richard-day-gramsci-is-dead

Utopian Socialism Then ... 99of authority such an assembly should have. ‘Are they to issue theircommands to the different members of the confederacy? Or is itsufficient that they should invite them to co-operate for the commonadvantage, and by arguments and addresses convince them of thereasonableness of the measures they propose?’ (576). One might expecthim to come down unequivocally on the side of reasonableness, butonce again he defies expectations. ‘The former of these would at firstbe necessary’, Godwin argues. ‘The latter would afterwards becomesufficient’ (576). Here Godwin encountered a difficulty that was torecur in anarchist theory and practice: we can call it the problem ofthe Revolution, the apparent need for a radical break, a discontinuityat the same time temporal and institutional-subjective, between the‘bad’ social totality of today and the ‘good’ one that lies just aroundthe corner. Like so many who came after him, Godwin assumed thatpeople living under state-capitalist institutions were too corruptedby those institutions to be able to make a new society immediately.They would not be able to see reason, and thus would have to beforced into a state where they could. It is curious, but characteristicof many classical socialists, that he was not troubled by the end ofpolitical debate that would be brought about by the use of force inthis context—it is, after all, force used in the pursuit of what he seesas reason and the good life.Godwin’s handling of the problem posed by ‘insufficientlydeveloped’ human beings is typical of both his time and histemperament. It did not occur to him that his universalizing doctrinecould be responsible for producing the very lack it found in others.Rather, the lack is seen as inherent to the subjects themselves, andthus thought to be remediable by action upon them—in this case, viaeducation. Thus Godwin believed that, with sufficient instruction,chambermaids and others of inferior quality might be ‘roused fromthe slumber of savage ignorance’ (180), brought to see the light ofreason and rendered able to understand the single and uniform truthto which God(win) was leading them. Human nature may not beperfect, but it is perfectible, though in human affairs ‘everythingmust be gradual’ (182). Thus we might look forward to the eventual‘dissolution’ of political government, that is, to the withering awayof even the periodic national assemblies and inter-parish juries. Oncethe appropriate institutions were in place, Godwin maintained, ‘thewhole species will become reasonable and virtuous’ (577).Godwin’s perfectionism has been much remarked upon in itshistorical context, but its influence upon contemporary anarchist