An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (Oxford World's Classics)

Godwin’s treatise on the potential for the elimination of law between individuals, resulting in a peaceful and equitable state of nature, is filled with lovely concepts and images, but fails to handle transition periods.There is something to be said for a practical approach to interpersonal and intergovernmental relations, but Godwin doesn’t contribute any of the “something”.This Kindle version is a good one, but lacks scrolling. At this point, there is little excuse for Amazon’s Kindle collection to not include scrolling in a 200-year-old manuscript. We’ve all had plenty of time to figure out pagination.The single biggest reason to read this text is Godwin’s innovative and forward-thinking view of the liberation of women. Unsurprising, as his wife was Mary Wollstonecraft. The second biggest reason is to become acquainted with the English version of classical anarchy. Either are good reasons to pick up the text.

This was written by part of Mary Shelley's family and it is a very interesting look into the political world of the 1800s

This book is deservedly a political science classic.

original edition のように大型の本でなく、読みやすく、扱いやすく、便利に読み、引用している。

My title is something of a riposte to the title (not necessarily the contents) of another Vine review. I agree with those reviewers who say words to the effect that even where we feel Godwin is wrong, or we simply differ in some degree from his position, nonetheless he is almost always very interesting. I have yet to finish this book, and part of the reason for my slow progress is my copious note-taking. Almost every page has at least one, and often more, pithily memorable statements.In certain quarters it is not very fashionable to believe in progress, and even less so in the 'perfectability of man', two premises Godwin takes as given. And yet, if we are to credit the arguments and supporting evidence of a book like Pinker's  The Better Angels of Our Nature , even if all is admittedly far from perfect, progress of sorts - and sorts Godwin deals with here - has, in places, been made. It's not irrevocable progress, and personally I find it hard to share Godwin's optimism for the future (or Pinker's, for that matter). Indeed, even what Godwin says regarding the French and American revolutions - i.e. the events of his present - seems rather naive. Nevertheless, in terms of ideals to be striven for, I think, in many very real and meaningful ways, he's really onto some very potent and challenging stuff.However, as for putting his ideas into action, say for example attempting to always speak truth. Without necessarily even addressing such ideas as pluralism, relativism and postmodernism, we can still ask, is such an idea even as laudable as he makes out, or might it in fact possibly even be counterproductive? The insights of evolutionary science (and Godwin is, of course, pre-Darwinian) show us that deception and conflict - two areas of political life that we may disapprove of morally - are tools for survival all too readily employed in nature. We may wish to evolve a 'higher' moral culture, and rise above such things, just as we may wish for science and the knowledge it brings us to help us counteract other aspects of nature, such as disease and ageing. But the idea of such moral 'strength' puts me in mind of "the untoward fate" of the younger of Gabriel's sheepdogs in Thomas Hardy's  Far from the Madding Crowd , a fate "which so often attends dogs and other philosophers who follow out a train of reasoning to its logical conclusion, and attempt perfectly consistent conduct in a world made up so largely of compromise." (You don't need to know the details of that story to guess that his fate is an ill one.)When Godwin refers to Paine's statement that society is everywhere a blessing, and government, even it's best forms, always an evil, I believe I understand, and yet I don't have anything like Godwin's apparent simplistic clarity. Effectively my heart wishes to agree with him, whilst my mind suspects that such a stance is an impractical form of over-simplified idealism. Likewise regarding the sovereignty of the mind, and freedom to enquire and reflect, etc. It's the relationship of personal and social, micro- and macrocosm, that introduces so much complexity and confusion. Godwin frequently seeks to address such uncomfortable realities, but I'm still left feeling there's an almost irresolvable paradox locked in there somewhere. But, and as other reviewers point out, at least he's thinking about these knotty issues, and not just catching up - as most people in our culture seem to be - on the footie, or Eastenders - that old 'panem et circenses' (bread and circuses) chestnut, or even 'opium for the masses'. Chomsky is a contemporary heir to this line of reasoning, with his ideas of 'manufactured consent', and I've been fascinated with his stance without necessarily entirely sharing or even understanding or agreeing with it.Reading this book - and I'm only about halfway through at present - reminds me of the eager younger man I once was (an eager young man who even interviewed Chomsky, for a putative magazine that never was). But it also makes me think how sad it is that such material isn't more commonly part of our intellectual lives and our socio-political inheritance. I don't know what I'll make of it all once I've finished it, but I do know that I'm loving reading it, and that it is, for all its age, a fascinating journey through ideas that are every bit as relevant to how we live now as they ever were. The Better Angels of Our NatureFar from the Madding Crowd

