"Ruinous Mixture": Godwin, Enclosure and the Associated Self.(Critical Essay)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-DEC-00

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The subject of property is the key-stone that completes the fabric of political justice.

--William Godwin, Political Justice (2.420)

The purpose ... of early instruction is not absolute. It is of less importance, generally speaking, that a child should acquire this or that species of knowledge, than that, through the medium of instruction, he should acquire habits of intellectual activity. It is not so much for the direct consideration of what he learns, that his mind not be suffered to lie idle. The preceptor in this respect is like the incloser of uncultivated land; his first crops are not valued for their intrinsic excellence; they are sown that the land may be brought into order. The springs of the mind, like the joints of the body, are apt to grow stiff for want of employment. They must be exercised in various directions and with unabating perseverance. In a word, the first lesson of a judicious education is, Learn to think, to discriminate, to remember and to inquire.

--William Godwin, The Enquirer(1)

ONE OF THE MOST FREQUENTLY CITED JUDGMENTS OF GODWIN'S WORK and of his place in the British radical tradition of the 1790's is William Hazlitt's claim, in The Spirit of the Age, that "no one was more talked of, more looked up to, more sought after, and wherever liberty, truth, justice was the theme, his name was not far off." "Tom Paine," he continued, "was as a Tom Fool to him, Paley an old woman, Burke a flashy sophist."(2) Godwin has rarely fared so well since that time. Marilyn Butler's account, in her "Introductory Essay" to Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy is a bit more reserved: "[n]o other production of the pamphlet war achieved the impact or the notoriety of Paine's Rights of Man," but coupled with it, Political Justice, she argues, remains one of the most significant publications of the era.(3) Much of the critical debate about Godwin's work focuses on just this question: what is his place in the radical tradition? Most studies rightly pay particular attention to his (rather critical) relationship with the leaders of the political association movement as a central context for his work. But readers--in our day as in Godwin's--have been quite divided on the question of Godwin's commitment to revolutionary principles.(4)

Mark Philp has made a compelling argument that E. P. Thompson's critique that Godwin was not seriously engaged in radical political action (which he takes more seriously than as a merely polemical use of Godwin to make his case against contemporary Marxists) "mis-characterises Godwinism" (228). And Butler has called attention to Godwin's great "courage" during the repressive years from 1792-94 in defending radicals accused of treason and criticizing all forms of government.(5) Philp argues that Godwin and his circle, who played a pivotal role in the development and testing of the premises of Political Justice, sought to "transform a theoretical discourse based on private judgment into a practical reality." He also asserts that Godwin's readers--in particular his immediate circle of Rational Dissenters--would have recognized that private judgment involved a duty to act (228-30). Indeed, Philp goes so far as to say that this context (of Godwin's close circle) makes his much mocked optimism about the eventual withering away of government as individuals govern themselves by the dictates of reason and mutual correction intellectually defensible and "empirically grounded." This group, Philp argues, actually practiced the kind of rationally "self-regulating and cohesive" mutual self-government Godwin advocated (96-98; 170-74).

Since Philp's influential argument articulates the grounding of Godwin's conception of private judgment which I take as my subject, it merits a brief discussion here. Philp argues that Godwin owes his central belief in the "sanctity of private judgment" to the tradition of Rational Dissent.(6)

Godwin was not simply aware of this tradition, but was, more crucially, steeped in its intellectual heritage and practically involved in its social circles. Godwin's debt to :Rational Dissent also helps explain his popular success with Political Justice, since it was Rational Dissenters who organised the earliest demands for reform and who provided many of the pamphleteers and much of the ideology for the radicals' platform.(7) (10)

The issue of private judgment was important to this tradition because it afforded grounds for contesting the Test and Corporation Acts which excluded them from political participation on the basis of their religious beliefs. Thus, while Thompson argues that Godwin's anarchism serves the cause of totalitarianism, Godwin advocated an anarchist agenda in order to stave off the encroachment of totalitarianism. And Philp is right to argue that Godwin tests all other proposals for political reform against the sanctity of private judgment.

But it is not my purpose to support Philp's--or any other--defense of Godwin's consistent radicalism throughout the 1790's. Rather, in this essay, I seek to explain the nature of Godwin's ambivalent place in the radical tradition. In the process, I will attempt to explain what I take to be the crux of the debate: the radical individualism, in particular the sacred sphere of private judgment he opposed to any form of collective activity, whether institutional reform or revolutionary agitation on the part of political societies. A specific instance of this is his ambivalent (in terms of the radical tradition) view of property as simultaneously a "common stock" upon which all have an equally valid title to draw and a sacred "palladium" which only the exclusive owner can control.(8) The core of my argument will be that Godwin draws his notion of human nature from historically-bound definitions of property.

