THE PROBLEM IN considering Coleridge’s political trajectory has largely been the consequence of attempting to read his various early works and private utterances as though they were all of one piece. This same error has been replicated with respect to his later writings; however, the superimposition of order has tended to reverse the focus on political questions. That is to say, critics have searched for the radical tones in the early writings and sought out the most conservative aspects of the later work in their search for apostasy, or indeed even consistency, in Coleridge’s life. While I would argue for coherence and continuity in Coleridge’s career, I would resist the impulse to “tidy” Coleridge up. I would also suggest that any assessment of Coleridge’s overarching principles must be made in terms of balance over time and that such a balance depends on a reading of his underlying principles as they pertained to a complex network of ever-changing political realities.
Like most people, Coleridge’s opinions on various subjects tended to present themselves in terms which suggested an ambivalence towards reductionism and the doctrinaire. Human conviction is harder to educe than the simple utterance of a single text. The specific principle or event in light of its consequence, the particular audience for the work, the immediate emotional context of a letter: all of these must be considered in order to judge an individual’s overarching principles as they pertain to any given moment in life. If these various expressions of belief are passionate and contradictory, or fragmentary, the problem is exacerbated. In Coleridge’s case this is unusually true. Nonetheless, there have been numerous efforts to categorize Coleridge’s political sensabilities. “Apostate,” “mime,” “glacier,” and “unconscious man” are the epithets associated with four classic theories of Coleridge’s political development that have attempted to delineate a pattern for his thought from 1794 to 1834.
The crucial years of 1795 and 1802 have often been presented as two possible loci for Coleridge’s “apostasy” away from “radicalism” toward “conservatism.”1 Many critics suggest that in the early months of 1795, Coleridge’s writings reflected an active support for popular “radicalism.” Coleridge abandoned the “radical” cause, these interpreters contend, when the tide of popular counterrevolutionary fervor and high-handed government muzzling of the “radicals” mounted in the closing months of the year.2
There seem to be four major schools of thought on the issue of the changes, if any, in Coleridge’s political ideas in 1795. The first school is that of “self-conscious apostasy,” as suggested by E. P. Thompson and his acolytes, a quick and Judas-like about-face that took place in either 1795 or 1802. The second school is that of the “mime,” which claims that Coleridge possessed a chameleon-like habit of shifting his opinions to conform to what he perceived to be the beliefs of his audience, in the same way that a weather vane turns to indicate the direction of the fresh winds. Given this propensity, Coleridge appeared to be in constant change and alteration, when in truth all that was changing was the audience to whom he conformed his ideas in search of better rhetorical effect. The third is that of a slow but sure evolution away from “radical” toward “Tory,” a sort of “glacial” change. The fourth and oddest is that Coleridge was not at all political during this segment of his life, the theory being that Coleridge was “inert and unconscious” in his youth and, indeed, throughout his career as to matters of practical politics. Each of these theories—the “apostate,” the “mime,” the “glacier,” and the “unconscious man”—has specific weaknesses; all tend to ignore the fundamental continuities in Coleridge’s work throughout his lifetime.
The “mimetic” thesis had an early articulation in Crane Brinton’s 1926 study of The Political Ideas of the English Romanticists.3 Brinton described this chameleon-like behavior as Coleridge’s “obliging way of adapting himself to the views of the person with whom he was dealing.”4 The interpretation continued to win adherents as recently as the work of Thomas McFarland in the mid-1980s.5 Its value was that it recognized that Coleridge was a complex and rhetorically sophisticated writer who did not speak with one voice and could not be successfully analyzed by those who presumed he did. McFarland believes that the suggestion that Coleridge was a young “Jacobin” is misleading because Coleridge used certain prorevolutionary idioms and locutions in order to reach his audience with a non-Jacobin message. In studying Coleridge, McFarland suggests, one must consider audience and context rather than simply pointing to the use of certain isolated phrases. Both Brinton and McFarland argue that Coleridge, in dealing with a wide diversity of audiences during some of the most politically supercharged decades in British history, used a variety of lexica in an attempt to reach various groups of readers. This suppleness of idiom, they agree, has led to unfair and inaccurate readings of Coleridge as “changing his mind” when all he was “changing” was his rhetorical strategy.
Pocock has contributed to the “glacial” thesis in his location of the romantics. He describes Coleridge as being a “republican” in youth and a “Tory” in his middle and late career, a pattern which Pocock also saw in Wordsworth and Southey.6 Pocock has analyzed this change as a major shift in opinions without employing E. P. Thompson’s morally supercharged and fundamentally negative term of “apostasy.”7 Pocock’s examination of Coleridge’s career has been shaped by his opinion that the discourse of “classical republicanism,” to which he thinks Coleridge subscribed, was an alternative, communitarian political language of virtu.8 This “republican” language, according to Pocock, was the masquerade costume of choice for those “citizens,” from Niccolo Machiavelli to John Thelwall, who aped antique virtues (which they imagined to have existed in the incorrupt and manly polities of the ancient Spartans and late-republican Romans) in the service of moral and political rinovazione. According to Pocock, this language of the stalwart citizen protecting his civically constructed rights through the dutiful exercise of virtú and rinovazione was opposed to and fundamentally incompatible with the rival language asserting God-given claims to individual natural rights (ius). The language of ius was employed by proponents of cosmopolitan and Continentally based jurisprudential theory (Jurieu, Grotius, Pufendorf), a discourse which spoke of the “Universal Rights of Man” rather than the virtues and duties of citizens of a particular realm. The pagan/classical language of citizen-virtue among the republicans was also a contradiction to the Christian/medieval discourse of Tory paternalism, patriarchalism, staunch churchmanship, high monarchism, and noblesse oblige.
A fourth strand of thought contends that not only was Coleridge not an apostate in 1795 or 1802, nor a mime, nor even a glacially paced evolver-away from youthful ideas, but was instead politically “unconscious.” Jonathan Mendalow argues that Coleridge’s ideas during 1795 and, indeed, throughout his career, were aimed predominantly towards “religious and metaphysical speculation” and never turned specifically towards “questions of constitution, law, and practical politics.”9 While Mendalow’s thesis may be dismissed as the weakest of the four, it is finally the “apostasy” thesis, with its concomitant model of “disappointed radicalism,” which has continued to dominate literary and historical accounts, both of Coleridge’s political thought and the cultural and political realignment of party politics in the 1790s.10
Coleridge has long been viewed as one of a group of English romantic poets whose political careers can be conveniently divided into three distinct political stages: “Jacobin radicalism,” “apostasy,” and “Tory conservatism.” In the first stage, the “radical” period, the poets in question are supposed to have uncritically and wholeheartedly embraced the principles of the French Revolution and the cause of parliamentary reform and served with distinction on the polemical barricades of democratic revolt against the old regimes of Europe. In the second stage, the moment of “apostasy,” they are described as having turned tail and deserted the Jacobin cause in the hour of its greatest need, in a series of sudden and traitorous acts of defection. In the third phase, the “Tory conservative” period, they are presumed to have settled into a long and profitable senescence in which they enjoyed the fruits of their apostasy as lackeys of the counterrevolution. In these final years, they are thought to have obsequiously defended the same values of landed hierarchy, titled nobility, and feudal chivalric tradition that they had so recently marked out for destruction.
Like all myths of betrayal from Brutus and Judas through the Duke of Marlborough to Benedict Arnold and Charlotte Corday, the “apostasy” model offers the tempting high drama that is absent from so much political history.11 The dagger blow to a great politician or cause, if it comes from the hand of a recognized enemy, only has the status of a detestable murder. The dagger blow attains the height of the horror and power of tragedy if (and only if) the stab in the back comes instead from the unsuspected hand of a trusted friend: then it partakes of the sin of betrayal as well as the sin of assassination. The anguished cry, “Et tu, Brute? Then fall, Caesar,” is not so far from the style and tenor of the mythicized description, in conventional historiographical accounts of the 1790s and 1800s, of the execrable “apostasy” of the great romantics from their early and admirable devotion to democracy.
Historians such as E. P. Thompson have charged Coleridge, along with Southey and Wordsworth, with a dramatic “apostasy” of this sort against British Jacobinism, the political movement that Thompson saw as having offered Britain a narrowly fumbled opportunity for a true democratic revolution in the 1790s.12 Thompson and those who followed in his footsteps harnessed the rhetorical power of the myth of betrayal to their equally powerful myth of lost opportunity through which they depicted the English 1790s. Given that Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class was Marxist historiography’s own mythographic Acts of the Apostles, Coleridge and the romantics were ably and dramatically cast in the roles of its Judases.
