Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1890 edition. Excerpt: ... GODWIN'S "POLITICAL JUSTICE. A Reprint of the Essay on Property. INTRODUCTORY NOTE. It is now close on a hundred years since the world was startled by the appearance of a book which, both by the significance of its title and the strangeness of its conclusions, was well calculated to arrest the attention--friendly or hostile, as the case might be--of every reader into whose hands it might fall. It is difficult for us, who live in a less speculative and sanguine age, to realize the keen interest which attached to the publication, in 1793, of William Godwin's Political Justice, at a crisis when men's minds were strung to a high pitch of expectant enthusiasm by the thrill of excitement of which the French Revolution was the cause; but the testimony of contemporary authors, whatever their personal sympathies might be, is explicit on this point. "No work in our time," says Hazlitt, "gave such a blow to B the philosophical mind of the country as Godwin's celebrated Enquiry concerning Political Justice. Tom Paine was considered for the time as a Tom Fool to him; Paley an old woman; Edmund Burke a flashy sophist. Truth, moral truth, it was supposed, had here taken up its abode, and these were the oracles of thought." "Burn your books of chemistry," was Wordsworth's advice to a student, " and read Godwin on Necessity." "Faulty as it is in many parts," wrote Southey, "there is a mass of truth in it that must make every man think." We are told by De Quincey that Godwin's book " carried one single shock into the bosom of English society, fearful but momentary." "In the quarto," he adds, --" that is, the original edition of his Political Justice, --Mr. Godwin advanced against thrones and dominations, powers and principalities, with the air of some Titan...
