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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 a Tom Fool to him, [William] Paley an old woman, Edmund Burke a flashy sophist." Yet when the curtain fell on his fame, it fell swiftly and with an uncommon finality, so that today, despite Godwin's prodigious literary output that included biographies, novels, political essays, and children's books, he is best remembered for his two earliest important works, Political Justice and Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794).
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