Literary critics such as Meyer H. Abrams added to this myth of treason against the cause a biological and sociological explanation based on another myth, that of “idealistic youth” and “cynical old age.” The romantic poets’ process of disenchantment and retreat from their youthful idealism, argued Abrams, represented the universal experiences of maturation, encroaching cynicism, and despair.13 Coleridge’s experience, Abrams believed, reflected a common human process, the disillusionment attendant to age and experience. Simply put, young men are radical and old men are conservative.14
One naturally begins to ask when reading these works on Coleridge’s “apostasy,” whose radical? whose Tory? whose apostasy? One also begins to suspect that the apparent retrograde movement of “apostasy” was merely the optical illusion produced by Coleridge remaining constant in his principles even as his associates moved rapidly forwards into even more (contextually) “radical” positions than those he could support.15 If one is interested in seeing Coleridge as more than the stock villain in the tragedy of the death of the British Revolution, one must question this myth of “apostasy” and see how far it corresponds to facts. For one begins after any extended study of Coleridge and other thinkers of this era to question the value of these terms—“radical,” “conservative,” “Jacobin,” “Tory”—as they are so often uncritically and polemically applied to the politics of the 1790s. Obviously, in order to judge sensibly whether Coleridge was once a “radical” and then became a “Tory,” it is necessary to understand the meaning of those terms as they have traditionally been used in studies of Coleridge and his time. Beyond the observation that a radical/Tory dichotomy comprises a mixed metaphor of ideological category and party political label, the question of change must be addressed not only to Coleridge but also to the meaning of those terms. Radical or conservative, the problem of using nineteenth-century political vocabulary in analysis of the 1790s (or indeed the entire eighteenth century) remains confused by the failure to use either ideological or party political labels with any degree of consistency or with any establishment of relative benchmarks.
During the last decade, considerable debate has addressed the nature, vocabulary, and taxonomy of the political ideology of “radicalism” during the 1790s. Discussion of 1790s “radicalism,” generally speaking, tends to divide scholars into three camps. The first one is that of the reconstructors. The second is that of the debunkers. The third and final position is that of the pantheon builders. Much of the misunderstanding and rancor that characterizes scholarly debate on this era is due to the incompatibility of these three approaches.
Obviously, the divergent goals of these groups—to reconstruct mentalities, to debunk cant, or to find one’s political ancestors—result in different approaches to the problem of “radicalism” in the 1790s. Although few scholars are pure examples of any of these three “types,” most researchers into the marginal political movements of the 1790s do tend to undertake study of the “radical” movement either by seeking to discover how that term was used in the 1790s or by rejecting the lexicon of the period and evaluating “radicalism” by political deeds rather than by words or by presuming a “radical tradition” and looking for its earliest members.
The first group is that of the “reconstructors” of the political discourse of the 1790s. Their work owes much to the Annales school of the histoire des mentalités, as well as to the works of Michel Foucault on the archaeology of knowledge. The historiography of reconstruction is based on the theory that a given society’s political lexicon constructs and bounds the perception of what is “possible” in that society. It follows from this contention that the political vocabulary used by that society to describe itself will more accurately mirror the “real world” of that day than terms borrowed from later eras with different mentalités. This style of historiography, therefore, focuses its efforts on discovering what sorts of terms people living in that period used to describe their political parties and political actions. It tends to discredit and condemn all interpretations of a period that use concepts that were nonexistent in the lexicon of that period (such as “Puritan” in the 1550s, “middle class” in the 1640s, “petite bourgeoisie” in the 1750s, “Tory” in the 1770s, or “radical” in the 1790s) as “anachronistic” and therefore wrong. Therefore, if scholars are to be strictly “chronistic” in their use of political vocabulary appropriate to this age, they must eschew the term “radical,” however much they may like it. They must choose other terms to describe the movement.16
Jonathan Clark has found himself in the position of attacking the historiography of “radicalism” in the 1790s on reconstructionist grounds. Clark argues that if we are ever to understand the politics of the 1790s, we must cease applying anachronistic terminology to them. Although “radical” developed recognized meanings by the 1790s, he argues that radicalism emerged in the 1810s and 1820s, its component parts from earlier and limited uses assembled “in novel and unexpected ways.” He concludes that only if we can reconstruct or “date and analyze” that “conceptual innovation” can radicalism be “recovered as a valid term of historical analysis.”17
The second approach is that of “unmasking” a given political lexicon, the approach of the “debunkers.” This second variety of work is based on an assumption that people use language generally to conceal rather than to communicate reality. Knowing that political labels and party rhetoric consist mostly of what Lewis Namier famously described as “names and cant,” such historians act in sharp contrast to the lexicon reconstructors. Where the reconstructors tend to accept and embrace the lexica of the past as valid, the debunkers almost always end up rejecting the political language of the past as failed models of reality that were inaccurate in their own time and misleading to historians in subsequent periods, particularly our own. The tribe of Geoffrey Elton, Lewis Namier, and Ian Christie tend to be profoundly skeptical about the utility of study of wifty political discourse that does not root itself in the hard-headed and eagle-eyed study of how the politicians of the era actually acted, as opposed to how they said they acted. Ian Christie’s well-known book Myth and Reality expresses the fundamental belief of Christie and his ilk that a scholar may only hope to learn as much about the truth of politics by studying its rhetoric as a medical student could hope to learn about pharmacology from the patter of a snake-oil salesman.
The “debunkers” invariably discover that the radicals were not really so radical after all. To their opponents, of course, they were beyond the pale and introduced novel ideas. But once one examines their writings under the cold light of the comparative history of political thought, they do not seem so “radically” different from Whigs of the era. The major difference between a fiery radical and a staid reformer, according to the “debunkers,” was the speed and degree of change they desired rather than the direction of that change.
Two major expositors of this view of the “radicals” as a more daring set of Whigs have been H. T. Dickinson and Gunther Lottes. Dickinson has suggested that the French Revolution had its greatest impact on the “new and more radical societies that sprang up in London and the provinces in the early 1790s.”18 These British Jacobins adopted the “more extreme political program of the earlier reformer.”19 Dickinson suggests that something qualitatively different in platform and approach characterized these popular reform societies during the period of the French Revolution.
British radicalism during the 1790s was, in Dickinson’s view, the more daring brother of Whiggism. The radicals in their audacity adopted a more extreme and innovative ideology than that espoused by those Whigs (like Burke and Portland) who favored a moderate constitutional or economical reform. Indeed, for Dickinson, the British Jacobins only evinced a more extreme position than that held by the association and petitioning movements of the late 1760s and early 1780s (i.e., Christopher Wyvill or even James Burgh and Major John Cartwright).20
Gunther Lottes has tended to agree with Dickinson’s vision of the radicals as the more daring customizers of standard-issue Whig political ideology. Lottes has described radicalism as embracing a very broad agenda indeed—one in keeping with traditional reform arguments which reached back to 1688 and beyond.21 Nonetheless, Lottes, who argues for the constitutional nature of this radical polemic, acknowledges that during the revolutionary period, “some theorists like John Thelwall, Thomas Spence and William Godwin went far beyond this frame of reference.”22
The third major approach is that of pantheon building. This branch of historiography sees history as a model for and inspiration to political action. It therefore interests itself in building up a “radical tradition” that it can use to evangelize followers into political action of the sort that they praise in past times.23 The pantheon builders tend to be unconcerned that their uses of terms such as “radical” in the description of the 1790s are anachronistic, since their goal is to show how the “primitive radicals” of those days and before evolved into the sophisticated radicals whose inspirers they strive to be.
The most famous exponent of this approach has been E. P. Thompson, whose Making of the English Working Class still exerts its gravity on scholars more than forty years after its first edition. But the reification of a radical and a conservative tradition into something that is far more than just hyperactive Whiggism or a false and anachronistic use of nineteenth-century terms is not entirely the province of Marxist labor historians. Philip Schofield has examined conservative ideology during the period with a view to understanding the polemical range of the 1790s. He has interpreted the conservative position as consisting of “theological utilitarianism, social contract theory, and natural law tradition.”24 According to Schofield, conservatism constituted a “whole moral and political theory that undermined the intellectual foundations of radical theory.”25 Schofield sets this ideology against the rights-of-man theorists, and in terms of the “more solid ground of economic prosperity and social happiness.”26 For Thompson and Schofield, the “radicals” of the 1790s are aptly named, in a fundamental way that they are not in Clark’s or Dickinson’s accounts of extremist politics in the period.
