The Romantic poems and novels discussed in this book all criticise the social contract tradition for failing to integrate the social body into a totality. But Romantic poetry also maintains a critical distance from philosophical discourse, as suggested by Samuel Taylor Coleridge's sceptical representation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and by Wordsworth's shifting viewpoints in The Prelude. By contrast narrative fiction has always been an integral aspect of philosophical argumentation, and particularly of empiricism. For this reason, the Romantic novel is more closely aligned with social contract theory than is Romantic poetry. Whereas Coleridge and Wordsworth can propose reorganising society in lieu of contract (along sceptical and neo-Aristotelian lines respectively), William Godwin, Mary Shelley and Thomas Carlyle all focus their works on dissident individuals that are excluded from social construction, and explore their predicaments through the techniques of fiction. Wordsworth associates Godwin with an inexcusable position of extreme individualism. But this is a partial reading of Godwin's 1793 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, which does not engage with its radically communitarian politics. And Wordsworth also ignores Godwin's rendering of private perspectives of malaise and discontent in his novels. In anatomising the ills of individualism, Godwin's novel Fleetwood: Or, The New Man of Feeling (1805) features Rousseau the philosopher as a fictional character. In Mandeville, A Tale of the Seventeenth Century in England (1817) Godwin fictionalizes the first Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, grandfather of the third Earl of Shaftesbury Anthony Ashley Cooper, patron of John Locke and founder of the Whig party, as a character in his novel. In this chapter, I shall show how Godwin forms these characters and presents their ideologies as disruptive forces. In Fleetwood and in Mandeville, Godwin reduces Rousseau and Shaftesbury respectively, towering figures in their times, to a relatively minor scale, enacting their focus on the small individual instead of the big social picture, and thus also displacing their philosophical systems from the centre to the margins.