george wasington

George Washington is rightly known as “the father of his country.” No figure had a more central role during the American Revolution and early national period. Even after his death he remained the preeminent embodiment of national character. To understand the trajectory of Washington’s career is to understand that of early American history.

EARLY YEARS
Washington was born 22 February 1732, the son of a wealthy Virginia planter. He received irregular schooling from the ages of seven to fifteen. His father died when he was only eleven, and he became the ward of his half-brother Lawrence, who was married to Anne Fairfax. The Fairfax family was one of the wealthiest and most influential in early Virginia, and young Washington benefited from their patronage. Washington’s early years were spent as a surveyor, a profession that kindled his enduring interest in George Washington.

Washington eventually became the heir to Lawrence’s estate, including Mount Vernon, which would serve as Washington’s lifelong home; his inheritance made him one of the wealthiest planters in Virginia. In 1759 he added significantly to his holdings when he married the wealthy widow Martha Dandridge. The couple did not have children. Washington spent his early life as a very successful planter. He was an assiduous caretaker of his own property, often experimenting with new farming techniques. Over time, Washington shifted his farm production from tobacco to wheat, which helped save him from the crippling debt that affected so many other Virginia planters. He served in a number of local offices as well as in the Virginia House of Burgesses.

In contrast to many other Virginians, Washington, though a slaveholder, eventually charted what was a somewhat progressive path for his time. Despite eventually having more slaves than he could productively employ and their upkeep added to his expenses, he refused to sell his slaves because he did not want to break up slave families. In his will, he stipulated that all of his slaves (with the exception of his wife’s dower slaves) were to be freed upon his wife’s death.

Washington gained military experience during the French and Indian War (1754–1763). He served in a number of posts, including as British General Edward Braddock’s aide-de-camp; his coolness, bravery, and resourcefulness when Braddock’s force was ambushed gained him the confidence of his fellow Virginians. He was eventually appointed commander in chief of all of Virginia’s troops during the conflict. After the war he resigned his commission. He retired once again to life as a planter and seemed likely to finish his life as a wealthy, respected Virginia gentleman. The looming imperial crisis would change all of that and make Washington one of the most famous figures in the Western world.

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
After Washington resigned his commission during the French and Indian War, he tried to get a regular commission in the British army. If he had been successful, the course of the future nation would likely have been substantially different. His attempt reflected the common aspirations of elite provincial Americans for acceptance among the elite of British society. The unwillingness of British gentlemen to give their American cousins what Americans felt was their due helped sow resentments that eventually led people like Washington to choose the path of resistance. Washington quickly showed himself to be an ardent Patriot. He was chosen to be a Virginia delegate to both the First and Second Continental Congresses and, in 1775, was chosen commander in chief of the Continental Army. His appointment was, in part, due to bargaining with the delegates from New England, who were willing to give the honor of command to a Virginian so as to tie that powerful colony firmly to the cause of Revolution, most of the burden of which New England had borne up to that point.

Washington accepted the appointment and rode north to oppose the British forces that had gathered at Boston. Washington was not a superior tactician; if judged solely by his performance on the battlefield, he was a mediocre general. He showed daring and élan with his nighttime crossing of the Delaware and his surprise attacks and victories at Trenton and Princeton, and his decisive plan to capture Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown was a model piece of strategy. But he also blundered repeatedly, most severely during the Battle of New York in 1776. He divided his force in the face of superior numbers and almost allowed his army to be trapped by the British navy.

Washington’s greatness lay not in his tactical brilliance but in his strength of character, which was largely responsible for holding the army together. As long as Washington could keep a viable army in the field, the Americans were, in some sense, winning the war. Washington did just that, despite tremendous challenges. His original recruits were raw, untrained colonials who often signed up for short enlistments, yet he managed to create a disciplined fighting force, even though his army was rarely supplied with the food and equipment it needed. It was said that, during the winter, you could follow the path of the army by the bloody footprints left by shoeless feet.