My argument for the most part accepts Dickinson and Lottes’ basic premise that radicals were the “hotter sort of Whigs.” On the other hand, it does not enter into the camp of the “debunkers,” since it contends that there were recognizably radical approaches to politics in the 1790s that escaped the traditional boundaries of Whiggism. Although the “radicals” were not called by such a name at the time, they were in their own time recognized as different, novel, and extreme. In my reconstruction of what “radicalism” meant in 1795, I have avoided both the excessive verbal niceties of the “reconstructors,” suggesting that the convenience and relative accuracy of post facto terms such as “radicals” outweighs the dangers of their abuse by anachronistic pantheon builders. Thus, my own solution to this persistent and probably insoluble puzzle of political categorization in the 1790s is that there were indeed “radicals” of a sort, notorious for their “Frenchified” egalitarian-democratic ideas and far-ranging, novel proposals for innovation in government and society, but Coleridge was never among their number. The hallmarks of “real” radicalism—antimonarchism in some cases leading to a republican intent to dethrone all kings; anti-aristocratic sentiment in some cases leading to an egalitarian desire to abolish all hereditary titles; strong anticlericalism in some cases leading to a desire for disestablishment; proposals for the immediate or rapid expansion of the electoral franchise to the lower orders; consistent philo-Gallicism in many cases until and even after the Terror; and (in many cases) suggestions for the redivision or redistribution of property to offer greater economic power to the disenfranchised—appear in Paine and Spence, but not in Coleridge.
The traditional grouping of Coleridge amongst the radicals, I argue, is due to at least four factors. The first factor is the assumption that all romantic poets “transgressed” social norms of elite hegemony, since poetry is a liminal art form, and that therefore Coleridge, since he was a romantic poet and therefore “transgressive,” must have been a radical. The second factor is the persistent misreading of his nonpartisan friendships with those radicals with whom he openly associated. The third factor is a naive acceptance by scholars of contemporary critics’ claims that Coleridge was a rabble-rouser. The fourth factor, perhaps the most important of all in recent years, is a decontextualized reading of certain difficult and hyperbolic passages in the lectures that isolates “radical” phrases while ignoring reams of moderate phraseology and argumentation.
Coleridge’s earliest political thought may best be considered within the context of those works that, over the course of his entire lifetime, contributed to a theory of human societies as dynamic, living, social, moral, and economic matrices. He did not, of course, publish a full-dress version of his systematic moral and political social theory until his late work of 1830, on Church and State.27 However, one may detect assumptions as to the nature of history, power, and public opinion of the sort that Schofield defines as quintessentially “conservative” in Coleridge’s earliest writings of 1795, when he was supposed by conventional accounts to have been a fiery radical.
Coleridge’s first forays into politics were not at all characteristic of British “Jacobinism” as practiced by Thelwall, Paine, Spence, the Scots Martyrs, or the Conventioneers.28 His political vision was consistent from 1795 to 1830 in its moderate, pragmatic constitutionalism. In his earliest writings on the liberty of the press, party spirit, Pitt’s “ministerial treason,”29 revolution and reform, Coleridge displayed a respect for organic moderation, disgust at all governmental policies of terror, dislike of politicians’ exploitation of the passions of the moment, and mistrust of paper constitutions. The above are all traits that are so atypical of British Jacobinism that they are usually seen as hallmarks of Burke’s counterrevolutionary writings of the same period. Coleridge consistently adhered to this perspective, grounded in his fundamental religious and ethical principles, in the face of the rapidly shifting political realities of these years and the changing reader response which those shifting realities brought about. No less an authority on English reactions to the French Revolution than Albert Goodwin once noted that the chaos of the Revolution so warped responses to politics that political opinions which had been approved of in the 1770s and 1780s suddenly became regarded as scandalous or dangerous after 1792.30 Such was Coleridge’s fate. With respect to the charge of Jacobinism, the so-called self-indictment of Coleridge’s youthful exuberance, “when first” he “squeaked” his “tinny trumpet of sedition,” must be set against the overwhelming evidences against.
Knowing that Coleridge himself had always rejected the charge of Jacobinism, it remains to be seen, “in any of [Coleridge’s] writings,”31 whether charges of his having espoused a French Jacobin–style, democratic republicanism in 1795 were justified. It is true that he admired (and rhetorically made use of) the classical republicanism of the past. He had little but praise for the historic defenders of freedom among the ancient Greeks and Romans (such as Lycurgus and Cicero), the Commonwealthmen of the Civil War era (such as Milton and Harrington), and the first Whigs (such as Locke and Sidney). But this generic love of the “great tradition” of fighters for liberty did not, on its own, betoken admiration for the avant-garde anti-monarchial republicanism so favored by the radicals of the 1790s.32 Nor did it entail admiration for Robespierre and other Jacobin leaders.
Three major aspects of Coleridge’s thought make theories of his early “Jacobinism” unlikely and probably unsustainable. First, Coleridge rejected the Jacobin languages of the natural rights of man and the equality of the people as mechanistic fallacies, “half-truths” that missed the deeper reality of political ideas. Second, he supported the influence of the national clergy and religion in the activities of the state, whereas most Jacobins tended to be anticlerical. Third, by his assumption throughout his life of the role of a nonjoiner and a critic, he deliberately excluded himself from the world of party politics and refused to accept any political creed, whether Jacobin, Foxite, or Pittite.
Coleridge varied from the “patriot politics” of the British Jacobins because he consistently articulated a “conservative” social theory that was incompatible with the “radical” political rhetoric grounded in the language of abstract general principles and natural rights on which Jacobinism rested. Coleridge consistently derided Jacobinism as narrowly mechanistic, even in his earliest writings. In this respect, his condemnation of the French Revolution was not so different from Burke’s well-known denunciation of the new regime in France as the work of “sophists,” “economists,” and “calculators,” or Samuel Johnson’s famous quip that he found most philosophical “schemes for improvement” to be very laughable things. The “mechanism” to which Coleridge so frequently alluded was a conception of ideas and, more pointedly, political and social institutions, which was formalistic, positive, or utilitarian. Such an account of society, predicated as it was on a narrowly mechanical model of the world, could only produce the fatal moral nescience born of false science.
Mechanistic philosophy, to Coleridge’s mind, put into full force the worst aspects of the empiricist epistemology of Locke, which ignored the underlying truths of reality while focusing on the phenomena and ephemera of the sensory world. Such ideas constituted “half-truths, more dangerous than lies.”33 The conviction that “half-truths” were more dangerous than lies became one of Coleridge’s most persistent themes. He warned against such theoretical fallacies as late as his 1830 publication, On The Constitution of the Church and State. He believed that all theoretical maxims were by their very nature imperfect and fragmentary assertions of truth; as such, they could not stand the test of common sense.34
Half-truths, while providing less than satisfactory explanations of the moral and metaphysical world, were especially dangerous as grounds for pragmatic decisions in politics. Adherents of these false philosophies ignored the living, organic nature of human polities, treating the dynamic matrix of society as if it were a machine in which unsatisfactory parts could be torn out and replaced with new designs with no regard to the original configuration of the machine itself. Such vulgar materialism, even when expressed by “friends of liberty,” suggested a mind sealed off from the study of the “real,” transcendent world of ideas and forms and the telos of government, the study of which alone could lead to true political wisdom.
The French Revolution was, for Coleridge, an important example of imperfect and fragmentary theory applied as wholesale remedy to a practical crisis. He would later describe Jacobinism as “monstrum-hybridum,” a grotesque and sterile conjoining of the most beautiful parts of existing creatures that resulted in a hideous freak.35 In its lack of common sense, in its inability to compromise, the French Revolution had been grounded entirely in “half-truths.” When institutionalized into a system for action, it had proven far deadlier than a lie. Such a system, of mechanized morality, was fundamentally at odds with Coleridge’s own moral and political philosophy.
The second idea to divide Coleridge from the “Jacobins,” whether English or French, was his conventional religious piety.36 Coleridge was never at ease with the often anti-Christian and anticlerical tone of the Revolution in France, which in its more violent phases among the strictest sansculotte “radicals” aspired to do away with all priests and churches and place a generic Cult of Reason in their place.
Throughout his life, Coleridge’s philosophy was consistently underscored by his own deeply personal religious conviction and his persistent commitment to freedom of conscience in matters of religious belief as the critical driving force behind political “independence”: in short, the autarchy of the individual will was the essence of the free moral citizen. Although Coleridge may have mulled over alternative Christologies or even prefigured some of the vague, impersonal ideas of the Godhead that would later appear in the American transcendentalists, he never renounced his lifetime commitment to a fundamentally Christian system of belief. Indeed, he abhorred atheism and seems to have considered one of the successes of his life his convincing Godwin to at least become a theist rather than an outright atheist.37 His language in his early years showed a pervasive Anglican evangelical vocabulary of personal redemption and repentance.38 Whatever ideas on the relationship of the Father to the Son his anti-Trinitarian speculations may have led to, his soteriology appears to have been that shared by Anglicans such as Cowper and More. Coleridge represented that unfortunate Christian strand of reformism characterized by Price and Priestley. Loyalty to traditional theism made extreme anticlerical “radicals” denounce it as a prop of the Old Regime. But its reconsideration of Athanasian formulae of Christ’s nature made “Orthodox” Christians attack it as an enemy to that same old establishment.
