For about a decade after the publication of his treatise on philosophical anarchism, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Political Justice, and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness (1793), William Godwin enjoyed the kind of notoriety reserved for great literary figures and influential statesmen. Paying tribute to Godwin in The Spirit of the Age (1825), William Hazlitt describes that moment: "he was in the very zenith of a sultry and unwholesome popularity; he blazed as a sun in the firmament of reputation; no one was more talked of, more looked up to, more sought after, and wherever liberty, truth, justice was the theme, his name was not far off." In an age graced with great political minds such as those of Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine, Godwin not only held his own but, at least in Hazlitt's view, left them behind: "Tom Paine was considered for the time as...