In this argument, I turn on its head Godwin's claim that the right to private property "flows from the very nature of man." While Godwin argues that the right to property is "founded" on the "right of private judgment" which "flows from the very nature of man" (2.169-70), I will argue that this argument runs counter to his notion that private property "unavoidably suggests some species of law" to guarantee it (2.439). To be more specific, I argue that Godwin's defense of the "sacred" and "essential" "sphere" surrounding the self (1.170, 1.257), which is necessary to protect it from being "resolved ... into the common mass" (1.289), draws upon the conceptual framework which informs the rhetoric of the Enclosure Movement. In particular, I note his argument that cutting off the individual from the "common mass" is necessary for "improvement"--another term for enclosure.(9) I will argue, then, that Godwin is best understood, not as the defender of "the reason of State," the genuine radical, nor as the lapsed radical, but as fundamentally ambivalent about the reform movement. Philp is right to argue that while "Godwin had radical sympathies," his work aimed to explore, not espouse, these principles (75). In doing so, I take my lead from John Thelwall who, in his Tribune (1796), recognized this ambivalence at the core of Political Justice:

nothing is more remarkable titan that it should at once recommend the most extensive plan of freedom and innovation ever discussed by any writer in the English language, and reprobate every measure from which even the most moderate reform can be rationally expected. (qtd. in Philp 196)

Part of his "extensive plan of freedom" involved the socialization of the self and (ideally) property and the rejection of all restraints on individual liberty; his "reprobation," I argue, stems from this same defense of private judgment, which can be said to serve the conservative interests of the powers that be.

1. The Subject of the Commons

Political associations came of age in the latter part of the eighteenth century in response to the upheavals wrought by the industrial revolution.(10) Associations were contesting the state's efforts to regulate subjectivities. Albert Goodwin recounts that in 1790 in the industrial center of Sheffield, for example, "the master scissorsmiths," apprehensive of the collective power of striking scissor grinders, "called a general meeting of the town's merchants and manufacturers `to oppose the unlawful combinations of the scissor grinders and the combinations of all other workmen.'"(11) The same anxiety about the collective strength of the poor which led the Sheffield city leaders to oppose combinations also led to attempts to eradicate collective landholding arrangements by enclosing the commons. Following the passage of the Private Enclosure Act of 6 June 1791, in which 6,000 acres of commons were redistributed among: the wealthy "local land-holders, titheowners and large freeholders," an angry mob, comprising both peasants and industrial laborers, rioted, threatening to destroy "the lives and properties of the freeholders who had approved the enclosure" (164-67). The fact that the mob opposing enclosure included industrial laborers as well as peasant farmers whose land was being appropriated reveals the close connections between enclosure and industrial capitalism. Sayer and Corrigan make the connection between enclosure, capitalism, and subjectivity in this period more explicit.

But the great catastrophe which above all pervades the eighteenth century is the acceleration of that great "freeing" of labour (and thus making of labour-power) that divides wage-labouring from generalized poverty; the long movement from service to employment, from provision to production/consumption, from political theatre to the individualism ... of the vote: enclosures. (96)

As Marx argues, enclosure ensures that workers, expropriated from their means of subsistence, are thrust into relations of dependence on the capitalists.(12)

Goodwin goes on to relate that the response of the commoners and laborers also took forms more organized and intellectual than rioting. "When `5 or 6 Mechanicks' began to meet ... to discuss `the enormous high prices of Provisions,'" they initiated the creation of political societies, associations, for the (self-) education of the working classes (166). They attempted, in the words of one charter, "to persuade their benighted brethren to defend themselves against private and public exploitation by the assertion of their natural rights" (qtd. in Goodwin 167). Political societies provided laborers with an organized forum--an institution--to exert influence on the opinions of their fellow laborers, and by extension, on society at large. Godwin opposes political associations on just this account. The "interference of an organized society" to influence "opinion" is "pernicious" (2.228). "[E]ach man must be taught to enquire and think for himself," uninfluenced by either "sympathy or coercion," guided only by "reason." The "creeds" of political associations, on the other hand, encourage "each man to identify his creed with that of his neighbour" (1.288). He goes on to argue that sympathy, like a disease, is especially contagious among undisciplined laborers: "While the sympathy of opinion catches from man to man, especially among persons whose passions have been little used to the curb of judgment, actions may be determined upon, which the solitary reflections of all would have rejected" (1.294). Like the unenclosed commons, sympathy threatens the distinctions upon which general improvement is predicated: the "mind of one man is essentially distinct from the mind of another. If each do not preserve his individuality, the judgment of all will be feeble, and the progress of our common understanding inexpressibly retarded" (1.236).

1790, the year the Sheffield master scissorsmiths moved to outlaw the combinations of "grinders" and "workmen," was also the year in which Edmund Burke published his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Burke reserved his greatest hostility--and fear--for the "confusion" of the "swinish multitude" (314). Reflections reveals the extent to which concerns about the collective power of the masses, the upheavals of the industrial revolution, and anxiety about the French Revolution are intertwined. The "French Revolution," he argues, was brought about "by means the most absurd and ridiculous ... by the most contemptible instruments. Every thing seems out of nature in this strange chaos of levity and ferocity, and all sorts of crimes jumbled together with all sorts of follies." And further, it is a "monstrous tragi-comic scene, the most opposite passions necessarily succeed, and sometimes mix with each other in the mind; alternate contempt and indignation; alternate...

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