Godwin began thinking about Political Justice in 1791, after the publication of Thomas Paine's Rights of Man in response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).

[2] Its length and expense (it cost over £1) made it inaccessible to the popular audience of the Rights of Man and probably protected Godwin from the persecution that other writers such as Paine experienced.

[2] One way in which this happened is through the many unauthorized copies of the text, the extracts printed by radical journals, and the lectures John Thelwall gave based on its ideas.

Its vision of human perfectibility is anarchist in so far as it sees government and related social practices such as property monopoly, marriage and monarchy as restraining the progress of mankind.

McCann explains that in Godwin's vision, "as public opinion develops in accordance with the dictates of reason, so too should political institutions change until, finally, they will wither away altogether, leaving the people to organize themselves into what would be a direct democracy.

[2] He argues that "the task which, for the present, should occupy the first rank in the thoughts of the friend of man is enquiry, communication, discussion.

Peter Kropotkin, in his article on "Anarchism" for The Encyclopedia Britannica discusses the revisions from a far-left perspective, criticizing how new versions seemed to retract earlier, more radical, positions concerning property:Speaking of property, he stated that the rights of every one ‘to every substance capable of contributing to the benefit of a human being’ must be regulated by justice alone: the substance must go ‘to him who most wants it’.

[7] The book 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.

"[2] 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.

[6]The surviving holograph manuscript for Political Justice is held in the Forster Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum, along with several other works by Godwin.

In 1859 the texts for Political Justice, Caleb Williams, Life of Chaucer, and History of the Commonwealth of England were all acquired by John Forster, who died in 1876.