I'm thinking that the history of the 20th century pretty much shows that this quote isn't true.

Ah, the Romantic period. Such nice prose and poetry. Such incredibly naive political and social values....

You folks are too quick to judge MS based on your current values. If you lived in a very restrictive legal social system and are poor, all your roads go no where. A better organized society means removing those restrictions and opening up roads. Daring villains would be those four black students who asked to be served in a Greensboro counter many years ago. In Shelley's time, it would be social class, religion, party, etc.

I'm not so inclined to overlook statements made by people as fallacies of their age, particularly when they say things that are quoted in a modern context. I'm even less inclined to do so when the person is one of the Romantics or their ilk, who so often stepped outside their culture to comment, and then make a claim that seems a profound truth as part of that supposedly objectivity. These people claimed to know better than the people of their own age, so even if we were applying our own values to an understanding of her comments, she happily did the same kind of thing in order to make them in the first place.

But even were that not the case, Mary Shelley isn't from the Dark Ages. In her own time she really should have been able to recognize that someone like Napolean Bonaparte wasn't simply a "daring villain" that sprung up as a result of the "disorganized" French Revolution. It's pretty dismissive and more than a little shallow to characterize the predations of humanity upon humanity as "daring" and then place the blame for those activities on society's lack of organization.... This is just a pretty way of avoiding the idea of personal responsibility and blaming everything on society.

I don't know the context of this particular quote. Maybe she meant it ironically, or put the statement in the voice of some character meant to show that she really meant the opposite. But by itself, this one is a real problem. And as a general rule, you can go through a lot of the political/social commentary of the Romantics and find them a lot of really bad ideas on how things should work in society. So, again, when it comes to the Romantics: nice literature, bad social ideas.

I disagree. I take umbrage at her choice of words--there's a lot more to improving society than just making it "well-organized"--but I do agree with the basis of her thought. Would Napoleon's vigour not be better channeled entirely towards, say, legal reform, instead of war? Imagine how much more influence the Napoleonic Code would have!

It's not clear how to remove the villainy and keep the daring, but that's still something that society needs to work on, because individuals aren't going to be responsible without prompting.

---

Currently Reading: Various Discworld Novels
Currently Watching: Code Geass

A look at the history of the black southern minister,the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., might help to provide some color to Mary Shelley's statement.

By that, I mean this: the chaotic, unorganized society of the south was such that a daring man like Dr. King, who advocated social mores which were a stark contrast to what was acceptable of the day; thusly, rendering him a villain.

Perhaps, what the statement allays is that had that same energy from society been channeled into a more coherent, organized (or rather, "civilized," in my mind) manner of living, efforts by a man like Dr. King might have rendered him useful.

Instead, his character, and eventually his life, was assassinated - and that, with the help of the invisible hand of even the government, which was designed to protect the life, liberty, and property of its citizens.

Language does change over time... but I don't know if "well organized society" would shift all that much, and I'm a little doubtful that an English Romantic would have used that term had she meant it in the way you're suggesting.

I do appreciate that there is a fundamental optimism behind these comments that are reinterpreting or slightly softening the implications of the quote, but if one really just takes the quote by itself, without parsing the language or excusing it as the product of another time and place... well, it's not all that great a sentiment, and more than a little dubious.

Let's try a little thought experiment: Does this quote work in the context of MS's most famous creation? Does it apply to either Frankenstein or his monster? Of course, these are fictional characters but does Dr. Frankenstein become an egomaniac because the society in which he exists wasn't well organized? Does his monster murder fewer of Frankenstein's family members because society wasn't properly organized to channel his soulless rage into more positive pursuits? I don't think that was the point in the novel....

Instead of those fictional characters, try real ones. Are there are lot of real world people whose energies were directed towards daring villainy that we can really lay off on society's disorganization?

Then let's consider reversing the situation. Think of some of the greatest, most daring heroes. Shall we attribute their heroism to an ORGANIZED society, or are they products of their own, internal drive and motivation? Can we attribute the heroism of the aforementioned example, Dr. King, to the well-organized and nurturing influence of 1950's and 1960's America? I find that supposition as doubtful as I find Shelley's suggestion that villains are the product of society's disorganization.