The Continental Congress not only failed to supply him adequately but frequently complained about his generalship. Subordinates made at least two attempts to displace him. Through his adroit management, he also managed to prevent a mutiny at the end of the war by disillusioned and discouraged officers. Despite all of these difficulties, Washington persevered and, by doing so, brought the army to eventual victory. After the Treaty of Paris had been signed in 1783, officially ending the war, Washington rode to Annapolis, Maryland, and, appearing before the  ontinental
Congress, resigned his commission. Echoing Cincinnatus, the Roman general who did not attempt to seize power but returned to his farm after leading his army to victory, Washington’s gesture gained him immeasurable fame and admiration. That act alone increased his prestige as much as anything else he did in his lifetime.

PRESIDENCY
Washington knew that the work of the Revolution was unfinished. His personal experiences under the Articles of Confederation convinced him that a stronger union was the only safeguard for the future of the nation. But he himself did not expect to take part in this work. After pledging to retire from public life, he did just that and returned to Mount Vernon to repair his fortunes, which had been severely damaged by the war. But the 1780s proved a turbulent and difficult time for the new nation. At the behest of several friends, Washington eventually agreed to take part in the constitutional convention at Philadelphia. When he arrived, he was quickly elected president of the proceedings. Although he played almost no part in the debates, his silent presence played an essential role in the eventual shape of the government.

Everyone expected Washington to be the first president, and thus the delegates were willing to give the office powers that they would never have bestowed on another man. In addition, his prestige was essential to the eventual ratification of the Constitution. Although many were frightened by the additional powers being given to a central government only a few short years after concluding a war against another centralized power, a great many of those people trusted Washington to pursue a moderate course. After the document was ratified, Washington was unanimously elected to the presidency and, as he traveled north to New York City, was met by cheering crowds along the way. When he arrived, he and others had to invent a new government almost from whole cloth. The Constitution is remarkable for its brevity, and many of the crucial details of governing had to be established.

One of Washington’s first tasks was establishing what sort of tone he would take as president. No one was certain how a chief executive should be treated in a republican government. He was not a king, but neither was he a common man. Washington eschewed some of the trappings of high office: he expressed a preference for a simple title, “Mr. President,” rather than some of the elaborate titles proposed. But he limited his availability to the public to weekly receptions. He also wore a sword and rode in a carriage and four. He attempted to establish a proper sense of dignity for the office; but some began to whisper against him, seeing his actions as signs of creeping royalism.

During his two terms (1789–1797), although Washington tried to keep himself above partisan disputes, he leaned more and more heavily to the side of the Federalists, supporters of the administration who advocated a stronger central government and a more deferential society, as well as a foreign policy that favored Great Britain. He backed Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton’s financial plans, including the assumption of state debts and the creation of a national bank. He insisted on neutrality when war broke out between Great Britain and the newly republican France despite America’s original treaty with France (1778), which had promised perpetual alliance. These actions and others earned him the enmity of the Republican Party, which had emerged in opposition to the Federalists. He found himself the butt of vicious partisan attack in the newspapers. For someone who considered himself above party, who longed for retirement, and who worried constantly about his reputation, this partisan controversy was galling.

Even after retiring to private life, Washington was called on one more time to be commander in chief of the provisional army in case of a possible war with France, although in the end war was avoided. He died on 14 December 1799, an appropriate date for a man who was so thoroughly of the eighteenth century.

NATIONAL SYMBOL
After his death, Washington’s symbolic importance to the nation remained. Freed from the partisan bickering that had dogged his final years, he quickly became not just father to his country but a role model for its people. During his lifetime, Washington unavoidably became entangled in the nation’s political divisions; but Washington as symbol served a unifying role. No one played a more important role in refashioning his character to fit the new political realities than Mason Locke Weems, an itinerant preacher and bookseller—and inventor of the story of young George Washington and the cherry tree—who wrote the astoundingly popular Life of Washington. Weems remade Washington as a common man who could serve as a proper role model for the nation, and this formulation provided the grounds for future generations’ veneration. Throughout the history of the United States, Washington has continued to serve as a symbol for the nation and its ideals. Although his eighteenth-century manner now seems stiff and foreign to us, he remains the symbolic father of his country, the indispensable man.

