Radical Enlightenment and Antimodernism: The Apostasy of William Godwin (1756–1836)

In 1799, with conservative reaction to the principles and activity of the French Revolution at its height, the English radical intellectual William Godwin published the historical novel St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century. The novel’s protagonist, Reginald de St. Leon, a young French nobleman, attains possession of the magical and alchemical secrets of immortality and exhaustless wealth, which he employs to benefit his family and the wider community. Despite his best intentions, however, St. Leon discovers that his powers only effect the estrangement of his family and his persecution by, and alienation from, society at large. This article contends that the novel represents Godwin’s rejection of the sufficiency of modern, scientific rationalism as a guide to, and guarantee of, the radically renewed social and political order he and other progressives of the late eighteenth century pursued. At the same time, Godwin’s disillusionment with Reason did not translate into a rejection of the desirability of radical change.

Six years before the publication of St. Leon Godwin had achieved extensive fame as the author of the anarchist Enquiry Concerning Political Justice¹, a work briefly regarded as the most insightful intervention in the debate on the French Revolution. Godwin asserted that individuals possessed the fundamental right and duty to judge and act according to the dictates of their own reason apart from the determinations of government, law, tradition, emotion and social pressure. Godwin argued that such “independence” (to use his preferred term) is the defining human quality and the only guarantee of progress.² Charles Taylor has demonstrated the extent to which modern conceptions of individuality and selfhood are indebted to a Cartesian and Lockean “ideal of the disengaged self.” Such a self is defined by its capacity to objectify and utilize all that is extrinsic to itself conceived as rational essence or will.³ In Political Justice Godwin provided perhaps the most emphatic and unqualified iteration of this crucial version of modern identity, assuming an ideal self radically disengaged from historical, experiential, social and somatic externalities.⁴ This was exemplified paradigmatically and notoriously in the Fénelon Fire Case, wherein he argued that one ought to be prepared to sacrifice beloved family members to the dictates of reason and broader social utility.⁵ Though Political Justice was generally well-reviewed⁶, war with France and growing fear of the imperialistic expansion of French Revolutionary principles—or Jacobinism—conspired rapidly to swing public opinion in a more conservative direction. As the foremost proponent of the radical “New Philosophy,” Godwin was increasingly vilified in the public imagination as a “Jacobin monster,” condemned as much for his apparently heartless rejection of instinctive domestic attachments as for his political radicalism and implicit atheism.⁷ A veritable subgenre of anti-Jacobin literature emerged with its sights fixed firmly on Godwin and “Modern Philosophy.”⁸

Such reaction cannot, however, be unproblematically termed antimodernist. There were, as Gertrude Himmelfarb has recently demonstrated, a number of “roads to modernity.” Himmelfarb helpfully distinguishes the French, American, and British Enlightenments in terms of their respective privileging of reason, political liberty, and the social affections.⁹ The many eighteenth-century paths to our modern condition were for Godwin’s contemporaries definitive instances of consciously embraced or rejected modernities. While writers could at times denigrate “modern philosophy” and even “enlightenment” itself, they did so by opposing alternative modernities and enlightenments.¹⁰ The eighteenth-century British intellectuals lionized by Himmelfarb were certainly convinced of their location in, and contribution, to a modern age and ethos.¹¹

It was in the 1790s—and in direct response to “French principles” and the French Revolution—that British “radicalism” in its various forms has been said to have emerged.¹² Such radicals can generally be characterized as those who favored reform of institutions in accordance with the dictates of abstract rights and rational principles rather than by appeal to precedent and tradition.¹³ Yet although encouraged by events in France, British radicalism possessed its own indigenous intellectual dynamic. For this and other reasons, Himmelfarb’s “French” Enlightenment with its dominant “ideology of reason,”^14...