William Godwin: Governance

“Government was intended to suppress injustice, but its effect has been to embody and perpetuate it.”

William Godwin

"Summary of Principles" 2.7
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)
Variant: Government was intended to suppress injustice, but it offers new occasions and temptations for the commission of it.

“Whenever government assumes to deliver us from the trouble of thinking for ourselves, the only consequences it produces are those of torpor and imbecility.”

William Godwin

Vol. 2, bk. 6, ch. 1
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)

Thinking

“Government in reality, as has abundantly appeared, is a question of force, and not of consent. It is desirable that a government should be made as agreeable as possible to the ideas and inclinations of its subjects and that they should be consulted, as extensively as may be, respecting its construction and regulations. But, at last, the best constituted government that can be formed particularly for a large community, will contain many provisions that, far from having obtained the consent of all its members, encounter even in their outset a strenuous, thought ineffectual opposition.”

William Godwin

Book III, "Of Obedience"
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)

Question , Communication , Reality , Appearance

“The reason a man lives under any particular government is partly a necessity; he cannot easily avoid living under some government, and it is often scarcely in his power to abandon the country in which he was born: it is also partly, a choice of evil; no man can be said, in this case, to enjoy that freedom which is essential to the forming a contract unless it could be shown that he had a power of instituting, somewhere, a government adapted to his own conceptions.”

William Godwin

Book III, "Of Obedience"
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)

Freedom , Evil , Country

“Democracy is a system of government according to which every member of society is considered as a man and nothing more.”

William Godwin

Book V, Chapter 13, "General Features of Democracy"

Massacre is the too possible attendant upon revolution , and massacre is perhaps the most hateful scene, alllowing for its omentary duration, that any imagination can suggest, The fearful, hopeless, expectation of the defeated, and the blood-hound fury of their conquerors, is a complication of mischief that all which has been told of internal regions can scarcely surpass. The cold-blooded massacres that are perpetrated under the naem of criminal justice fall short of these in some of their most frightful aggravations. The ministers and instruments of law have by perform, and often bear their parts in the most shocking enormities without being sensible to the passions allied murders with the rudeness of an insulting triumph ; and, as the conduct themselves , in a certain sort, by known principles of injustice, the evil we have reason to apprehend has its limits. But the instruments of massacre are discharged from every restraint.

Book VIII, Ch.
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)

Democracy

“The benefit of the governed is made to lie on one side and the benefit of the governors on the other.”

William Godwin

Book III, Chapter 9
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)

Lie