Joseph Stalin (Josif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili) (1879–1953) Soviet dictator

The future dictator of the Soviet Union was born Josif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili to illiterate peasant parents in Georgia in the southern Caucuses. Some historians have attributed his tyrannical temperament to the frequent beatings he received from his father when he was growing up. His mother encouraged him to become a priest in the Russian Orthodox Church, and he studied for the priesthood until he was almost 20. However, he fell under the sway of Karl Marx rather than God, and he was expelled from the seminary in 1899. He then became involved in the socialist underground, distributing Marxist propaganda and serving as a labor agitator. Dzhugashvili was arrested by the czarist police in 1903 and sentenced to imprisonment in Siberia, but he was back in Georgia within a year. When the Social Democrats split into two factions (Mensheviks and Bolsheviks), he joined the more militant Bolsheviks under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin. In 1908 he was arrested again and sent into exile but managed to escape. The next several years were marked by other arrests, narrow escapes, and secret trips abroad on behalf of Lenin to raise support for the Bolsheviks. During this period Dzhugashvili assumed the pseudonym Stalin (meaning “man of steel”) and was elevated by Lenin to the Central Committee, the highest body of the Bolshevik Party (later the Communist Party).

In 1913 Stalin was again arrested and again exiled to Siberia, to be freed only when the monarchy was toppled by revolution in 1917. He then established a base in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) and became editor of Pravda, the Communist Party’s mouthpiece. In 1919 he was elected a member of the Politburo, the Communist Party’s most important decision-making body. He also became head of the Commissariat for Nationality Affairs, a position that was of crucial importance because the new Soviet regime was struggling to maintain control over the country’s disparate ethnic groups and nationalities in the midst of civil war, which lasted from 1918 to 1921. Stalin was directly involved in planning military strategy against counterrevolutionary forces—the Whites—as well as against Polish forces in the war between Russia and Poland (1920–21). His decisions were disastrous and put him at loggerheads with Leon Trotsky, the commissar of war and heir apparent to Lenin.

After the Communist victory, Stalin quietly built up organizational strength. In 1923 he was elected general secretary of the Communist Party, a position he used as his power base. Lenin, who was seriously ill at this point, was beginning to harbor deep misgivings and wrote a “testament” in which he cautioned against allowing Stalin to succeed him. But Stalin continued his inexorable rise to power after Lenin’s death in 1924. For the next few years he was obliged to outmaneuver a number of rivals, including Nikolai Bukharin, Lev Kamenev, and Grigory Zinovyev. But it was only after he had succeeded in marginalizing Trotsky, Stalin (left) with top Soviet leader Sergey Kirov (later assassinated) (Library of Congress) who was forced into exile, that he was able to secure uncontested power. (Trotsky was assassinated on Stalin’s orders in Mexico City in 1940.) Thereafter, from 1928 until his death in 1953, Stalin was effectively in complete control over the party and the country.

With the economy in a state of decline, Stalin abandoned Lenin’s New Economic Policy, which allowed some free-market commerce, in favor of a policy of collectivization of the agricultural sector to raise output and bolster efficiency. Although the policy was promoted as a boon to peasants, it was vigorously resisted by small farmers, known as kulaks, who were now being called upon to sacrifice their land and become members of a collective farm. The new policy threatened not only their livelihood but a traditional way of life that had endured for generations. Stalin forcibly suppressed opposition, characterizing the kulaks as capitalist parasites and using special Shock Brigades to bring them to heel. The kulaks were either shot or sent to Siberia.

