THE PURSUIT OF liberty, like the pursuit of happiness, is a hunt in which the ostensibly sought-after quarry is almost never captured by those hunters who give chase to it. This is generally because the hunt usually dissolves into squabbles about what species of quarry is actually the most desirable and how the prizes shall be shared out. In essence, although there was in many polities of the early nineteenth century a stated desire to be “free” and to enjoy “liberty” rather than “oppression,” the differing ways in which these words were used makes one wonder if taxonomically one would not be better-off discussing separate species of “freedoms” and “oppressions” rather than addressing them as if they were unified concepts. The similarity of the diction of the widespread effusions of support for “liberty” from 1801 to 1830 among the various factions in the United Kingdom concealed a vast difference between strategies of how to obtain that liberty, visions of what that liberty would look like, and timetables of when that liberty might be perfectly achieved, if it had not already been achieved. As John Selden pointed out in the mid-seventeenth century, the language of “liberty” was so pervasive and so poorly defined even in his time that would-be absolute monarchs used its lexicon to make their points on occasion. In Coleridge’s own time, when the “Tories” were in truth the last fundamentalist believers in the “Whig” “Principles of 1688,” this language of liberty that employed the same words for different ideas was even more baffling. In the time of the American Rebellion, Lord North had used the same sort of flowing phrases in the defense of “liberty” as had his enemy John Adams. In the years of the French Revolution, the Younger Pitt had spoken as eloquently in favor of “liberty,” as had his critic Thomas Paine. Indeed, even the crustiest and most senile Tories of Coleridge’s era could not have been coaxed into offering up huzzahs for “oppression,” or roused into damning “liberty.” They, too, believed that they were the “defenders of liberty.” One cannot dismiss this similarity as the result of “mere cant.” What made late Georgian Britain nearly unique among states existing from 1800 to 1850 is that discussion did not focus on whether it was a good thing to have “liberty” or not, but instead focused on how best to attain the liberty that all professed to desire.
The study of a culture such as later Georgian Britain, in which real differences in goals and methods of seekers after “liberty” are masked by the similarities in the political values and vocabularies which define them as different social and political groups, makes for a fundamentally more difficult problem than the study of a culture in which there is a true bifurcation between authoritarian and pro-liberty lexica. How can one make sense of a term that was used by so many for so many divergent and incompatible purposes?
Understanding Coleridge’s political and social “science” presses us to delimit and describe the ways in which he thought about this fog-shrouded and complex issue of “liberty.” Arguably, the most distinctive and independent aspects of Coleridge’s political thought were to be found in his conception of liberty. His innovative views of liberty in the 1820s set him apart from the purported “Toryism” of his late career, just as his views of liberty in the 1790s separated him from the Painite radicalism with which his earliest political writings have been associated.1 I suggest that in his analysis of liberty, Coleridge once again employed his characteristic dynamic vision of the “Idea” (in this case the “Idea” of liberty). I also wish to suggest that Coleridge offered a language of liberty that presented a chance to resolve the longstanding apparent conflict between liberty-as-private-property and liberty-as-community-equality.
In order to comprehend the magnitude of Coleridge’s achievement in transcending the traditional antimonies of individualism/property and communitarianism/equality, it will be necessary to do two things. First, it will be necessary to see what a powerful chokehold this dichotomy had on the Atlantic political tradition in the early-nineteenth-century discursive world that Coleridge inhabited. Second, it will be necessary to understand that the power of those dichotomies has continued to be so great that they still shape, and even distort, modern thought on the subject.
