I could argue for William Godwin’s place on the syllabus myself, but why not hear it from him directly?
I, William Godwin, believe I deserve a place on next year’s syllabus because my work fills a gap in the current curriculum. As it stands, there is no sustained engagement with political philosophy, yet my politics is inseparable from my metaphysics. My own arguments for anarchism rest distinctly on a metaphysical foundation. That is, the doctrine of necessitarianism. I hold that every action stems from causes, and that by understanding those causes we can reform the world without relying on coercion or punishment. My political theory cannot be separated from my metaphysics. Including me on the syllabus gives students a rare chance to study a thinker for whom metaphysics and politics form a single system.
I am also biographically interesting. I married Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the most important feminist philosophers in the English language, and became the father of Mary Shelley, whose Frankenstein would shape modern discussions of science, responsibility, and creation. My household was a crossroads of Enlightenment thought bleeding into Romanticism. Studying me gives students a window into the intellectual networks that produced some of the era’s most transformative ideas.
My influence has been long and often underestimated. I insist that moral progress arises not from force but from reasoned discussion, an idea that would be useful in today’s economy. So include me not simply for historical interest, but because the questions I raise about freedom, causation, moral development, and political authority remain alive. My work challenges students to ask how philosophical principles of metaphysics actually impact the world we live in.