Coleridge’s career as a political writer began with six lectures at Bristol on “Revealed Religion” in 1795, and ended with his conception of the social and political significance of a National Church in On The Constitution of the Church and State According to the Idea of Each in 1830. Throughout his lifelong attempts at forging an ethical system that would be a ground for political action and social reality, Coleridge insisted upon the need to “bottom on fixed principles” and his philosophical adherence to moderation and compromise were always in mind. His Broad-Church sensibilities and his love of moderation and toleration for their own sake were as incompatible with Jacobinism’s quest for unity and ideological purity as were his philoclericalism and his Christian belief.
Coleridge’s image of himself as a true political independent and therefore the critic of all things was a third aspect setting him apart from the “Jacobin” party. It excluded him from the increasingly sectarian and factional interests of the reform societies of the late 1790s, which demanded the “citizen’s” close loyalty to the group. It also made him an enemy of the rhetoric of Pittite law, which maligned all who criticized the government as “seditious” or “unpatriotic.” Coleridge’s political writings throughout this period reflected his lifelong belief in the cult of the political independent. Coleridge often skirted absurdity in his attempts to be an “independent” man, a critical voice who stood outside the petty groupthink of slogans, parties, and factions. As John Morrow has argued, the vocal rejection of party spirit by Coleridge was an echo of the rhetoric of the “outsider” used to such effect in the Country Party polemic of the 1720s.39 Indeed, a contemporary from Bristol who contributed to The Monthly Magazine attested to the “independence” of Coleridge’s early politics. Writing under the designation “Q,” he recalled Coleridge’s politics from the Bristol days as “anti-Pittite and anti-Foxite” (my italics). “Q” continued that far from siding unreservedly with opponents of government, Coleridge had once delivered a “philippic” against Fox.40
In this regard it is best to view Coleridge’s writings as generically critical and polymorphously “oppositional” rather than factional, as independent rather than party-minded. His vision of himself as a public intellectual who fought only on the side of truth resembles the Socratic role of gadfly that Leo Strauss later defined as essential to the true political philosopher.41 Both saw the true political philosopher as a man of vision able to see through the exoteric cant of party rhetoric, and who dared to plumb the dangerous depths of true esoteric wisdom without fear of the criticism he would incur for doing so. Arguably, Coleridge’s end-of-career scheme for the clerisy was designed to produce a sort of Straussian elite who would be trained in criticism rather than in creed and who would provide an objective voice that could clearly articulate the foibles of society.
Contemporary friends such as Hazlitt, Cottle, and Southey and twentieth-century critics of Coleridge such as Holmes and Jackson failed to make a convincing case for locating Coleridge within a tightly factional framework of party politics.42 It is very hard to conceive of a man as being a traitor to a political party to which he never belonged; similarly, a man cannot be deemed a heretic for diverting from a creed that he has never confessed. Coleridge’s temperament precluded him from professing a creed (whether political or religious) on the grounds that creedal allegiance to party or church would erode his critical independence. This habit of mind anchored his judgment to a criterion of fidelity to his own personal cult of outsidership. This same self-professed independence makes Coleridge extremely slippery when measured by political-party categories. He invariably evades any critical attempts to pin him down as easily as he evaded his contemporaries’ attempts to categorize him.
If one rejects the view that regards the Coleridge of the Bristol Lectures period as a Jacobin or radical, what becomes of the myth of “apostasy’? The charge of “apostasy” to the cause was the natural response of those friends who falsely assumed that Coleridge’s affiliations and sympathies were the same as their own and who were shocked to discover that this was not the case.
Southey’s accounts of his early friendship with Coleridge provide much of the evidence for the claims of “apostasy” and “betrayal” maintained by Edward Thompson, Nicholas Roe, and others. Southey wrote of Coleridge’s early politics that
It is worse than folly [for Coleridge to deny that he was ever a Jacobin], for if he was not a jacobine in the common acceptation of the word, I wonder who the devil was. I am sure that I was, am still, and ever more shall be. I am sure too that he wrote a flaming panegyric of Tom Paine, and that I delivered it in one of my lectures.43
Unfortunately, Southey is open to charges of hypocrisy in his criticisms of Coleridge. Such tu quoque charges, if they do not precisely rid Coleridge of the charge of apostasy, arguably sully Southey’s credibility as a witness. Lewis Patton, one of the editors of Coleridge’s works, used his introduction to Lectures 1795 to examine Southey’s motives for calling Coleridge a turncoat. Pointing out Southey’s bias, Patton wondered whether Southey maintained the tone of virtuous indignation, of radical scorned, in the presence of his neighbors and patrons, Sir George Beaumont and Lord Lonsdale. Southey’s advancement to poet laureate by 1813 was itself accompanied by a reasonable degree of political inconstancy, if his pantisocratic youth is to be viewed as a polemical marker. Oddly enough, Southey in 1795 had claimed authorship of the “panegyric to Tom Paine” which he foisted onto Coleridge in his 1809 denunciations.44
Coleridge addressed the issue of his own supposed Jacobinism in an 1803 letter to Sir George Beaumont. He complained that he had been forced into “retirement” from active political life in the year 1796 at the age of twenty-four, “disgusted beyond measure by the manners and morals of the Democrats.”45 This hardly suggests someone who was socially or intellectually suited to the social world of promoting liberty, equality, and fraternity. It also implies that there was a fundamental elitism that Coleridge felt in the presence of the “Democrats,” whom, he felt, exhibited the degraded mores of those who they wished to elevate into franchise.
Because he did not see himself as belonging to the “party” of the democrats, Coleridge was typically dumbfounded when less careful intellects (who saw even the mildest reformists through the lurid, blood-colored “spectacles of prejudication” in the wake of the Terror) associated him with that sect. A violent swarm of critical opprobrium arose in response to Coleridge’s 1794 publication The Fall of Robespierre, a mordant condemnation of the late chief of the Jacobins, the dictator Maximilien Robespierre.46 In a heartfelt 1794 letter to his brother George, Coleridge bemoaned the fact that “People have resolved that I am a Democrat” despite the burden of evidence to the contrary. He realized that those who had already lumped him in with the arch-Jacobins would continue to do so no matter what his doctrine or conduct, simply because they “look at everything I do with the spectacles of prejudication.” He wrote much of this bigoted reaction off as the inevitable result of the upper ranks’ paranoia in the wake of the Terror: “In the feverish distemperature of a bigoted Aristocrat’s brain some phantom of democracy threatens him in every corner of my writings.”47 Even at this early stage, Coleridge saw his status as a “democrat” as given to him by his enemies rather than his friends. It is certainly significant that even before the traditional date of his “apostasy” he saw the label of “democrat” not as a badge of honor, but as a denunciation pinned on him by those imbeciles who saw a “phantom of democracy” in his writings. Coleridge mocked their belief in his Jacobinism as “feverish distemperature,” the same sort of paranoia that made small children create bugbears from the shadows in their bedrooms late at night. Referring to the book against Robespierre specifically, he continued,
[Because my polemic on Robespierre’s fall] is an anti-pacific one, I should have classed it among the anti-polemics—Again are all who entertain and express this opinion [deriding the war against France] Democrats? God forbid [that it were ever the case that all who opposed the war were necessarily Democrats, for then] they would be a formidable party indeed! I know many violent anti-reformists, who are as violent against the war on the ground that it may introduce that reform which they (perhaps not unwisely) imagine would chant the dirge of our constitution.—Solemnly my brother! I tell you—I am not a Democrat.48
Several things become clear in this passage. First, Coleridge stressed that his opposition to the war against France did not make him a pro-Democrat; he decried this linkage with a shudder of “God forbid.” Second, unlike the true “radicals,” who tended to see a natural, broad support for their work amongst the dispossessed, Coleridge did not believe there were many “democrats” at all. Indeed, he could not envision the democrats seriously as “a formidable party” unless they could be (wrongly) redefined as consisting of anyone who for any reason defied the hawkish strategy of the Pittite War Party. Third, he considered his distaste with the war analogous to that of the “anti-reformists.” Both he and they, for different reasons, disliked the war against France because it would unintentionally bring about alterations that would end by destroying the “constitution.”49 He hated the war not from a wish to protect the French system of government but from a desire to preserve the English system. Coleridge’s outrage at the conflation of all criticism of government policy with democratic principle is suggestive of his own political neutrality. He viewed himself even amidst the heat and fury of 1794 as a moderating voice: moderate and, most significantly, independent.
