343 ELH 76 (2009) 343–369 © 2009 by The Johns Hopkins University Press “THE BUSINESS OF WAR”: WILLIAM GODWIN, ENMITY, AND HISTORICAL REPRESENTATION BY TIMOTHY CAMPBELL Nature . . . again unites the nations . . . by the commercial spirit which cannot exist along with war, and which sooner or later controls every people. —Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Essay” (1795) William Godwin, one of the long eighteenth century’s foremost theorists of the historical imagination, begins his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) with a vision of history as war. “War has hith- erto been considered as the inseparable ally of political institution,” he observes, before surveying the “annals of conquerors and heroes,” the various successful “projects, by means of bloodshed, violence and murder, of enslaving mankind.” From Bacchus to Xerxes, from Alexander to Caesar, from Mahomet to Charlemagne, from the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre to the Seven Years’ War, the archive of human polity reflects “little else” but the ceaseless succession of war. 1 War prevails not only when we consider the “facts,” what really happens in history, but also, as Godwin sardonically notes, in what seems possible. As “excellently described by Swift,” a formidable and enduring logic always assures ready recourse to war: “Sometimes a war is entered upon because the enemy is too strong, and sometimes because he is too weak. Sometimes our neighbors want the things which we have, or have the things which we want” (P, 7). 2 Completing a totalizing picture, Godwin establishes war’s grasp even upon “the principles of . . . domestic policy”: “A numerous class of mankind are held down in a state of abject penury, and are continually prompted by disappointment and distress to commit violence upon their more fortunate neighbors. The only mode which is employed to repress this violence, and to maintain the order and peace of society, is punishment” of the cruel, physical variety (P, 8). The project of Political Justice, Godwin concludes, is to consider, even if war may not be “extirpated out of the world,” whether this state of total and perpetual war “may be remedied”—whether human history, heretofore more or less reducible