Introduction

William Godwin’s Political Justice (1793) and his Enquirer (1797) focused public opinion in England on radicalism, Jacobinism, property and inequality in the decade following the French/American/industrial revolution and in the shadow of individualist economists such as Adam Smith. Thomas Robert Malthus in the Essay on Population (1798) argued that automaticity and anarchy would be self-negating since they would turn loose the population multiplier and put pressure on the supply of food. This chapter describes the life and times of both authors. It relates their great classics to their other publications and to contemporary authors such as Paine, Burke and Shelley. It states the central theme of this book, that the contribution of Godwin and Malthus to political economy is inseparable from their views on constitutional government, sense perception, evolutionary change, progress and betterment.