Between 1929 and 1933, as collectivization was being carried out, millions of people lost their lives—5 million in the Ukraine alone, according to some estimates—mostly on account of a famine that resulted from the massive disruption to agricultural production. At the same time, Stalin moved rapidly to industrialize Russia—regarded as one of the poorest nations in Europe before 1914—introducing a succession of five-year plans. The ramped-up production levels did yield extraordinary gains that exceeded Germany’s pace of industrialization in the 19th century and Japan’s earlier in the 20th century. To subsidize this ambitious program, Stalin relied to a great degree on wealth he appropriated from the people. However ruthless his regime, he is also credited with improving the health of the Soviet populace with aggressive immunization campaigns against typhus, cholera, and malaria and improving and expanding the educational system. In the early 1930s Stalin consolidated absolute power by carrying out purges of political opponents, real or imagined— among them many old Bolsheviks. Between 1936 and 1937—a period known as the Great Terror—several once-powerful Communist Party officials were convicted in “show trials” and either shot or sent to the GULAG—the camps in Siberia and elsewhere. There were four major purge trials during these years: the Trial of the Sixteen; the Trial of the Seventeen; the Trial of the Red Army Generals; and finally, in March 1938, the Trial of the Twenty-One.

The KGB, the successor to the NKVD (the Soviet secret police under Stalin), estimated that 681,692 people were shot between 1937 and 1938, although this figure might be an undercount. Millions of people were arrested, often in the dead of night, on the basis of trumped-up charges or none at all. (Historians are divided as to how many million victims there actually were, with estimates ranging from eight to 20 million; some put the number as high as 50 million.)

Stalin is thought to have personally signed as many as 40,000 death warrants of political opponents. For all his cunning, Stalin appears to have been taken in by Adolf HITLER’s assurances that the Germans had no territorial designs on the Soviet Union. In 1939 he agreed to a nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), which also contained a secret appendix that carved up Poland between the Soviet Union and Germany and allowed the USSR a free hand in the Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. In 1940 Stalin effectively decapitated the Polish leadership, ordering the execution of thousands of Polish officers in Katyn Forest after they had been captured by the Red Army, which had seized its share of the country under the terms of the nonaggression pact. The Kremlin later tried to cover up responsibility and laid the blame on the Germans for the atrocity.

In 1941 the Germans, taking Stalin by surprise, launched Operation Barbarosa, the code name for their invasion of the Soviet Union. Initially Germany scored major gains. The Red Army was at a disadvantage because its leadership had been crippled by Stalin after he had purged so many of his top generals. There is no doubt that the Soviets suffered the most during World War II and yet were responsible in large part for Germany’s ultimate defeat. Approximately 22 million people (13 percent of the Soviet population)—7 million of them civilians—were killed in the war. Ironically, German aggression united the Soviet people behind Stalin against a common invader, even after so many years of misrule. Stalin cleverly played the nationalist card, downplaying ideology, to mobilize resistance to the invader. The 1943 surrender of General von Paulus’s Sixth Army to the Red Army at Stalingrad is generally considered the turning point of the war, making the German defeat inevitable.

Even before the end of the war, Stalin began to plan for the expansion of Soviet influence well beyond the borders of the USSR. As a vital wartime ally, he wrested concessions from an ailing President Franklin Roosevelt that allowed the Soviets to carve out a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe after the war. Between 1945 and 1948, the Soviets extended their influence over East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. (An independent communist regime under Josip Broz [Tito] was established in Yugoslavia.) These puppet “people’s republics” formed a military alliance known as the Warsaw Pact, which was dominated by Moscow. In a famous speech in Fulton, Missouri, British prime minister Winston Churchill declared that an “iron curtain” had descended across Europe. The phrase stuck. What became known as the cold war between the Communist empire and the West had begun.

In the early 1950s Stalin increasingly showed signs of mental and physical disability. His megalomania was only matched by his paranoia. Those closest to him were fearful, never knowing when he would single them out for disloyalty, which could mean either imprisonment or execution. In early 1953 he ordered the arrests of several Kremlin doctors whom he accused of plotting against his life. As many of these doctors were Jewish, his action raised fears that he was about to initiate an anti-Semitic campaign throughout the country. But if he were planning such a pogrom, he never lived long enough to order it. On March 1, 1953, Stalin collapsed after an all-night dinner whose guests included Lavrenti Beria, head of the secret police, and Nikita Khrushchev, who would later become Soviet premier. He died four days later, having never regained consciousness. Officially the cause of death was a cerebral hemorrhage, but Vyacheslav Molotov, the foreign minister, claimed in his memoirs that Beria had poisoned Stalin.