Coleridge produced two rival theories of the Commonwealth’s role in advancing freedom: Liberty-in-Private-Property and Liberty-in-Community-Equality. Coleridge’s conception of “political justice” rested on his simultaneous commitment to what some have considered two contradictory visions of liberty: liberty inherent in the goals of unfettered private property, and liberty inherent in the goals of enhanced equality and community. Much of nineteenth- and twentieth-century political theory has been taken up with the issue of whether a society that maximizes the individual rights of private property holders can also maximize the social equality and rights of the community as a whole. The solutions presented by liberalism and laissez-faire placed the balance of power in the hands of liberty in the shape of property, presuming that the freedom to use one’s own property (whether land, labor, or money) as one pleased was most likely to ensure general social freedom. The solutions of socialism and other such redistributive theories of government placed the balance of power in the hands of liberty in the form of equality, suggesting that true freedom was impossible unless it was recognized that the “freedom to do as one likes” was meaningless to have-nots until they were given property or the means to obtain it. These two major lines of argument were already relatively well-drawn by the early nineteenth century in the English-speaking Atlantic world. Philosophers such as Locke, Smith, and Jefferson had stated the case for private property as the agent of liberty; philosophers such as Rousseau, Paine, Spence, and Godwin2 had suggested that equality and redistribution of property imbalances would have to take place before “true liberty” could emerge.3
“Liberty” is typically defined in modern political theory as either “positive” or “negative.” Isaiah Berlin was the most famous exponent of this theoretical division between “negative” liberty and “positive” liberty.4 These terms describe the relative relationship between the holder of the liberty in question, whether an individual or a group, and the commonwealth, state, or society, which is that liberty’s guarantor. “Freedom from” governmental or other social restrictions on one’s actions is traditionally described in terms of “negative liberty.” “Freedom to” perform certain actions or to receive certain benefits that will enable the fulfillment or accomplishment of corresponding entitlements has traditionally been associated with the idea of “positive liberty.” In general, the ideology of “negative liberty,” with its stress on noninterference by the governors in the property of the subject, has been associated with “individualism” and with the advocates of a limited sovereign power in the community and the state (the school of Locke, Smith, and Jefferson). As a rule, the ideology of “positive liberty,” with its stress on the superior claim of the social well-being of the many over the freedoms of the few, has been associated with “communitarianism” and with the advocates of an expanded sovereign power in the active institutions of community and the state (the school of Rousseau, Paine, Spence, and Godwin).
Where the competing claims of liberty in property and liberty in community conflict, a decision must be made. A polity must either choose to shift the balance of society in favor of “freedoms from” interference by the commonwealth with one’s individual liberty and property, or it must elect to pursue a program of enhancing “freedoms to” provide a minimal standard of equality for the commonwealth. In either case, a dense and thorny tangle of political questions as to which of the two alternatives creates a truer or purer form of “liberty” must be hacked through.
Debates in political theory in the final decades of the twentieth century have suggested not-so-novel ways in which the competing claims of the individual and the group may be weighed in the balance to most effectively ensure the idea of liberty. As this is not a study of contemporary political theory, I will not spend much time on post-Coleridgean thinkers on the issues of property and community. Such comments as I make on modern political thought, post-1830, will only be by way of noting that the debate on liberty versus equality in property rights is no less closer to solution 170 years after Coleridge’s essential writings on the subject than it was in his era. (It is also by way of suggesting that the claim of social justice and equity in community is not a modern invention, nor inherently a “radical” one, and was quite strong even during the so-called “triumph of laissez-faire”). The most widely read modern authors on the subject, Robert Nozick5 and John Rawls,6 confront essentially the same problem as Coleridge confronted in his thinking about property.
Obviously, then, this balancing of community and individual claims in the matter of property is a persistently insoluble question and is not an invention of the late twentieth century. These conflictive ideas of the relationship between liberty, property, and equity as determined by law and the limits of government may be usefully employed in considering Coleridge’s understanding of the idea of liberty.
Coleridge perceived liberty in terms of the “individual versus community rights” divide. Liberty, for Coleridge, was a principle of action “constituted”—that is to say, created as well as delimited—by civil society and its living institutions. He insisted that the institution of private property was the foundation of civil society and of all government. He resembled the advocates of strong property rights in his belief in property as a fundamental basis of good order in the state. Coleridge did not advocate an “absolute” or “natural” right of property based on God or lex naturis as certain theorists, such as Locke, famously did. But he did recognize property as a weight-bearing girder essential to the construction of a free and stable society. Such an essential girder of the state could not be “torn out” and abolished by law without similar problems ensuing as had occurred when Samson had toppled pillars in the Temple of Dagon. He regarded liberty and property as complementary, rather than antagonistic, entities.
In distinction from the standard libertarian defense of property rights, Coleridge transformed property into a dynamic, organic principle. The typical defenders of liberty in individual property treated property as a mindless set of material objects, passive chips to be accumulated and traded. Coleridge’s great innovation was in considering property as a living subject, which acted upon its owners, rather than a passive object, which was only acted upon by its owners.
