Burke, Godwin, and the Politics of Honor

Recently, Kwame Anthony Appiah claimed, “We may think we have finished with honor, but honor isn’t finished with us.” With Appiah in mind, this essay explores honor as a central ethic of modernity by situating it within William Godwin’s late eighteenth-century masterpiece Caleb Williams, a novel whose protagonist is both attracted to and repelled by chivalric honor and its role in public life. The novel, it is argued, stages a cultural battle in the 1790s between two contrasting versions of honor: an ethos rooted in sentimentalism to which even the most rational subject must acquiesce (as described by Edmund Burke) and a staid virtue of collective dignity—one that presupposes by nearly a century the concept of public solidarity.