The Impact of Japan of William Godwin's Idea.

From 1783 TO 1834 William Godwin published a succession of ingeniously varied works that were widely and vehemently discussed and criticized. During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, with the complete defeat of these Englishmen who were spokesmen for reform, Godwin fell out of "extreme notoriety," as William Hazlitt put it in his "The Spirit of the Age." During much of the time that the Western world was arguing the merits of his strikingly individualistic-even anarchistic ideas, Japan was almost entirely isolated intellectually. What has been the impact upon Japanese thinking of a writer so varied and so original as this man? Godwin's ideas first reached Japanese minds with the growth of the study of political economy. Japan had to develop her economy rapidly after being opened to outside trade in 1854. It was not only Adam Smith with whom students of economics became acquainted. Among Japanese theorists on population, discussions of Malthus have always included Godwin's contribution, although the attitudes of these scholars have varied.