Some Versions of Equality in Godwin

Abstract

Some Versions of Equality in Godwin Samuel Rowe (bio) In an essay published in 1797 as part of The Enquirer, William Godwin offers a clarion call for egalitarianism: "Thus much is certain, that a state of cultivated equality, is that state which, in speculation and theory, appears most consonant with the nature of man, and most conducive to the extensive diffusion of felicity." 1 This sentence, with its double, conjoined objects, hesitates between two statements about why people should be equal. A state of equality may be desirable because equality is natural for humankind, or it may be desirable because equality diffuses happiness more widely than other states. This stylistic hesitation, in presenting two distinct cases for equality, is also a hesitation between two intellectual and political paradigms, a hesitation that Godwin makes repeatedly in his celebrated writings from the first half of the revolutionary decade: An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) and Things as They Are, or the Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794). Godwin merits revisiting at a moment of intense interest in economic and social inequality in the social sciences, when ambitious new macroeconomic theories and global histories reaching back to the Stone Age are reshaping the debate. On one hand, economic historians—prominently, if from different ideological perspectives, Thomas Piketty and Walter Scheidel—have argued that modern economies tend in the long run toward high equilibrium inequality.2 On the other hand, trends in archeology—as summarized in James Scott's recent work—are converging on an account of species history in which relatively egalitarian hunter-gatherer and pastoral societies are the historical norm and the steep inequalities introduced by the appearance of states five thousand years ago the exception.3 The picture that emerges, viewed in its broad outlines, is an ambiguous one: obdurate inequality in the long run for human societies, egalitarianism in the very long run for the human species. Though these discussions are taking shape in the context of faltering welfare states and rising Gini coefficients, they also constitute a return to central Enlightenment questions: do human groups tend toward equality or inequality, [End Page 473] and should we have a normative preference for either condition? The new answers to these questions echo the old. On one hand, the neo-Platonic "great chain of being" so beloved by eighteenth-century thinkers was a powerful intellectual tool that placed hierarchy in the very fabric of being.4 On the other, state of nature theory, one of the Enlightenment's great conceptual innovations, assumed naturally occurring equality among persons and viewed latter-day deviation from this state as a puzzle that required explanation. As the intellectual historian Siep Stuurman has argued, the European Enlightenment, or at least its radical wing, championed an account of "natural equality," or an equality existing "among all human beings on the sole grounds of their humanity."5 According to Stuurman, though the Enlightenment gave birth to new ways of excusing inequality among individuals and groups—political economy, biological-determinist accounts of gender and race, stadial theories of history—these discourses were subject to the new demand that they be reconcilable with universalist and egalitarian assumptions. This essay tries to broach the question of what eighteenth-century studies has to offer to the new debates about equality and inequality via a case study of Godwin's early political thought and fiction. As "equality" made its debut as a central element within reformist and revolutionary political programs, the word did not carry just one meaning. Rather, multiple political and intellectual programs laid claim to the term, carrying with them profoundly different understandings of what equality was and how one might foster it. As the Godwin scholar Mark Philp has argued, the ideology of the British radical reform movement of the 1790s was "fragmented," inhabited by a variety of tendencies and interest groups.6 In the case of equality, this fragmentation extends into the usage of a single concept. At a moment when key political and intellectual debates continue to turn on precisely the content of "equality"—as distributive or relational, attached to opportunity or to outcomes, essential or irrelevant to democracy—the protean role of the term in early radical reformism seems...