With resemblance to certain communitarians of his day, Coleridge stressed the organic relationship of each constituent part of society to all others and did not see a strong regulatory state as an inevitable threat to liberty.7 He saw property not only as granting certain “freedoms from” state interference with the owner’s will, but as demanding and inspiring a broad set of civic duties from the propertied classes. In line with other communitarians, Coleridge advocated consistent and firm state intervention where needed rather than total laissezfaire. His writings in support of the Factory Acts in 1818 made it clear that in a conflict between absolute liberty of property and the good of the community (i.e., the health of children), he would choose community. In that conflict, he stood on the side of reducing the Lancashire mill owners’ “rights” to hire whomever they wished and the parents’ “rights” to vend their childrens’ labour when and where they wished in favor of the general “rights” of English children as a class not to be subjected to work in hazardous circumstances.
Coleridge differed from the standard communitarians of his era because he did not insist that property weakened the cause of commonwealth and thereby destroyed liberty. Property was not invariably corrupting to Coleridge, in the way that it had been both to condemners of property rights, such as Babeuf, and defenders of “corrupt” property, such as Mandeville. He ultimately viewed property as a constructive, rather than a destructive, moral force. Coleridge refused to embrace the commonplace views of his contemporaries that property was either morally neutral or invariably socially corrupting. In his innovative theories he envisioned private property as not only a practical necessity but as a principle for moral improvement, as a principle of self-actualization.8 Throughout his career, Coleridge developed ideas both of individual agency and political institutions into a Conception of the nation-state as a trusteeship founded on property, where rights and duties must always be aligned.9
Coleridge’s Conception of liberty and his theory of property were both components of what became an institutional social theory of the state by his last great work, the treatise On The Constitution of the Church and State (1830). His view of the “interdependency” of property and liberty and his vision of property as a “constructive” moral force both demonstrated a strong view that a phenomenon such as “liberty” could not be studied in isolation but must be examined with an eye to its self-reflective mutuality of influence on property and morality. In other words, liberty, property, and morality were essentially linked and interdependent forces. This view contributed to what Durkheim once identified as a protosociological tradition of political analysis.10 This protosociological tradition examined social structures as well as laws and high political phenomena in explaining the politics of a given nation or culture.
Many critics have associated the interactive and synthetic components of Coleridge’s ideas of liberty and property with the post-Kantian, post-Hegelian “German phase” of his writings (1800–1817).11 It is equally likely that Coleridge had developed his own early “protosociological” views on organic dynamism through his readings of Montesquieu and Rousseau, who included statements about climate and manners in their estimates of the validity of a nation’s constitution. He may also have owed some of his vision of the interconnectedness of society to Burke. Furthermore, one may look beyond Burke to an earlier English source: Coleridge’s first readings of seventeenth-century Common Law and constitutional theory.
In the seventeenth-century treatises on sovereignty and consent, duty and right, law and morality, Coleridge traced the evolution of a Natural Law philosophy that paralleled the dynamic organism of the natural world. The nature of this world, its order and its life structure, was dynamic and dialectical. Cudworth and Newton had suggested as much in their Platonist writings on physics. Blake provided a poetic echo of this view in his account of “contrariant” opposites. Coleridge developed these ideas in his own writings as a political and moral corollary of the juridical and physical implications of natural philosophy.
Although his preoccupation with duality may be traced to his earliest writings, by 1800 Coleridge had developed a theory that he termed the “Polar Tension” of opposites applicable to ideas of property and community. This “polar tension” between the diverse concerns of private interest and public welfare was a chief focus of Coleridge’s political thought after his return from Gottengen.12 It marks the beginning of a conscious effort in his journalism as well as in his philosophical and theological writings to lay down a metaphysical foundation for a comprehensive system of political thought. In other words, it constitutes the first of Coleridge’s deliberate efforts to establish a statesman’s science. He believed that personal attainments, such as private property, needed to be considered not sufficient unto themselves but counterbalanced by an objective community of social “goods” in the commonwealth. The corollary of this was his belief that a community interest in equality and the social welfare of all could not be established merely by government fiat but had to be the long-term result of an aggregate of individual concerns, including those of private property holders. There was no clear priority (ranking or privileging) of individual or community interest in Coleridge’s understanding of political institutions. This tendency to reconcile rather than rank opposites distinguished Coleridge from most of his contemporaries.
