Godwin from "Metaphysician" to Novelist: "Political Justice", "Caleb Williams", and the Tension between Philosophical Argument and Narrative

Abstract

To William Hazlitt, the publication of William Godwin's novel Caleb Williams in 1794, only a year after Godwin had published his philosophical treatise An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, was something unprecedented: It was a new and startling event in literary history, Hazlitt wrote, for a metaphysician to write a popular romance.' What was remarkable was not just that a single person would write books in two such different modes but that the novel would clearly follow up the philosophical program expounded in the treatise. There may be no other case as prominent in which a novel succeeds a philosophical treatise so closely in time, is so closely connected to its concerns, and yet is so unprogrammatic. Accordingly, a number of critics have explored the relations between Caleb Williams and Political Justice, especially the complex ways in which the novel, while sharing and pursuing many of the political and philosophical positions of Political Justice, diverges from them. Yet there has been little discussion of what is arguably the central point of Hazlitt's comment: the difference in form between a narrative and a philosophical argument. Much of the incompatibility between Political Justice and Caleb Williams can be seen as arising from the conflict between the austerely logical approach of Political Justice and the narrative account of Caleb Williams. Political Justice proceeds as if proper (largely utilitarian) principles will enable us to make moral and political choices almost mathematically, as if we will be able to judge situations and persons in a straightforward way; it avoids narrative thinking. But Caleb Williams shows that situations and persons are understood by way of narratives, and (unlike Godwin's next novel, St. Leon [1799]) it emphasizes the problems inherent in