Politics & Power Quote by William Godwin

Godwin doesn’t call government imperfect or inefficient; he calls it an evil. That bluntness is the point. The line is a moral provocation aimed at readers who treat the state as a neutral tool. By framing government as “usurpation,” he casts it not as a collective agreement but as a takeover: an external power that elbows aside the inner faculties that should matter most in an enlightened society - “private judgement” and “individual conscience.” The real target is deference. Godwin is warning that the habit of obeying, even when convenient or well-intentioned, slowly trains people to outsource moral reasoning.

The phrasing “Above all” signals a hierarchy of political sins. Poverty, corruption, even violence can be discussed, he implies, but the deepest damage is spiritual and cognitive: citizens become less capable of thinking and acting ethically without permission. It’s an argument designed for an age that had just watched revolutions promise liberation and deliver new apparatuses of coercion. Godwin wrote in the long shadow of the French Revolution, when “public good” became a slogan that could justify surveillance, punishment, and the guillotine.

There’s also a strategic insistence on conscience as a public resource. If individuals are morally competent, then centralized authority looks less like protection and more like theft: it steals responsibility. Godwin’s radical optimism about human reason powers the critique. The sting is that his warning still fits modern politics, where the most seductive form of control isn’t brute force but the quiet comfort of letting institutions decide what counts as right.