For Coleridge, freedom was not meaningful as a political “Idea” outside of its temporal, material, manifestations in civil societies. He located the “existence” of the Idea of freedom not only in a superlunary realm, or in the mind of God, but in the everyday ability of an individual to act according to his will without illegitimate constraint or obstruction of that will. The Idea of liberty, therefore, was perpetually manifesting itself in quotidian affairs. Its chief and most historic expressions of itself were in the chartered “legal” rights, powers, and “possessive dominiums” of the subject.13 For this reason, Coleridge’s view of the right of property was intrinsically connected to his conception of liberty. He regarded the “freedom” of property as inseparable from the “liberty” of a subject to dispose of or possess an object.
Coleridge’s conception of liberty consistently set him the problem of reconciling a broad program of freedom of the will with necessary social constraints on action. In the course of the study of that dynamic, he also outlined the interconnection of the exercise of rights and the performance of duties. In addition, he examined the problems inherent in a government founded on a propertied trust acting to secure the “liberty of the subject” and how the sanctity of private property affected the welfare of the community, which included so many propertyless individuals.
Coleridge’s bravado in grasping such a hideously thorny nettle as the relation between individual rights in property and individual responsibilities to the Commonwealth and then presenting a new model that attempted to reconcile their differences was not rewarded.14 His dualistic, dynamic model of the state, because of its refusal to privilege one side of a duality and condemn the other, has been lambasted as timid, trimming, and cowardly. Alternatively, it has been branded with the old mark of “apostasy.” The charges of inconstancy and duplicity to the cause of liberty, which met him during his lifetime, have been echoed ad nauseam by later critics, and at least one of these has seen Coleridge as a compulsive liar.15
But is this persistent critique of Coleridge as a traitor to the cause of liberty—either through out-and-out apostasy or fuzzy-minded, neo-Hegelian trimming, which, it was held, obscured the importance of the claims of freedom over community welfare—at all merited? John Stuart Mill, who was no meager authority on questions of individual freedom within social systems, saw the “Mature Coleridge” as a persistent and eloquent friend of liberty. Mill remarked that “the Coleridgeans, far from being Tories, were a second liberal and even radical party, on totally different grounds than Benthamism and vehemently opposed to it.”16 Mill’s quip was an important observation, because it suggested that Mill and others already recognized the degree to which Coleridge had deviated both from the main-stream of “Toryism” and from the senior tribe of the “radicals” after 1800, the “Benthamists.”17 Coleridge, Mill thought, had rescued from oblivion “truths which Tories have forgotten, and which the prevailing school of liberalism never knew.”18
Mill’s various observations on Coleridge are important not because they provide another nail to the coffin of the vision of the mature Coleridge as a pattern-book Tory. Rather, Mill’s opinion on Coleridge is of value because it shows that as early as the mid-nineteenth century, the “totally different grounds” of Coleridge’s vision of liberty had been perceived. Mill also appreciated the degree to which Coleridge had been able to revive those “truths” that had been ignored by Tories and radicals alike. Presumably, by the “truths” that Tories had forgotten, Mill meant the basis of Toryism in a reasoned defense of constitutional liberty, based on the interest in the church and the land, rather than on ultratraditionalism. Presumably, by the “truths” which the Benthamites never knew, Mill meant Coleridge’s own emphasis on moral and social factors as foundational ideas that the Benthamites (or so Mill thought) had neglected.
But beyond the assertion that the Coleridgeans and the Benthamites represented differing visions either of radical Toryism or nascent liberalism, one is returned again to the problem of these classificatory labels as such. Certainly Coleridge rejected the polemic as well as the affiliatory pull of party. He believed that even so-called “Free Associations” were repressors of liberty. His lifelong political affiliation was to the defense of the independent. Such independence would sometimes produce sympathy for a leader or faction combined with hostility to their policies, while at other times suggest that a hostility to an individual or group could be tempered by an endorsement of their current political practice or action. In this regard, friendship with John Thelwall did not prevent Coleridge from attacking the program of the rights-of-man polemicists in 1796, nor did admiration for Lord Liverpool restrain Coleridge from a radical criticism of the established church in 1828.
