By Ruth Kinna and Clifford Harper.  

Read by Barbara Graham and Jim Donaghey.   

Godwin was an eighteenth-century radical writer and journalist and one of the leading participants in the debates sparked by the French Revolution. Godwin is sometimes credited with being the first philosophical anarchist, but this underplays the character of the philosophy he advanced and the active role he took in politics. Like many of his contemporaries, Godwin understood publishing as a form of activism, an intervention into public debate that was intended to shape it and which also entailed risk.  Today, Godwin is as likely to be remembered for his family connections as he is for his independent contributions to radical politics. He married Mary Wollstonecraft in 1797, was father to Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein), and his influence was felt strongly in the writing of his son-in-law, the Romantic revolutionary poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley.   

Also available on YouTube:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbAG8xUk7F8

Download at Bandcamp - https://greatanarchists.bandcamp.com/track/great-anarchists-william-godwin

The Great Anarchists pamphlet series is published by Dog Section Press and Active Distribution. See: http://dogsection.org/press/godwin and www.activedistribution.org for more details.    

Music by Them’uns - https://soundcloud.com/user-178917365