Discussão:Mary Shelley

Libertarismo

Qualquer umas das caricaterizações aplicadas à Godwin são anacronicas, porém algumas tem base histórica e outra não. Godwin discute a abolição da propriedade privada em sua filosofia, e foi suficiente para que tenha sido historicamente lido enquanto parte de um socialismo anti-estatista:

Philosophically Godwin’s greatest supporters were his contemporaries, such as Thomas Holcroft and John Thelwall, and a younger generation of men (and some literary women) who were attracted to Godwin’s intellectual rigour and his radical critique of the social and political order. Many later abandoned him, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Southey as part of a rising tide of loyalist reaction, Shelley and Byron, for more personal and domestic reasons. However, his philosophical anarchism had a profound influence on Robert Owen, William Thompson and other utopians in the nineteenth century, and there is also evidence of influence on the Chartist movement and on popular labour movements for political reform in the 1840s (see Marshall 1984: 390). His impact in literary circles was long lasting, both through his political writings, and through his novels. Political Justice was read and translated by Benjamin Constant in France, and an abridged edition was translated into German in 1803, along with the first three of Godwin’s mature novels. Marx and Engels knew of his work and cited him as having contributed to a theory of exploitation, and as being widely read by the proletariat. Later in the nineteenth century Anton Menger and Paul Eltzbacher introduced Godwin’s work to German audiences, leading to further translation. Caleb Williams appeared in Russian in 1838, and Chernyshevski, Kroptkin and Tolstoy all read and referred to him. In the late nineteenth century the last book of Political Justice, formally titled “Of Property”, but dealing with the prospects for progress in the human race and including his attacks on marriage and co-operation, was reprinted as a socialist tract, and the whole work was reprinted again in the 1920s. A critical edition of the third edition with variants appeared in 1946, and an edition of the 1793 text with both later variants and material from the original manuscripts appeared in 1993. Biographies of Godwin have also appeared regularly since the first by C. Kegan-Paul in 1876, which drew heavily on the extensive manuscript sources. Philosophical interest has been less pronounced, although since the 1940s a slow trickle of books has emerged which have sought to do justice to Godwin’s essentially liberal political principles and to his moral philosophy. That work has recognised the importance of thinkers of the French Enlightenment, and more recently the Dissenting inheritance which his education and early career provided. As a result, the traditional view of Godwin as a strict utilitarian has been increasingly challenged. Recent work in political philosophy on the appropriate form and scope of impartiality has looked to Godwin, most commonly to define a position to resist, but not exclusively so. There has also been an upsurge of interest in Godwin amongst literary scholars and historians studying the romantic period, producing a range of work examining a much wider span of Godwin’s corpus than has hitherto been the case and especially exploring the contribution that his Diary can make to understaning the political culture of London in the period.https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/godwin/#Rep

JoaquimCebuano (discussão) 02h29min de 20 de julho de 2022 (UTC)