Thus far, I have systematically attacked the old view of Coleridge as a “young radical” from 1794 to 1802. In doing so, I have largely dealt with Coleridge’s doctrines in a number of seminal early works to suggest that Coleridge did not share the ideologies of the “radicals.” I now wish to suggest that Coleridge did not entertain a “radical’s” view of institutions either. Evidence of Coleridge’s view of “radical” organizations is important because it demonstrates cogently his view that institutions and ideas were interlocked and that bad institutions could not successfully promulgate good doctrines, nor good institutions successfully promulgate bad doctrines. It will become apparent that institutional and constitutional forms were given great priority in Coleridge’s thought because to him they were not soulless operating systems but embodied transcendent “Ideas” of the state with a life and vitality of their own.
The myth of “young Coleridge” as a “radical” has yet another bar to its credibility if one recognizes that Coleridge never joined any of the reform societies, even the aristocratic and moderate ones. Coleridge’s refusal to join these reformist and “radical” leagues was not a result of either a laziness that made him unable to put his ideas into action or of a fear of prosecution by the government. Instead, his not joining was due to a fundamental commitment to an independent mind and a critical stance, a stance that he felt obviated him from taking part in any collective action. Coleridge believed that all political societies, factional parties, and reformist clubs were coercive.19 Because he felt that valid organizations would encourage broad and deep thought and reflection by their individual members, Coleridge denounced the groups of his own era. The political clubs and associations of the reform era outraged Coleridge in their resort to narrow party manifestoes, slogans, and rallying cries in an effort to whip up unified support and squelch dissent. In his opinion, they demolished independent thought and set up a single, stone-graven factional rhetoric in its place.20 Coleridge also suspected the motives of many of the leading “reformers” of his time. He scornfully noted that grandstanding and behind-the-scenes deals dominated meetings that should have been open and free, that should have been governed by duty and conscience. Coleridge first exposited this antiparty view in his early, 1796 essay, “Modern Patriotism.” In “Modern Patriotism,” he suggested that faction and party were always at odds with the principal of liberty because they erected the fences of group-thought which penned in the free exertion of individual will in political choice.
An ideal organization, Coleridge suggested, would present its decisions as the result of a debate between individual choices. Such an organization would also respect and register the dissents of members as a sign of its regard for independence of mind. In the societies of the “Modern Patriots,” Coleridge claimed to see a very different and patently false “consensus,” a sham unity that a party, a society, or a club generated to standardize and homogenize the opinions of its members. In his estimate, political clubs spoke in the voice of a corporate identity that presented the opinions of a majority, or even of a few drafters of a manifesto, as “the opinions of all members,” as if they had been unanimous rather than contested or even imposed from above. Coleridge perceived a deep incompatibility of the radicals’ fabricated (and self-delusional) “united front” of a univocal collective conscience with his own goal of liberty as the exercise of individual conscience, voice, and will.
While Coleridge thought that criticism and independence were important in society, he did not wish to suggest that mere obstreperousness was a desirable trait in general. Indeed, to take the role of a “spoiler” in an organization simply to annoy one’s enemies appears to have been as wicked to Coleridge as imposing one’s ideas upon them. The essential work of criticism and opinion must never be allowed to degenerate into factionalism, and opposition must always be conducted (where necessary) from a position of disagreement rather than jealously or spite. Coleridge’s vision of rights and liberties is interesting in the context of his analysis of the threat that the careless exercise of the freedom of association posed to the freedom of thought. In his critique of the “modern patriots,” he expressed his opinion that “free associations” such as political clubs were as capable of destroying freedom “from below” as a repressive government was capable of destroying it “from above.” Any institution, public or private, which inhibited the duties of conscience and individual opinion, he alleged, undermined the notion of right. This was the case because Coleridge conceived of a right or liberty as an entitlement conferred through the exercise of the duties of private conscience. Because censors and club manifestoes obstructed individual conscience, they poisoned liberty as well.