Coleridge’s political independence owed more to the ancient and tradition-bound British “country” tradition of criticism in politics than it did to the new doctrines of radical anarchism which some have associated with William Godwin’s writings.50 The idée fixe of a freely critical political intelligence and autonomous voice, which Coleridge held at the heart of his self-conception of his role as a political actor, made him prone to use the “language of the outsider” in his politics. The great language of political “outsidership” in the England of 1794 was still the “country” tradition. The “country” tradition in politics had been perfected in the seventeenth century as a strategy for denouncing the political misdeeds of the “court” and “administration” from the allegedly more objective and more ethically pure stance of those not on the ministerial dole.51 Coleridge’s lectures and pamphlets of 1795 borrowed from critical geniuses of all parties, from the great “Whig” Shaftesbury, the great “Tory” Bolingbroke, the great “reformer” Burgh, to the great “conservative” Burke. But he was especially drawn to the critical acuity of the “country” tradition, which, after all, was Britain’s own home-grown and authentic reformist movement rather than a graft from a foreign tree.
John Morrow argued in favor of the affinities that Coleridge had for Godwin rather than Burke, despite the moderate tone of A Moral and Political Lecture. But if Coleridge was also influenced by Godwin the constitutional historian, and not only by the author of Political Justice, then the affinities that Coleridge felt for Godwin and Burke should not prove to be incompatible. While Coleridge did hold certain views in common with Godwin in these early pamphlets, he disagreed most emphatically with Godwin’s view that a disinterested benevolence that treated all men as one’s neighbors and brothers was attainable and desirable. Godwin was, of course, famous for expounding the doctrine that a proper and true moral agent would consider all humans equally as objects of his care. The perfect Godwinian benevolent man would refuse to ration his charity on the traditional basis of preferring family and friends to strangers in deciding whom to help and would instead extend his bounty equally to all. Coleridge, although he favored an expansive vision of charity on a Gospel-based model, found Godwin’s proposition that humans should completely give up their ties to locality and family an inhuman and preposterous scheme.
Given Coleridge’s fundamental breach with Godwin on this issue, Morrow is inaccurate in arguing that Coleridge’s view was “quite consistent with the rationalism of writers such as Godwin, who started from the ‘grand and comprehensive truth’ of universal benevolence.”52 Coleridge did use the phrase, “some grand and comprehensive truth,” in A Moral and Political Lecture. However, when he used the phrase he was not referring to Godwin’s concept of benevolence. Coleridge saw “grand and comprehensive truth” in the context of the need to “bottom on fixed principles.”53 His choice of words may have intentionally echoed Burke’s proposition that “opinion [should be] … bottomed upon solid principles of law and policy.”54 At any rate, Coleridge’s and Burke’s concepts of “fixed principles” were kindred formulations of the same problem in a way that Coleridge’s and Godwin’s concepts of “grand and comprehensive truth” were not. Coleridge’s “fixed principles,” since they belonged to the only partly knowable world of ideas, were seen as through a glass darkly. Only “half-truths” could be so foolish as to parade about in the dress of mathematical certainty that Godwin and other system-builders assumed for their work. The “fixed principles” of which Coleridge spoke could not be defined with a geometer’s precision because they always remained obscured by the contingencies and particularities of history. Only the active historical process, not any system of positive formulation, could hope to achieve the ideal of “political justice” that Godwin hoped to reach through pure principle.
Coleridge attempted to reconcile what he perceived to be opposite camps in a political crisis of ideology and rhetoric. To Coleridge, the conflict of the 1790s was at its root a battle that set “French theory” against the “science of history.” This crisis accelerated and became more violent due to the British reaction to the revolution in France and Pitt’s need for a strong set of executive powers to conduct the war as he wished.
The success of the Jacobin hunts of 1794 to 1795 had pushed the reform movement into a more “radical” opposition to the government: “radical” in the Dickinsonian sense. Coleridge contended that the set of “constitutional abuses” of the years 1792 to 1795, which, he believed, Pitt had forged as a gauntlet for crushing “Jacobins,” were every bit as severe and grave in their own way as the destructive forces which had been let loose by the French Revolution.55 Pitt’s Terror, it was argued, mirrored Robespierre’s. The two men’s policies of repression were the same phenomenon in looking-glass variants. The only difference was that while in the French “side” of the mirror the iron gauntlet of Terror appeared to be worn on the dictator’s left hand, on the British side of the mirror it appeared to glove the dictator’s right hand.
By Coleridge’s estimate, during the years 1792 through 1795, the Crown and administration had eroded or suspended the stabilizing effects of constitutional balance and the just operation of the courts and public opinion. In a healthy polity, claimed Coleridge, the gradual bringing-about of political justice through the courts, the constitution, and the “public will” allowed the continued development of the nation through an organic and historically evolving social process. He contended in his anti-Pitt writings that this social process must be defended as the best means of both developing and exploring the “fixed principles” (“the grand comprehensive truth”) that he believed existed in the realm of ideas. Only Providence, or the teleological “science of history” as he called it, could reveal these “fixed principles” as valid.
The critique of Pitt rested on Coleridge’s personal development of his own theories of three crucial social phenomena: ethics, historical development, and enlightenment. Coleridge charted the relationship between these principles through a criticism of political “function” and an analysis of the “agency” of public opinion. Through a better understanding of politics and power as historical processes, he believed that moderate reform could be achieved and, more importantly, violent revolution avoided.
Having considered the evidences against Coleridge as a youthful radical it remains to be seen whether there was any degree of merit to the characterization of him as a late-life Tory. While he was hostile to much of the policy associated with the rising school of political economy and consequently felt a greater degree of sympathy to the Liverpool government than to its opposition, there is much evidence to weigh against the view of Coleridge as a conventional Tory supporter. Most ideologically based interpretations of Coleridge’s political thought have tended to focus on his early career and the question of his “radicalism.” Less has been written about the “conservatism” of his later works, such as Church and State. This is presumably because although Coleridge ceases to be useful as a subject for the scholars of “radicalism” after his assumed “apostasy” in about 1800 gives him the taint of the turncoat, he does not tend to be adopted into the pantheon of subjects for scholars of “conservatism” in the nineteenth century because of his checkered past and his presumed (and largely undocumented) Unitarian heterodoxy.56
The notion of Coleridge as a quintessentially reliable and dependable “Tory philosopher” was a standard assumption of the Victorian editors after the mid-nineteenth century. It was they who created the myth of Coleridge as a hot-headed, controversial youth who had held the torch of revolution high in the 1790s, but who finally grew old and settled back into a drowsy reactionary dotage in the 1820s, which he supposedly spent espousing the values of church and king from the comfort of a well-upholstered armchair. Coleridge was not so easily “domesticated” by his contemporaries and by the generation of philosophers immediately following his death.57 Among those who actually knew him or read his works, the “Sage of Highgate” was held in an almost superstitious awe for his ability to force his readers to reconsider standard problems of religion, philosophy, and politics in unusual and unconventional ways. Like all deeply critical intellects, Coleridge did not make a good party hack; he could not resist the urge to be unique or innovative even when he defended traditional institutions.58
One central question is persistently begged in the party-political analyses of Coleridge’s later “Tory” years. It has never been explained why a Tory philosopher, given that we presume Coleridge to have been a Tory partisan after 1809, wrote Church and State when he did. Why would a true-blue Tory write a treatise in favor of a deep and total reform of the church and the clergy on adoctrinal lines in an era when the party of church and king was doing its best to resist reformist attempts to clean up the church’s political structure, place its clergy under the management of politicians rather than prelates, and expand the church’s toleration? Like so much in the young Radical/old Tory mythology of Coleridge’s life, the vision of Coleridge in his middle and old age as the apostle of Toryism does not bear the weight of a close reading of documents such as Church and State. Indeed, his work on Church and State, according to John Stuart Mill, was so far from typical Tory formularies of the 1820s that it could be depended upon without fail to “set a Tory’s hair on end.”59 The problem, as Mill recognized, is that one may introduce as many pieces of evidence that suggest that the “old” Coleridge was a conservative liberal—the founder of what Mill famously called a “second strand” of liberalism——as one can introduce to prove that Coleridge in old age was the chief of Tories.
Coleridge from 1802 to 1830 definitely exemplified the “Tory” tradition in many writings. His respect for land, hereditary primogeniture, and hereditable titles as a basis for the values of honor and permanence was “Tory.” His advocacy of the retention of a state-supported and enlarged national clergy was “Tory.” His support of Peel’s paternalism in the instance of the 1818 Factory Acts was “new” Tory, but Tory all the same. His despite for Benthamite and Malthusian “scientific” solutions to complex social problems was generically “conservative,” but specifically Tory. His ascription of a large compass for the influence of the education of citizens into virtue and morality in the state owed much to “Tory” polemic. Finally, Coleridge’s contention that moral reform needed to precede extension of the franchise showed a Tory lack of faith in the disenfranchised in their native state of illiteracy and immorality.
