No Matter, No Master Godwins Humean Anarchism“不要紧的，没有大师戈德温的休谟的无政府主义”.docVIP

Roderick T. Long – No Matter, No Master: Godwin’s Humean Anarchism – p. PAGE 14No Matter, No Master:Godwin’s Humean AnarchismRoderick T. LongAuburn UniversitySEASECS conference – February 2008William Godwin (1756-1836) is often regarded as essentially a Berkeleyan in his metaphysics and a Rousseauvian in his social philosophy. ?For example, Peter Marshall in his biography William Godwin describes Berkeley as “Godwin’s principal mentor in immaterialism” (p. 367); as for the Rousseau connection, Walter Bagehot described Godwin as “a disciple of Rousseau” (Economic Studies, 2nd ed., pp. 135-6), while Peter Landry more recently claims (incredibly, I should say) that Godwin “followed along in the footsteps of Rousseau in his nostalgia for the simple and the primitive.” (Biographical Sketches: The Thinkers.)I shall argue that in both metaphysics and social philosophy the influence of David Hume (1711-1776) is far more fundamental than is ordinarily recognised, and ultimately more decisive than that of Berkeley or Rousseau – though the relation is more one of Godwin’s creative repurposing of Hume’s ideas than of his passive receptivity to them.With regard to metaphysics, although immaterialism is a Berkeleyan rather than a Humean thesis, Godwin’s version of immaterialism, as we shall see, is flatly incompatible with Berkeley’s, and in both its epistemological foundations and its role in our reflective life owes far more to Hume than to Berkeley.With regard to social philosophy, while Hume might seem an unlikely precursor for Godwin’s socialist anarchism, in fact Godwin, in his Enquiry (1793) and other writings, takes precisely Humean arguments for the rule of law and prevailing institutions of property and turns them in the opposite direction; and inasmuch as Hume’s account of the role of public opinion in sustaining social order inadvertently provides Godwin with grounds for the present-day feasibility of anarchism (by contrast with Rousseau’s relegation of anarchism t