William Godwin’s Enquirer: Between Oratory and Conversation

Abstract

Late eighteenth-century Britain’s nostalgia for the ancients’ oratorical eloquence competed with its fear of oratory’s demagogic power. Instantiated in David Hume’s turn from oratory to conversation as the site of cultural power, this quarrel also appeared in the work of William Godwin, but in a deeply creative melding of the two. Godwin had already invoked the civic eloquence-liberty link in his 1783 biography of Lord Chatham, turning it to analytical use in evaluating the career of great men of the Walpole era, and in the 1793 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice he had discovered a way to replace traditional institutions of governance and oratory with conversation as a civic institution, incorporating ardent eloquence in rational thinking and speaking and meaning eventually to spread participatory power from a small enlightened coterie to an increasingly educated populace. Believing that the intelligent exercise of private judgment was pre-requisite to political independence, Godwin hoped that individuals would improve themselves through reading and civic-oriented conversation, and he thought his conversational scheme would avoid the dangers of addressing crowds. In his 1797 Enquirer, Godwin directly confronts the problem (not treated in Political Justice) that individuals do not spontaneously exercise any private judgment worthy of the name, and therefore do not only need to resist encroachments on it, but rather need to become capable of making judgments that are their own. Recasting the participants in enlightenment discussion as preceptor and child, Godwin attempts to work out the implications of inequality in rhetorical (and ethical) situations. From Cicero’s De Oratore, a multi-sided conversation teaching the nature of oratory, Godwin took hints for training the citizen through the adaptation of philosophy to everyday language and employing the power of persuasive speech acts in the pedagogical mission. Like Crassus and Mucius in this dialogue, Godwin advocates using conversation and ardent rhetoric to arouse desire for learning and to activate the pupil’s independent efforts. In this process, the preceptor must allow a degree of combativeness alloyed by the cooperative character of intellectual friendship. To effect this change, Godwin re-enlists the techniques of oratory to transform the adult into a conversational partner with the child, raising the imagination and desire of his parental and preceptorial readers for a difficult but exalted mission. Godwin’s revision and redirection of eloquence changes his view of speech acts as well, from emphasis on constatives, which match words to the way the world is, to emphasis on persuasives, which enlist the imagination in disciplining the mind for freedom.