However, during the same years of 1802 to 1830, Coleridge exemplified the “liberal” tradition in as many venues. His high esteem for commerce, the rise of fresh talent and ingenuity, and increasing capital as a basis for the values of liberty and “progression” (in the technical sense as it was used in Church and State) was “liberal.” His suggestion that a national clergy would transcend the classical limits of the Anglican confessional state and become a trans-Protestant “clerisy” that would include paid Dissenting pastors was “liberal.” Also liberal was his idea of the clerisy (as opposed to the clergy as a subset of the clerisy), which professed that the clerisy drew their inspiration from the best that the general community of moralists and thinkers had to offer rather than the specific traditional formularies of the Athanasian Creed. His attack on the excessive influence of the landowning classes in both houses of Parliament was “liberal.” His suggestion that the government had no business legislating morality and ought to allow each individual citizen the right to do as he pleased as long as he did not damage the rights of others was outrageously “liberal.” His belief that liberty was as important a value in the state as community and virtue and order was classically “liberal,” as was his suggestion that the franchise ought to be enlarged as soon as the subjects could be educated into their proper performance of duties. This list could be broadened far more, and indeed most of these contentions are made at length in the final chapters of this study. Essentially, Mill was correct in suggesting that Coleridge’s “Toryism,” if we wish to call it such, was far more “liberal” even than that of Peel on many fronts. In the end, the “old” Coleridge truly had attempted to forge a middle path for liberalism that would reconcile the “Tory” values listed in the preceding paragraph with the “liberal” values elucidated in this paragraph. It was Coleridge’s consistent belief that such a synthetic approach was only possible through the pursuit of deep philosophical or “underlying” fixed principles.
Having considered the ambivalences of Coleridge’s political opinions as they relate to conventional uses of modern ideological categories, it remains to explain the substance of those views of politics which reveal continuity in Coleridge’s principles. I would argue that the serious reintegration of Coleridge’s philosophical thought into his political principles suggests such deep continuities. Through his revival of an indigenous British Platonism, Coleridge used Bacon’s doctrine of the double truth to established the foundations of his statesman’s science. His essentially metaphysical approach to the underlying “fixed principles” of political and moral society must be understood in terms of this “double vision.” In short, Coleridge pursued the very practical science of the science of practice in politics. In doing so he revealed the interconnected unities of the principles of history, nature, and law as the empirically structured instruments of an ever-unfolding providence of agency and design.
Coleridge was preoccupied from his earliest writings—long before he encountered the German revival of the dialectic—with the cooperative relationships between opposed dualities of meaning. He constantly endeavored to balance, or moderate, opposing forces: reason and understanding, subject and object, theory and practice: to create a model of ideas in which, to use Blake’s celebrated phrase, the opposition of contrarieties led to progress. Isaiah Berlin evocatively pictured this duality in Coleridge as existing between an “ideal” or “higher” self, who inhabited the world of ideas, and his benevolent rule over the “lower,” “empirical” self in the material and moral world. Berlin described this phenomenon as “Coleridge’s great I AM over less transcendent incarnations of it in time and space.”60Coleridge’s own language for this “double vision” focused on the distinction between subject and object, between ideal and actual, between philosophic “reality” and practical morality. Even as Coleridge concerned himself with the formal validity of institutions as “Ideas” he maintained a belief that such institutions invariably contained or incorporated the activities of material forces and historical agents.
Coleridge’s reading of Kant and other German idealists from 1800 to 1817 gave him access to a rich vocabulary of “synthetics” and a teleological framework in which to embody his ideas.61 However, one can easily locate an earlier source for these “synthetic” ideas in Coleridge’s eager and enthusiastic readings, by 1796, of the seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonists, or “Plotinists” (as Coleridge called them), such as Cudworth and More.62 The link with the English tradition of “Platonism,” which is missing from so many accounts of Coleridge’s intellectual influences, is crucial. Without knowing of Coleridge’s link to “Plotinism,” it is difficult to explain how Coleridge had developed so many concepts that we normally think of as “Kantian” and “Hegelian” before he had ever read any books by Kant or Hegel. Without understanding his feverish embrace in his youth of the native-born Neoplatonist doctrine, it is difficult to see the rationale for Coleridge’s later devotion to the formation of a wholly English Platonist canon and tradition. English Neoplatonism suffused his earliest writings and provided him with the basic concepts for his “synthetic teleology.” His later encounter with the German idealists only refined and improved these ideas.63
Coleridge conceived of all change, whether historical, cultural, or moral, as resulting from the linked and mutually dependent interaction of opposing forces. This has led to suggestions that he lacked the courage or integrity to be on one side of a question or another. It must be reiterated that Coleridge’s dualist view of dynamic relations was not a throwing in of the towel. Nor was it the sign of an intellect too lazy to see which of the two contrarieties in a pair—land and money, church and state, ideas and concepts—was the “important” or “formative” one. Coleridge’s effort to combine analysis of all major factors in a system (rather than isolating one factor, labelling it “the important one,” and bracketing out all other data, as he alleged Malthus and Ricardo did) was a decision of considerable audacity. His forging of a novel system of “ideas” was a pursuit of intellectual autonomy and independence that was more costly in time and effort than the advocacy of an existing system would have been.
Coleridge’s theory of ideas, like his Theory of Life, was foundational to all his other work.64 One cannot afford to ignore his doctrine of ideas and their relations because it is “about” metaphysics rather than “about” politics. That is certainly a distinction which Coleridge himself would not have made. Like the Cambridge Platonists he emulated, he was at heart a monist, who believed that an accurate system of metaphysics was the golden key to an accurate theory of physics and an accurate theory of politics. Indeed, Coleridge’s philosophical work on dualities and synthesis was basic to all of his later writings on any subject. Therefore, a comprehension of Coleridge’s “metaphysics” is and will always be essential for any true understanding of Coleridge’s aesthetic, religious, and political ideas.
From the “young” Coleridge’s earliest writings, “On Politics and Revealed Religion” (1795), to the “old” Coleridge’s most complete and mature political synthesis in On The Constitution of the Church and State According to the Idea of Each (1830), he presented a persistent and complex argument for the centrality of individual agency and free will in political and social life while at the same time arguing cogently for duty and community. Coleridge’s researches in the pursuit of this system were, as I have emphasized elsewhere, authentically eclectic to a degree that most nineteenth-century philosophies were not. It is certainly the case that Coleridge was not a disciple, propagating and elaborating the ideas of a “master” such as Kant. Nor was he a magpie (as Fruman has alleged),65 tearing up bits and pieces of the systems of others and slopping them together in his nest without any personal contribution.66 If Coleridge was one of the most careful students of the works of Locke, Hartley, and Godwin, he was also one of their most careful critics. Any study of “influences” on Coleridge’s intellectual development will show that Coleridge rejected as much as he retained from those authors whom he read.
In general, Coleridge’s theories of politics from 1795 to 1830 predicated themselves on moral constants of “conscience,” “right reason,” and “duty,” all three of these being ideas that he perceived as providing the essential organs of good government and a just society.67 Yet his reliance on transcendental “Ideas” never made him a utopian, as some have claimed. To categorize Coleridge as a utopian is to misread his doctrine of ideas. Although Coleridge believed ideas to be ultimately perfect and universal in their transcendence, he insisted throughout his career that they were always filtered through the imperfect and local contingencies of the material world. In his writings on liberty, he attempted to reconcile the universal and pure idea of liberty with the quotidian need for stable, efficient, and practicable government in “the moral world.”68
This phrase of Coleridge’s, the “moral world,” was his technical term for what is now typically termed “the real world.” His phraseology is somewhat confusing; on the surface, he seems to have argued that the “real world” of everyday life is “moral,” when what he actually meant was that everyday life was “imperfectly moral” and always uncertain in its moral decisions. Coleridge’s use of the term “moral world” evokes the now-classic distinction between “mathematical certainty” and “moral certainty.” “Mathematical certainty,” the absolute conviction of the correctness of a solution, can only exist in the realm of purely rational systems such as numbers. “Moral certainty,” a general belief in the appositeness of a solution short of absolute conviction, is the more usual degree of certainty attainable in the real/moral world. For Coleridge, the complexity of the moral world required a science of great subtlety and great precision. Such was the science of history, such was the philosophy of nature.
Metaphysics was the foundation of Coleridge’s statesman’s science, its fundamental doctrine of ideas considered as active and formative realities. That is, ideas were real and transcendent and yet still gave shape and meaning, gave structure, to things in the material world. In short, they were for Coleridge the word made flesh. They gave cause, they gave form, they gave purpose. Coleridge suggested, in Aids to Reflection and in several other works, that the sort of conflicts most philosophers cited as questions of idealism versus materialism were better stated as questions of subject-observer versus object–thing observed.69 Materialism was exceptionally useful as a conceptual model for studying the material world: the world of sensible and detectable objects, objects which could be weighed, measured, and counted. Idealism, for its part, provided a deeper explanation of causality and teleology and was, consequently, better for studying the immaterial aspects of that material world. The idealist model of the world could accommodate and so explain the properties of objects, which could not be measured and which were not available to empirical scrutiny but which were, nonetheless, available to human reason and open to rational debate.
