Impact
Political Justice was revered by the first generation of Romantic poets, such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, although they would later turn away from radicalism. However, as Romantic scholar Andrew McCann explains, "it is in the radicalism of Percy Shelley's work that Godwin's thinking exerted its greatest influence on the Romantic movement, and ... Shelley's work was most central to the resurgence of radical sentiment after the end of the Napoleonic Wars."
In 1798, the Reverend Thomas Malthus published An Essay on the Principle of Population, which was largely written as a refutation of the ideas of Godwin and the Marquis de Condorcet. Malthus argued that since population increases geometrically (i.e. doubling in size each generation), while production can only increase in a linear manner, then disease, famine, poverty and vice are inevitable. Consequently, Malthus criticised Political Justice for expounding unachieveable utopianism.
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Famous quotes containing the word impact:
“Television does not dominate or insist, as movies do. It is not sensational, but taken for granted. Insistence would destroy it, for its message is so dire that it relies on being the background drone that counters silence. For most of us, it is something turned on and off as we would the light. It is a service, not a luxury or a thing of choice.”
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