Frankenstein's grandfather

I am still slogging away through Passmore's The Perfectibility of Man (which stopped being easy to follow once he got past the Greeks), and was especially struck by some quotes from William Godwin. He was one of the founders of anarchism, the author of one of the first "thrillers," and also the father of Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein.

Anyway, as noted in the Wikipedia link above, Godwin promoted many ideas that are now accepted as mainstream (such as the immorality of colonialism and the rehabilitation of criminals), but he was such an extreme individualist that he considered cooperation offensive. To quote Passmore, "In Godwin's paradise, there will be no theatrical performances and no orchestras, since both plays and symphonies necessarily involve 'an absurd and vicious co-operation.'" "Every thing that is usually understood by the term co-operation," he goes so far as to suggest, "is, in some degree, an evil." He must have been a very difficult person to live with.