Coleridge discussed his Conception of the “Idea” throughout his career and perfected it in his last and most important political text, on Church and State. His distinction between subject/observer/idealism and object/thing observed/materialism may not suit all readers as a solution to the battle of the methods between the two long-warring schools, but it was innovative for its time.70 Coleridge’s metaphysics was a creative solution to the dilemma of whether to privilege idea or matter, because it chose to reify the central conceptions of both materialism and idealism. In doing so, Coleridge’s new system honored the claims of those who argued that matter was important and the claims of those who argued that ideas were important, while denying the typical claims of each of the two views that matter was so important as to make ideas of scant significance, or vice versa. Coleridge suggested instead that matter and Idea existed in a dynamic pairing in which neither had an absolute primacy or self-sufficient centrality. For Coleridge, Ideas were real, but they were embodied in the world of matter. Here, they were perceived and sensed, construed and measured. On the other hand, the changing configurations and “habits” of worldly institutions in the world of matter embodied themselves in the realm of Ideas. For Coleridge, even as Ideas “constituted” material objects, at the same time material objects “constituted” Ideas.
The minds of observers/subjects generated these Ideas, and Coleridge stressed that they did not exist in a pure transcendence independent of whether anyone considered them or not. Ideas, he asserted, were always predicated on and anchored in the circumstances of the “real world.” Yet, these Ideas, he claimed, were more real than the sum total of all observers’/subjects’ opinions of the meaning of ideas. Thinking, or simply “conceiving” of the world to be a mere material place did not make it so. Although the rationalizations of individual human minds and the solid matter of everyday life were the building blocks of ideas, ideas for Coleridge gained a transcendent life of their own above and beyond the net of matter and concepts.
This distinction between matter and idea was the basis of one of Coleridge’s most important epistemological distinctions, his study of the psychological differences between the faculties of understanding and reason. Like other aspects of his metaphysical and scientific study, Coleridge’s faculty of psychology defined and shaped his political theory, to such a degree that it formed an indispensable groundwork both for his conception of British political institutions and his critique of the French constitution. Coleridge wrote extensively about the divide between the faculty of “Understanding,” as outlined by Locke and the sensationalists, which produced “Conceptions” in the mind, and the faculty of “Reason,” as analyzed by the Plotinists, which was able to partially comprehend transcendent “Ideas” that maintained a life of their own outside of the minds of their perceivers and shapers. In Coleridge’s psychology of faculties, understanding is the facility for organizing experience and perception. It is the faculty that allows the mind of an individual observer/subject to develop an individual and partial apprehension, what Coleridge termed a “Conception,” of the Idea. For Coleridge, reason is the faculty that allows deeper (but still partial) comprehensions of this realm of ideas In this sense, Coleridge’s theory is different from Kant’s. Whereas the faculty of understanding keeps the mind rooted in “facts” and material data, the faculty of reason coaxes the observer outward from that data towards the formation of abstractions, or “laws” or “theories,” of the broader meanings and significances of things. Therefore, the Idea of a given class of objects depended on more than intense observation and low-level (taxonomical or commonsense) generalizations. Reason depends on the slow and gradual apprehension of broad, abstract patterns of the value, the meaning, and the end goal of a thing rather than its number, weight, or dimensions. Reason entails “seeing through” an object to its underlying reality. The understanding, then, perceives and organizes sensory data, while the reason perceives the intuitional and theoretical and abstract categories for that knowledge.71 The Kantian view is in the end a more Aristotelian and, finally, materialist view. Coleridge’s account is Platonic and idealist. But unlike Plato, for whom the appearance of an object of sense was no more than fleeting shadow, Coleridge believed the world of sense to be the concretization of Ideas.
The arena for this cross-fertilization of ideas and material life was what Coleridge termed the “moral world.” Coleridge’s use of the term “moral” here is counterintuitive; it denotes not a “moral world” in the sense of “a good and just world,” but a “moral world” in the sense of “a world where only moral certainty rather than mathematical certainty can usually be reached.” For Coleridge, the moral world was the imperfect world “here below” in which ideal and material realities intersected and influenced one another. The deep ordering principles of the reality of Ideas were valid independent of individual experience, in the same sense that the validity of mathematics did not depend upon the mathematical acuity of all humans, or even more than a handful. However, those “fixed principles” from the realm of ideas “constituted” themselves in the material world in ways which were infinitely variable. This interplay between material circumstances and the two levels of thought used to interpret those circumstances was the pivot of Coleridge’s entire political system. Coleridge’s 1795 plea that constitutional reformers adhere to some “fixed principles” greater than their technical schemes for short-term improvement based only on material circumstances of the moment was essentially rooted in his theory of Ideas. This theory later matured under the influence of Kant, branching into Coleridge’s campaign for a theory of Ideas that would portray them not as desiccated and impotent imaginations, but as living, active agencies, performing important “dirty” work in the material “moral” world. If his scheme was correct, Coleridge argued, it meant that politics could not be reduced to a science of simple algorithms allocating who got what, where, and when. The new political economy constituted just such a system. It was based on the amoral uses of statistical sciences; of social biology (Malthus), economics (Ricardo), and franchise reform (the “radical” reformers). It was crude and superficial at best, morally nescient at worst. A true and virtuous reform, Coleridge claimed, was the ongoing search for “fixed principles”—the effortful entrance of the fallible human reason into the transcendent realm of Ideas. That the ultimate objectives and purposes of this reform be undertaken with vision was even more crucial than that more popular and immediately practicable search for the best political tools for “reform” be accomplished. The French, in their haste for change and only dimly understanding their purpose, had employed the wrong tools and achieved the wrong ends. On that rock the revolution had foundered and the moment for enduring change had been lost.
In making such unusual claims, Coleridge offered the startling suggestion that metaphysics was a basic science of statesmanship, too important to be parceled off to decrepit Oxbridge dons as if it were an amusing but unimportant puzzle and too important to be shunted off to clergy, as if clergy were to be considered a dustbin where politicians could toss the “higher” moral concerns in the state. Since the concept of the Idea intruded at all times and in all places into the “material world” and indeed, Coleridge stressed, shaped and molded that material world, only an imbecile could claim that a government could succeed by privileging material and economical schemes for reform while ignoring entirely the ethically based Ideas that must inevitably undergird such systems.
It is impossible, argued Coleridge, to sever “everyday realities” from “transcendental Ideas,” either in political thought or in political action. The two are so intertwined that to disconnect one is to obviate the other. Thus, a political pragmatism that bracketed out the higher concerns of morality and teleology (as Coleridge believed the utilitarians had done) was doomed to fail. This was not statesmanship he argued, and certainly no science. Coleridge concluded that without the long-range vision and moral anchor of the “fixed principles” provided by the Idea, such blinkered, narrow-minded and mechanistic schemes for reform would invariably fail. There was no Machiavellian bargain to be made wherein one could succeed in politics by eschewing moral ideas sticking to pure amoral strategy. According to Coleridge, the proper understanding of political circumstances required deep thought on the ends and uses of government beyond mere plotting and strategizing. In the Machiavellian bargain of utilitarianism, he argued, lay both moral nescience and material failure. To move beyond the superficiality of such a crude political functionalism required, Coleridge argued, that government be grounded in an active Idea. Such an Idea required a formative institution. The state, then, must be understood as both active idea and formative institution.
Coleridge’s Church and State was his final articulation of the very old theme of the constitution as an Idea. Throughout his career, but especially in Church and State, his political theory envisioned governing institutions as living forms of power and action rather than as mere territories or machines over which political ideologies fought for possession. Emphasizing the ideal and formal nature of institutions, the first chapter in Church and State began with prefatory remarks on “the true import of the word, IDEA” and what the author meant by “according to the Idea.”72
Coleridge understood the state through the same philosophical perspective by which he considered the world, as an expression of successive opposing dualities. These dualities constantly and actively mediated between the ideal and the actual, between persons and things, between institutions and the particular historical objects of those institutions. Through this “double [i.e., dualistic] vision,” Coleridge first defined and then reconciled the purportedly antithetical interests of landed and commercial society through his constitutional philosophy in Church and State. The constitution, as conceived by Coleridge, was an active institution that synthesized and directed the contradictory elements of social and political life. The “STATE,” which Coleridge (like most others of his day) considered in its broader sense as church and state combined, became a dialectical and teleological idea.