The publication of this edition is most welcome simply because this work has not been available in an affordable modern edition since the 1970s Penguin edition went out of print. As the new introduction explains, Political Justice is a very important element of the British political-philosophical debate in the wake of the French revolution that included the better-remembered contributions of Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft. It is to students of British politics and political thought in that era that Mark Philp’s introduction is chiefly addressed.This is not really the place for a sustained engagement with the arguments of the text, but it is fair to say that it is not without its flaws. Like much of the later philosophical anarchism it helped to inspire, Godwin’s work probably is too optimistic about the progress of human reason. Even if it verges on the utopian in this respect, the argument still serves another useful purpose: to question what it is that legitimizes all forms of authority (law, morality, the state), and to raise troubling questions about the duties of individuals in a society towards others. Clearly such questions remain of compelling significance in our society, and they remain in want of satisfactory answers. Godwin, too, has few neat solutions to offer; all the same, even more than 200 years on, his work can help us to see these questions from new, challenging and illuminating angles. In the grand scheme of things, that is about as much as one can hope to get from a text of this kind.

Political philosophy interests me, but beyond some undergraduate classes, I've never really really continued my study in any rigorous way. Though I don't make the media mistake of demonising anarchists as little better than wreckers (they might not use exactly that language, but it still has a curiously five-year-plan era Stalin feel to it, which is a bit of a headcrash!), I'm really not well acquainted with political anarchism, beyond a basic understanding of it as an ideal which rejects hierarchical systems. This, naturally, includes governments, but also regards capitalism as an oppressive system, so yah boo all y'all libertarians who claim to be freedom loving.The book itself is well presented and edited and certainly presents an interesting contribution to anarchism. From that point of view, it's worth your money. I'd imagine that anyone buying this is probably interested in the subject, anyway, but this kind of thing does invite multiple editions.As a work, I'm not sure how successful it is. It's apparently a little known work these days (my own ignorance not withstanding). I think there's a good reason for this. This book, especially as an early work on anarchism and one criticising things such as the state, which isn't as much of a default as you'd think, is necessarily patchy. I think this work is interesting more as an historical curiosity than a work on anarchism which will continue to be read.So, I recommend it, but I think this is more something which has inspired me to seek out better writers on the subject.

William Godwin was an English political philosopher, considered one of the first exponents of utilitarianism and philosophical anarchism. He featured prominently in the radical circles of London in the late eighteenth century and was famous for, among other things, marrying the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft (with whom he had a daughter, Mary Shelley - she of Frankenstein fame). Godwin's most enduring work, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice was his famous critique of political institutions, published in 1793. And despite the turmoil of those times, French revolution and the rest, Political Justice outlines a kind of teleological vision of mankind in which humanity inevitably progresses; this notion having an enormous influence on the Romantic movement at the time. But Godwin's vision goes further than Enlightenment; his view of human perfectibility can be said to be a nod to `anarchism' in so far he views government and related practices such as property, marriage and monarchy as restraining the progress of mankind. Regardless, the belief emanating from these pages is that change does come, and comes gradually and without any need for violent revolution... cannon fodder for those like Malthus, who decried Godwin's brand of unachieveable utopianism. A fascinating work of political philosophy.