William Godwin

Godwin was an eighteenth-century radical writer and journalist and one of the leading participants in the debates sparked by the French Revolution. An ally of Tom Paine, he was also a critic of Edmund Burke, the Whig-cum-conservative author of Reflections on the Revolution in France. Godwin shared Burke’s abhorrence of The Terror but wholly rejected his glowing defence of aristocracy. At first enthusiastic about the Revolution, Godwin made two lasting interventions into revolutionary debates, the theoretical treatise Political Justice and the novel Caleb Williams......