The relative novelty of Coleridge’s dialectical “double vision” in the British “ancien régime” of 1828 is often lost on modern readers who were either weaned on William Blake’s literary doctrine of contrarieties engendering progress or Hegel’s philosophical concept of the hybridization of thesis and antithesis resulting in a vivid synthesis. The idea that the opposition of social forces might be bracing and vivifying rather than corrosive was still relatively novel in 1828. The “double vision” was especially novel among those Tory circles who still envisioned normative politics as a consensus under one king and one church, and for this reason feared Dissenters, papists, and reformers as the representatives of social fragmentation of unity. Archibald Foord’s work on the development of ideas of a “loyal opposition” in the eighteenth century showed that the concept of political struggle as beneficial to the state developed late in the eighteenth century and was slow to gain respect.73 Most sixteenth- and seventeenth-century political theory had argued that opposition and conflict between segments of society was inherently destructive. Therefore, it viewed contradictory social or political forces as mutually exclusive and diagnosed conflicts of land versus commerce, church versus state, king versus Parliament, or Whig versus Tory as signs of illness and dysfunction in the body politic. Coleridge, in sharp contrast, believed that opposition was desirable because it was progressive and creative.
Coleridge’s “Prefatory Remarks” on the Idea begin:
By an idea, I mean, (in this instance) that conception of a thing, which is not abstracted from any particular state, form, or mode, in which the thing may happen to exist at this or that time; nor yet generalized from any number or succession of such forms or modes; but which is given by the knowledge of its ultimate aim.74
An Idea, then, might exist in the world of theory and reflection, although no state in the real world (past or present) had ever fully realized its “ultimate aim.” The idea of a church was more than the sum of the jumble bag of all of the various churches that had existed in human history for Coleridge. It was, rather, the expression of the “churchness” that all of those organizations had (often unconsciously) striven for, with varying degrees of success.
Coleridge defined “Idea” teleologically, by reference to goals and substance rather than current externals and accidents. The Idea, for Coleridge, existed by virtue of some “final,” real cause that preceded and was greater than the “material” or formal cause of a thing. Ideas could not therefore be adduced or extrapolated out of the experience of things as they existed in the world of the present or even in the “bank” of history. They were instead formed out of reflections on how things might exist, were they able to realize their aims. Things as they were and had been invariably reflected some imperfect instantiation of an Idea. They were fragmentary.75
Coleridge continued by describing how an individual’s knowledge of “ultimate aim” might be experienced:
this knowledge, or sense, may very well exist, aye, and powerfully influence a man’s thoughts and actions, without his being distinctly conscious of the same, much more than his being competent to express it in definite words. This indeed is one of the points which distinguishes ideas from conceptions being used in their proper significations. The latter ie., a conception, consists in a conscious act of the understanding arranging any given object or impression into the same class with any number of other objects, or impressions, by means of some character or characters common to them all.76
Ideas, for Coleridge, had an objective and transcendental independence above and beyond the Conceptions of subjects. Individuals constantly learned and formalized certain things and relations between things in the world and gave names and taxonomies to these formulations. But the sortings-out of accumulated experience were Conceptions, Coleridge argued, and not Ideas. In his ranking of Ideas over Conceptions, Coleridge expanded on a tradition of philosophical realism that may be traced backwards to the Platonic forms and laterally to Kantian conceptions of rationality.
This distinction between Ideas and Conceptions was not an exercise in high-theoretical logic chopping for its own sake. The definition of Ideas and Conceptions was foundational to Coleridge’s politics, since it determined the relative weight he gave to experience and reflection as guides to political action. A proper understanding of Coleridge’s metaphysics is, therefore, an essential first step in any attempt to understand his view of Ideas as being superior to Conceptions of politics, power, and the state. R. J. White77 and John Muirhead78 have both emphasized the centrality of metaphysics to Church and State. But more recent scholarship would seem to share in a modern disinclination to take such philosophical inquiry as anything other than woolly and speculative mysticism.79
By treating the subject of the constitution in the context of his concept of the Idea, Coleridge was able to discuss the obvious discrepancies between the sought-after true object or goal of power in the state, as opposed to the day-to-day, fallible manifestation of its workings. Coleridge’s distinction between the “ideal” and the “quotidian” served as a useful means of comprehending the difference between pure political principles and their imperfect operation when plunged into the myriad contingencies of everyday politics.
According to Coleridge, constitutions (whether written or unwritten) existed on the level of Conceptions of power and governance rather than on the level of Ideas. Like rulebooks for games, constitutions were contingent and constantly changing formulations based on accumulated experience. If they were to be of any true value, if they were to be just and enduring, then the Conceptions had to be aimed towards the attainment of the Idea. Formulations of Ideas in a given polity’s constitutions must, as far as was possible, approximate the Idea of the (just) state in reality. Coleridge believed that there had been many attempts by different governments at different times to formulate just and lasting constitutions. He added that such efforts had failed or succeeded according to the degree to which, as active institutions, they allowed that polity to achieve the “true” Idea of a constitution.
Coleridge believed that all “true” Ideas, whether of constitutions or other things, were necessarily teleological and transcendental. It was therefore essential, Coleridge argued, to think very carefully about how society operated and which institutions most perfectly allowed it to progress and change, to adapt towards its ultimate aim or telos. A constitution put into concrete form the Conceptions of a set of institutions that the constitution makers had designed to allow society to evolve toward its real (pure, transcendent) self as an Idea.
The mistake that many governments—but most notably the misconceived republican and imperial governments of France—had made was in confusing the Conception (the rules of the game) with the Idea (the object of the game). The French Republic and Empire had erred in their attempts to construct a government because they had built institutions that were ideologically pure in terms of voguish Conceptions rather than institutionally sound in terms of lasting Ideas. This led to constant squabbles as to what constituted ideological purity, and horrific abuses and compromises in the pursuit of that purity. For Coleridge, a just and well-framed institution was far more dependable as a vehicle for travelling towards the Idea of the state than was an ideologically purified Conception of rights, such as the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.” The French, although they had believed that they had founded their new regime on Ideas, had (so Coleridge claimed), become trapped in the shadows of the cave of Conceptions of liberty. They had doomed their quest for freedom to failure because they had plotted their journey toward liberty without first considering the meaning and nature of freedom or the Idea of a constitutional monarchy or republic. Ironically, whereas Burke despised the French revolutionaries because they were excessively obsessed with theory rather than practice and experience, Coleridge pitied the revolutionaries because they had been insufficiently theoretical and had in their quibbles over the means of government forgotten to meditate upon its ends.
At no time a “Painite” radical, the “young” Coleridge is more accurately classified among the numbers of the “moderate” or “reform” timocrats of the decade than among the truly “radical” democrats who were his contemporaries and in many instances friends. Independence, and a view of reform based on historical pragmatism and constitutional balance, characterized his early writings. Coleridge’s career as a political thinker may be characterized in terms of two central obsessions. The first of these was his conviction that the moral and political natures of liberty were essentially intertwined and could not be severed through some Machiavellian or, indeed, Benthamite calculus. The second of Coleridge’s twin obsessions was with the perfection of what he termed his “medico-philosophical” theory of statecraft. His view was that society, as well as the state that expressed its intentions, was a living organism and as such must be understood systemically. The capacity to hold these considerations, both of the substance and of the institutional forms of political society, in parallel tension with each other was the essence of the statesman’s science. Coleridge’s political thought did develop from 1795 to 1834, but through the expanded formulation rather than the recantation of the principles present in his earliest writings.
Understanding the fundamental science of statecraft was Coleridge’s answer to the faction of sect and party. Both those who enlisted him under the radical banners of revolutionary France from 1794 to 1801 and those who wished to line him up, from 1802 onward, as a “Tory” who defended the British ancien régime against its reformist opponents missed the significance of his central preoccupations. Attacking the simplistic dichotomy of “radical and Tory,” or indeed “left and right,” Coleridge looked for a solution which offered the statesman a third choice, a visionary middle ground, where integrative compromise and innovation moved political and social change beyond the deadlock of both the long entrenched interests and their modern radical critics.
Against those arguments based on a rhetorical zero-sum game, Coleridge’s view, expressed most completely in Church and State (1830), emphasized the natural and organic maturation of political society through a progression regulated by structure and system. Church and State was more than an eccentric religious tract. Indeed, it is a mistake to consider the work in religious terms at all. Religion, as a matter of doctrine, is incidental to Church and State. Nor was it a simple response to the political crisis of Catholic emancipation and the reform controversy that surrounded it. Ultimately, Church and State was a work of constitutional theory. It was a treatise on the idea of the modern state and a political- and economic-systems analysis of the relationships between Britain’s landed and commercial interests. It was finally the culmination of a lifetime’s thinking on morality, history, law, and society. It was Coleridge’s most complete cultural and political synthesis, his chef d’oeuvre—in short, the final articulation of his statesman’s science.
