March 3, 1756

William Godwin (March 3, 1756 to April 7, 1836) elaborated his ideas on the problems facing the world in numerous literary works. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica:

The object of his principal work, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness (1793), was to reject conventional government by demonstrating the corrupting evil and tyranny inherent in its power of manipulation. He proposed in its place small self-subsisting communities. He argued that social institutions fail because they impose on man generalized thought categories and preconceived ideas, which make it impossible to see things as they are.

Godwin, an early Kurzweil, was convinced that man's reason could succeed in making human nature perfect. He married an advocate of feminine equality, Mary Wollstonecraft, and his daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, married the poet Shelley. In the heady years of the French Revolution many things seemed possible, and practical experience hardly weighed in the balance. Progress seemed so obvious to liberal thinkers at the time, that it did not merit analysis. Godwin's own father after all, had been a stern fundamentalist who despised the Church of England and said that petting a cat on the Sabbath was a sin. Everywhere young intellectuals of the time looked, things seemed to be changing for the better. That the giddiness they experienced was the result of cultural weights being shifted and merely a comparative, transient effect, they never considered. The recollection of the effervescence of youth would nourish them for decades.  

Elizabeth Robins Pennell's biography, Mary Wollstonecraft, (2008) is the source of the detail about Godwin's father.