Since Stalin’s death, historians have quarreled about how he should be judged. For example, in his biography Stalin: Breaker of Nations, Robert Conquest found that there was “something in [Stalin’s] character best thought of as an absence of life in its fullest sense.” He characterized Stalin as a “vast, dark figure looming over the century,” who was incapable of any sort of sympathetic human relationship. On the other hand, Robert Service in his portrait of the Soviet dictator, Stalin: A Biography, argues that while indeed Stalin was “as wicked a man as has ever lived” and someone who suffered from a “dangerously damaged” personality, he was nonetheless “hard-working,” “capable of kindness to relatives,” a “ruler of great assiduity,” a “fluent and thoughtful writer,” and “a delightful purveyor of jokes and mimicry.” In addition, Service finds him “a thoughtful man” who “tried to make sense of the universe as he found it.” Service allows that he could be guilty of trying to humanize Stalin but points out that “[i]f the likes of Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot are represented as having been ‘animals,’ ‘monsters’ or ‘killing machines,’ we shall never be able to discern their successors.” In Russia, too, Stalin’s reputation has undergone a resurrection of sorts. Denounced by Khrushchev for his excesses at a famous speech delivered in secret to the 20th Communist Party Congress, Stalin has enjoyed renewed popularity among some Russians who see him as a symbol of former Soviet glory. In 2005 the government announced a plan to erect a statue of Stalin in Moscow after a long period in which his once-ubiquitous image had been stripped from practically all public places. The backers of legislation to raise the statue maintained that Stalin should be honored for his leadership in World War II.

Mustapha Kemal (1880–1938)

More commonly known as Atatürk, soldier and father of modern Turkey, Mustapha Kemal was born in Salonica in 1880, where a museum at the current Turkish Consulate commemorates his birthplace. His father died when Mustapha was seven, and his mother brought him up. Mustapha studied at the military secondary school in Selânik, where his mathematics teacher gave him the additional name Kemal (“perfection”) because of his academic excellence. He entered the military academy at Manastır in 1895, graduated as a lieutenant decade later and was posted to Damascus.

Mustapha joined a small secret revolutionary society of reformist officers in Damascus called “Motherland and Liberty” and became an active opponent of the Porte. In 1907, when he was posted to Selânik, he joined the Committee of Union and Progress commonly known as the Young Turks. In 1908, the Young Turks seized power from Abdul Hamid II and Mustapha became a senior military fi gure. In 1911, he was send to defend Libya against the Italian invasion, and he was stranded there when the fi rst of the Balkan Wars started and was unable to take part. In July 1913, he was appointed commander of the Ottoman defenses of the Gallipoli Peninsula and in 1914 as military attaché in Sofi a. After a brief period of constitutional rule, power became vested in the triumvirate of Mehmet Talat Pasha, Ahmet Cemal Pasha, and Enver Pasha, who, through secretive negotiations, courted a German alliance. When they joined the Ottoman Empire to the side of the Central Powers during World War I, Mustapha was posted to Tekirda˘g, on the Sea of Marmara. He was then promoted to colonel and assigned the command of a division in Gallipoli. He played a vital role in the battle against the allied forces in April 1915, holding them off at Conkbayırı and on the Anafarta hills. He was promptly promoted to a brigadier general, thus acquiring the title of pasha. During 1917 and 1918, Kemal Pasha was sent to the Caucasus to fi ght against the Russians and then the Hejaz, to suppress the Arab revolt. After resigning his commission, he returned to serve in the unsuccessful defense of Palestine. In October Kemal, 1918, the Ottomans capitulated to the Allies and he became one of the leaders that favored defending Anatolia and withdrawing from territory not dominated by Turks.

