Enlightenment & Revolutions
William Godwin
1756–1836 · Philosophical anarchism
Government is force, and force makes men worse.
In their words
“Government is a scheme for making men virtuous by force; and it is the nature of force to make men worse instead of better.”
Godwin wrote the first systematic case that society can hold together without a state, at the height of the French Revolution's terror, and refused to trim it. Political Justice argued that people improve through reason and discussion, and that law, punishment and property teach them to obey rather than to think. He was married to Mary Wollstonecraft and survived her, raising the daughter who wrote Frankenstein.
Why it matters for freedom
He was the first to argue that a stateless society is not chaos but the next step of moral progress.
Who they stood against
the English crown, its courts, and the reformers who wanted a bigger parliament instead of less power