a child, when it has once been ascertained that the child will receive greater benefit by living under the superintendance of a stranger.’¹⁹

Gratitude, likewise, ‘can be no part either of justice or virtue.’²⁰ For gratitude leads us to prefer one man not for the good he can do mankind generally but for the good he has done us personally, when he might perhaps have been of more benefit to someone else. This is not to deny that it may sometimes be our duty to repay our benefactors, just as it is often our duty to help friends and family, when that will increase the general welfare. But it is to deny that we have a duty to our benefactor just because he has helped us. Indeed to act from a motive of gratitude, instead of for the good of all, would be positively immoral; so far from being a virtue, gratitude, as such, is a vice, so much more of absolute injustice. ‘I would spare him commission of that vice’, snapped Edmund Burke when he heard of this doctrine, ‘by not conferring on him any benefit.’²¹ Similarly, there can be no obligation to do something just because we have promised. If what I do promotes the general welfare then what I do is right, and I ought to do it whether I have promised or not; if what I do detracts from the general welfare then what I do is wrong, and I ought not do it whether I have promised or not. Either way promising makes no difference: the mere fact that I have said I will do it cannot make a right out of a wrong.

For much the same reason, there can be no rights of man, as they have been called, only duties, more exactly the one fundamental duty of doing all that good that is within your power. If by a right we mean the discretionary power to do something as and when we please, without incurring any blame – as I might claim the right to do what I li...