Believing in Freedom: William Godwin and Education
Graham Nutbrown

The philosopher William Godwin (1756 – 1836) is most often remembered today as a pioneer of anarchistic political philosophy, as the husband of Mary Wollstonecraft and the father of Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, and as an influence on Romantic writers such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Hazlitt and Percy Shelley. During the 1790s, after the French Revolution, he was not only the leading British political philosopher (An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 1793) but also a leading novelist (Caleb Williams, 1794; St Leon, 1799). He was also a significant philosopher of education (The Enquirer, 1798), whose ideas have a relevance today in the epistemic environment in which young people are forming their beliefs and dispositions. Godwin’s is a radical educational theory. Like Wollstonecraft, he was a critic of key aspects of Rousseau’s philosophy of education; unlike her, and most other radicals of the day, he rejected the idea of a national system of education. In his view, states and institutions of all kinds are bound to be hierarchical, to promote vested interests, and to inhibit original thought. His anarchistic alternative is lifelong education determined democratically by individual egalitarian communities. He believed an education that promotes independent thinking is both the means and the end of political justice. I will discuss, firstly, Godwin’s largely epistemological arguments against a national education system. I will outline the implications of his ideas for schooling today. Lastly, I will discuss how he reconciles his belief in freedom and independent judgement with his materialism and ‘necessitarianism’ (determinism).

Graham Nutbrown is a former teacher of English and Philosophy in state schools in Bristol. More recently he was Director of Studies for the Education with Psychology undergraduate programme at the University of Bath. He first attended Philosophy of Education seminars at IOE as a PGCE student and he returned there, decades later, for his doctoral studies. His thesis (2016), entitled Trusting Teachers Within Reason: Education and the Epistemology of Testimony, was supervised by Professor Jan Derry. His book, The Educational Thought of William Godwin: Believing in Freedom, is published by Palgrave Macmillan in August 2026. His current project, provisionally entitled How to Make a Man: From Freethinking to Frankenstein, is largely eighteenth-century materialism.