Godwin’s Anti-Mass Politics Revisited: Sympathy, Retirement, and Epistemic Diversity

Abstract

This essay revisits Godwin’s opposition to mass politics in light of his overlooked commitment to intellectual diversity. More than class bias or individualism, Godwin’s wariness of London Corresponding Society meetings springs from a conviction that rationality arises through intellectual conflict and therefore requires the presence of heterogeneous opinions within and between groups. Understanding sympathy in spatial terms, Godwin assumes that LCS crowds standardize opinions; the larger the group and the closer the participants in space, the more quickly opinions standardize through sympathy. Not surprisingly, then, he dismisses political collectives, insisting that the most effectual discussions instead arise in smaller, more diverse circles because small groups better maintain diversity over time. Even if impractical, Godwin’s rejecting of mass meetings represents an attempt to defy Enlightenment views of the rational and the social as mutually exclusive. This effort to socialize reason also establishes Godwin as a theorist of what modern philosophers of science term “epistemic diversity,” the idea that exposure to diverse perspectives improves reasoning over what persons can achieve in isolation.