Coleridge’s critique of the natural-rights tradition depended on his definition of liberties and rights as practices and as political ideas. His attack on the unfreedom of “free associations” in “Modern Patriotism” suggests that his personal vocabulary of “liberty” and “rights” differed from that used by many of his contemporaries. It is easy enough to see that Coleridge considered himself to be of the general party of freedom, the line of mythologized reformers that was so often summed up in the pat formula “Milton, Harrington, Sydney, Locke.” It is more difficult to determine how Coleridge differed from other liberty-minded thinkers of his day. One of the best ways in which to differentiate Coleridge from other philosophers of liberty is to examine his doctrine of the origin and nature of rights. For although all of the “party of freedom” converged in the opinion that it was a good thing to be free and a good thing for members of a polity to have rights that protected them from oppression, they invariably diverged when it came to the issue of whether those rights emanated from tradition, nature, god, custom, the Common Law, or some combination of those sources. They also repeatedly disagreed on whether one could speak logically of “rights” and “liberties” as existing outside the obligations of “duties” and the positive law and legal traditions of a historically located civil polity that had the power to enforce those freedoms.
Coleridge, for his part, appears to have rejected natural-rights philosophy. Natural-rights doctrines had claimed that rights emanated either from God or nature and could be spoken of as “existing” regardless of whether any nation past or present had ever encoded them as either statute or custom. Natural-rights theories also tended to suggest that a subject’s rights were not “granted” by his being born into a specific national tradition of local freedoms, or “earned” by virtue of civic participation or performance of duty, but were “implicit” in his status as a human being. By suggesting these premises, natural-rights theorists presumed that the true rights of a Russian serf were in truth equal to those of an English lord, despite their differences in social rank, ability to exercise “civic virtue,” or the different laws and customs of the empires into which they had been born.
In many ways, the natural-rights tradition, which assumed the a priori existence of an eternal and incorruptible standard of rights, one that lived above the everyday shortcomings of any particular existing government, was far more “idealistic” and overtly “Platonic” than Coleridge’s own “Idealist” theory of rights. Coleridge’s metaphysical concept that “Ideas” were the products of material circumstances (as well as the ends, causes, and shapers of them) meant that he could not envision an Idea which was not grounded in the historicist evolution of existing institutions in everyday life. Because of his historicism and his insistence that Ideas gained their reality from constant interaction with the material world, Coleridge parted company with the proponents of natural rights.
Indeed, Coleridge feared the claim that natural rights were conferred solely by virtue of existence, nature, or reason and regarded it as a dangerous proposition. He argued instead that rights were socially normative and civically constructed. They would always remain so and indeed ought to remain so despite theoretical attempts to misrepresent this reality for purposes of political advantage. If one held a certain civil right, one held it by virtue of its existence in the laws and constitutions of a particular polity in a particular age. One also held this right conditionally, as a recognition of one’s performance of that right’s corresponding duties. Natural-rights theory, by suggesting that rights were ultimately derived from God’s will or nature, tended to imply that “law” was morality.21
The confusion of law with morality, a theoretical confusion implicit in the natural-rights doctrine, was at the core of Coleridge’s anxiety as to the uses of this polemic. This did not mean that Coleridge was a “legal realist” who thought that morality had no place in lawmaking. Coleridge thought that law was aimed towards the “Ideal” moral telos of justice, and in this important respect he agreed with the natural lawyers. He dissented from them because they suggested that the lex naturis was deducible purely through ratiocination and that it required no comparative study of civilizations. Coleridge thought, in contrast, that the progress of law towards the Idea of justice could only take place within the traditions and struggles of laws and courts groping rung by rung toward the moral goal of universal justice, but that laws could never, as rules taken singly, comprehend a universal standard.
The material capacity and moral facility for individual choice and conscience were central to Coleridge’s theory of liberty. This theory focused on moral and political “freedom” as dependent on the exercise of choice, and “choice” was regulated by conscience. This was not in itself a surprising or unusual move, since most discussions of “freedom,” whether political (as in freedom/oppression) or theological (as in freedom/determinism), typically began with a discussion of what moral agency meant. Typical formulations of the liberty of the will in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries generically began with a statement of how liberty, which was usually defined with some reference to the human will, tempered and governed by conscience, was a different thing from license. License, in contradistiction to liberty, was depicted as the unfettered and unruly human will (or animal sensual instinct), the will without reference to conscience. In order to be truly free, such studies usually concluded, man must neither be in chains nor completely unleashed. He must not only be able to exercise his will without unjust hindrance from the state but must also be restricted by law or conscience from enacting his desire to do things that are unjust. Here the struggle or conflict was conceived of as an internal one, between man’s baser animal self and his higher, rational, or divine self.