Kemal Pasha, seeing that the disintegration and partition of the Ottoman Empire, even in Anatolia, was a serious possibility, arranged to be sent to Samsun, in Anatolia, with extraordinary powers, as an inspector of the Nineteenth Army and started ordering provincial governors and military commanders to resist occupation. In June 1919, he declared that the government at Constantinople held no legitimate authority and a government-in-exile should be established in Anatolia. In April 1920, a parliament, the Grand National Assembly, was formed in Ankara, and Kemal became the president. This body repudiated the Constantinople government and rejected the Treaty of Sèvres. This was a direct threat to Greece, which stood to gain the most, an empire in Anatolia, from that treaty and that country invaded Anatolia. After a series of Greek successes, in January and again in April 1921, Ismet Pasha defeated the Greek army at ˙Inönü. In July, after a third Greek offensive, Kemal took command and routed the Greeks in the 20-day Battle of Sakarya. Victory over the Greeks came in the Battle of Dumlupinar in August 1922 and this assured Turkey’s sovereignty and the Treaty of Lausanne delineated the borders.

william godwin

Though the term ‘anarchism’ was not used in a positive sense until 1840, by the French writer PIERRE-JOSEPH PROUDHON, William Godwin is regarded as the founder of philosophical anarchism. Born at Wisbech on 7 March 1756, Godwin was raised by a strict Baptist father, and became a Sandemanian Baptist minister in 1778. By 1783, however, he had abandoned his religious beliefs and calling for a career as a historian,
novelist and journalist. His chief work, the Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1st edn, 1793), was the most extensive and serious philosophical appraisal of the first principles of the French Revolution, and escaped prosecution only because of its high price. Rendered famous by its success, and that of his first major novel, Caleb Williams (1794), Godwin married the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, but she died in childbirth in 1797; their daughter married the poet Percy Shelley. Godwin extended and amended certain doctrines of Political Justice in both the 2nd and 3rd edns of the work (1795, 1798) and in The Enquirer (1797). But his reputation was greatly undermined by the attack on him, and upon all forms of utopian social engineering, in T.R.MALTHUS’S Essay on Population (1798), and despite publishing a number of later novels and historical works, as well as a response to Malthus, Of Population (1820), he never regained prominence.

