Life & Wisdom Quote by William Godwin

Godwin’s line lands like a moral tripwire: co-operation, that warm civic word, is cast not as virtue but as contamination. The sting is in “in some sense.” He’s not arguing that people should live as hermits; he’s warning that the moment coordination hardens into a principle, it smuggles in force. In Godwin’s political universe, “co-operation” rarely means free individuals aligning voluntarily. It too easily becomes the machinery of institutions: committees, parties, churches, guilds, even well-meaning reform societies. Those structures don’t just pool effort; they standardize belief, reward conformity, and make obedience feel like community.

The subtext is a radical suspicion of moral outsourcing. Co-operation offers a seductive bargain: surrender a portion of judgment and gain efficiency, belonging, safety. Godwin reads that bargain as a slow-motion erosion of conscience. When responsibility is distributed, it’s also diluted; when action is collective, accountability can vanish into procedure. “Some sense an evil” points to that gray zone where no one intends harm, yet harm becomes easier to do.

Context matters. Writing in the wake of the French Revolution, with Britain’s anxious clampdown on dissent and the rise of mass political clubs, Godwin is wrestling with how liberation movements can reproduce the coercion they oppose. His provocation still reads current because it targets a familiar modern alchemy: turning solidarity into bureaucracy, and bureaucracy into moral cover. Co-operation isn’t damned; it’s indicted as a gateway drug to compulsion when it replaces, rather than expresses, individual judgment.