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The Romance of the Impossible: William Godwin in the Empty Place of Reason

2003; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 70; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/elh.2003.0025

1080-6547

David A. Collings,

Anarchism and Radical Politics

In the treatise outlining his version of philosophical anarchism, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, first published in 1793 and revised twice thereafter, William Godwin attacks every possible interference with the individual's private judgment of what best serves the universal good. Every positive law attempts to substitute a contingent and fallible version of justice for its absolute form: "Legislation. . . is not an affair of human competence. Immutable reason is the true legislator, and her decrees it behoves us to investigate. The functions of society extend, not to the making, but the interpreting of law." 1 Because reason is prior to its historical articulation, the latter is illegitimate. To substitute mere laws for immutable reason is to be confined by potentially false interpretations; it is, in short, to create an imposture, a fiction of justice rather than the real thing. Accordingly, Godwin carries out a systematic critique of every kind of institution, arguing that people should live under the immediate authority of reason itself, carrying out an almost total violence against the complex fabric of social life. Because people would justify their behavior according to reason alone, and because property and sexual relations would be reconfigured to allow for such separate judgment, every form of collective enterprise or identity would disappear. No institution would mediate between people and reason, or between people and each other. This philosophy challenges far more than the rule of law or of government, for it also repudiates rhetorical power, prejudice, custom, contracts, promises, cooperative action, gratitude, codes of manners, marriage, the subordination of child to parent, employment of one person by another, and internalized forms of external constraint, as well as the coercion involved in any revolutionary or collective attempt to overturn institutions. Philosophical anarchy is in fact a kind of ratiocracy, a mode of governance even more severe than theocracy, for in this case the immutable principle would never mediate itself in any familiar social form. The same activity—coming to know and enact the [End Page 847] judgments of reason—would define every life and every interpersonal relation.