The reputation of the Enquiry concerning Political Justice rests on its treatment of eight themes: (1) philosophical necessitarianism—the foundation of Godwin’s optimism is his notion of the pliability, and improvability, of human nature, and his insistence, particularly against the notion of original sin, that individual moral character was derived from the environment, and that the voluntary actions of men were derived from their opinions; (2) theory of justice—in his famous ‘fire case’, where we are faced with a choice between rescuing an illustrious person who has been or is capable of assisting humanity as a whole, or a comparatively humble individual, Godwin urges us to choose the former; ‘my neighbour’s moral worth, and his importance to the general weal’ are ‘the only standard to determine the treatment to which he is entitled’; (3) individualist anarchism—Godwin builds on Swift, PAINE and others to argue that not merely government, but also most forms of co-operative endeavour, including marriage and common labour and meals, hinder the capacity of each individual to form their own judgements (the Nonconformist plea for the right of private judgement, with sincerity as the root virtue, being the root of this view) by compelling compromise; in the first edition of Political Justice, in particular, he urged the return to a simple society without government or exchange, law or punishment, where order was to be based on mutual moral supervision without coercion and social organization was to be parish-based; (4) critique of political institutions—Godwin scathingly assails not only monarchy and aristocracy, but equally the negative aspects of democracy, notably its propensity to interfere with private judgement through ‘partiality and cabal’, and the evil effects of vote-taking to secure decisions; (5) cosmopolitanism—Godwin places much greater value on universal benevolence than the crucial republican virtue, patriotism; (6) rejection of a complex division of labour—particularly in the 1st edn of Political Justice, Godwin (here largely following Rousseau) pleads for simplicity in work, with all being cultivators primarily, and condemns the propensity of separate professions (physicians and lawyers, but especially soldiers) to develop an interest separate from that of the public; (7) theory of property—again particular in the 1st edn., Godwin opposes all exchange and all significant inequality of property, on the principle that ‘there is nothing more pernicious to the human mind than the love of opulence’; if all superfluity were abolished, and labour shared equally, it would be reduced, Godwin thought, to a few hours a day, with time then available for intellectual speculation. War and selfishness, moreover, Godwin also saw as the offspring of unequal property. The system of distribution proposed was also linked to his theory of justice, all property being viewed by Godwin as held as a ‘trust’ that must be expended in the most just manner; (8) perfectibility—Godwin famously speculated that reason would eventually conquer the passions, especially sexual desire, that life might be greatly prolonged; besides abolishing law, government and war, human tempers would improve, to the point to which there would be no ‘disease, anguish, melancholy, nor resentment; nor would there be no reason to fear that overpopulation would undermine the system of economic organisation’ (this was the starting-point of Malthus’s critique not only of Godwin but also Enlightenment optimism generally). The changes in the three editions of Political Justice published in Godwin’s lifetime involved a reinforcement of his arguments against violence and revolutionary change, and a shift from relying upon reason as the basis of voluntary action to the feelings. In keeping with his breach with his agitator friend, John Thelwall, a popular lecturer among the London working classes, Godwin by 1797 stressed that the working classes would not be ready for universal suffrage for many years. He also moved sharply away from the embracing of simplicity, condoning even luxury, which he now associated with refinement and knowledge, in The Enquirer, so long as it was not exclusively enjoyed by the few to the burden of the many. He also conceded to Burke in particular, moreover, that benevolence was best practised not by an abstract and universal principle, but according to the ‘nearness to ourselves’ of persons and things. This gave greater stress to the value of and virtues associated with the domestic affections, as well, which no doubt owed something to both the personal and intellectual influence of Mary Wollstonecraft on Godwin

the idea of liberalism

The idea of liberalism antedates the use of the term liberalism. It developed in the philosophical and religious traditions of the West, specifically in one trend in Christian theology and political philosophy, as well as in the humanism of Enlightenment philosophy, which had its roots in Europe’s Renaissance and was very influential in 18th-century political thought. Underlying these theological, philosophical, and humanistic trends is the belief that human beings’ basic nature is good and that human beings have a tremendous capacity for knowledge and reason, even though that nature and capacity can be corrupted by power or by coercive elements in government and society. When liberated, however, human beings are able to improve themselves and their world continually as they reach toward, even if never ultimately reaching, perfection.

Thus, liberalism’s focus is the good that is possible in this world and not the salvation of souls for the eternity of the next. That is, liberalism is a “secular” mode of thought in the original meaning of the word “secular.” Originally, “secular” did not mean “nonreligious,” as it does in popular discourse today. Rather, “secular” pertained to those things that are time bound and, therefore, not of that other eternal world but are of importance to the “this-worldly” pursuits of the here and now. Consequently, secularism in this sense does not oppose religion, but rather emphasizes the “this-worldly” pursuits of religion and other endeavors. Nevertheless, because liberalism involves liberation of the people and their free associations from governmental constraints and the coercive elements of custom and tradition (including religious traditions and their institutions), liberalism emphasizes the need for government to remain unentangled with religion and vice versa. Consequently, liberalism holds that government’s role is not to constrain human beings in order to limit their potential to sin. That had been the traditional Christian political theory’s justification for government’s domination of the people in coordination with ecclesiastical authorities. Rather, liberalism promoted the revolutionary notion that human beings can be trusted with liberty. The idea is that even though there may be missteps along the way, when human beings are free, they naturally and ultimately, through experience and reasoned reflection, progress toward human flourishing. This leads in turn to greater and greater degrees of happiness in this world, and ultimately to an unfolding revelation of the true and the good. Hence, change is possible and is good as it can lead to progress toward that better world of tomorrow; that is, the “golden age” is in the future and not in the past.