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:
“As in political revolutions, so in paradigm choice—there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community. To discover how scientific revolutions are effected, we shall therefore have to examine not only the impact of nature and of logic, but also the techniques of persuasive argumentation effective within the quite special groups that constitute the community of scientists.”
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“The question confronting the Church today is not any longer whether the man in the street can grasp a religious message, but how to employ the communications media so as to let him have the full impact of the Gospel message.”
—Pope John Paul II (b. 1920)