William Godwin
At a glance:
- Series: Dictionary of World Biography: The 17th and 18th Centuries
- Categories: Government and Politics, Philosophy, Literature, Publishing
- Subcategories: Authors, Writers, Philosophers, Socialism, Socialists
- Curriculum: 19th Century European History, British History, 18th Century European History
Article abstract: Having evolved in his thinking from a radical Protestant position to the revolutionary, atheistic synthesis of the massive treatise An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness, Godwin developed the ideas of libertarian socialism that were to influence profoundly both the individualism of English Romanticism and the later anarchistic, communist ideas of the utopian Robert Owen, the Socialist economist William Thompson, and the young Karl Marx. His friendship with and marriage to Mary Wollstonecraft...
[The entire page is 2996 words long]
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