The suggestion that “liberty” did not mean the freedom to do whatever one pleased but meant the freedom to do as one should had been a pervasive one. Certain Nominalist theologians had suggested that even God Almighty distinguished between those deeds that were in his absolute power (potentia absoluta), but that he would not do because they were wicked, and those deeds that his self-imposed moral tradition (potentia ordinata) left him at “liberty” to perform.22
In his discussions of choice in politics, Coleridge assented to these standard divisions between “license” and “liberty.”23 Nevertheless, he took them to a far higher level of complexity in his writings on the role of conscience and individual choice in defining “liberty.” The faculty of moral conscience, Coleridge argued throughout his career, conferred two gifts: the power to choose and its correlative, the obligation to act. There were two notable strands to Coleridge’s thought on will, liberty, and conscience. The first was his assumption that the definition of a “free will” as being free to choose was inconceivable without the ability of the will to implement its choices. The second was his assertion of the principle “du kannst, denn du sollst”: if one had the ability to perform a duty, then one had a positive obligation to perform that duty.
Note that although Coleridge was an “Idealist” philosopher, his concept of moral conscience was strictly pragmatic in its insistence that the power to choose was meaningless unless one assumed the ability to act or to implement one’s choices. For Coleridge, “choice” meant not only the conceptualization but also the actualization of the individual will. “Will,” understood as mere good intention, was insufficient to the realization of rights. Agency, demonstrated in action, was also required.
In consequence of this theory that liberty was evidenced only by actions, Coleridge focused on the theme of duty and its relation to agency. Rights were regularly defined as dependent not only upon the correct choice to do one’s duty, but upon the actual deed of exercising that duty. It was necessary, argued Coleridge, for a citizen to exercise the choice, the “liberty,” to perform his social duties before earning the “liberty” of exercising his civil rights. Only through choice, he avowed, could the entire realm of “liberty” function.
The civil “liberty” that lived through the state and its institutions depended upon two things, Coleridge claimed. First, it depended on the noninterference by the state in the ability of the citizen to think freely and to act according to his conscience so long as he did not break the laws of the land. This was a negative liberty, in that it consisted of the “subject will’s” freedom from the state’s obstruction of its exercise. Second, civil liberty depended upon the active work of the citizenry in not only being willing to perform their duties to the commonwealth, but also in exerting themselves to fulfil those duties. This was a point of positive liberty, in that it represented the subject’s “freedom to” act civically and conscientiously as a citizen. Thus, in Coleridge’s politics, the personal “liberty” of the individual will to choose and act well was integral to the general civil “liberty” of the nation as a whole. If the citizen lost the ability to reason and act well for any reason (whether from state oppression or submission to a party manifesto), then liberty would be lost in the nation at large.
The interplay of individual choice, political duty, voluntarism, and free conscience was the central concern of Coleridge’s 1795 last-ditch defense of liberty of the press in The Plot Discovered.24 The importance of a free press, he insisted, resided precisely in the diversity of opinion among the subjects of the realm that such a frank exchange might air. In The Plot, as readers may recall, Coleridge lavished praise upon the contentious nature of political criticism, “Those sudden breezes and noisy gusts which purified the atmosphere they disturbed.” To him, such “gusts” represented the all-important exertion of “liberty” of conscience by the citizenry. The passage of the two acts by Pitt would kill off this freedom of thought, putting the nation into a situation where the exercise of civic duty was “hushed to death-like silence” once “all political controversy [was] at an end.” The censorship of the two acts would destroy the liberty of thought of the subject and so the liberty of action of the citizen. The new law, argued Coleridge, made the intention to think differently than the prime minister a criminal act and so all opposition and all opinion (whether polite or vulgar) incapable of exercise in action. And a will without a corresponding ability to act was not a “free” will at all, for Coleridge.25
Coleridge argued cogently in The Plot that the free exchange of information among citizens who may be described as critically minded secured liberty. Unfortunately, such a truly free polity—where the citizens willed to think and act well and were not prevented from doing so—depended for its existence on the free choice of the subjects to perform their duty of conscience. The state could play a minimal part at best in the encouragement of such civicism; states were far better at preventing citizens from undertaking bad actions than in encouraging them to perform good actions. In Coleridge’s opinion, the performance of the duty of conscience, like the duties of education and enlightenment, depended far more on the active and good wills of the citizens rather than on the coercive power of the state. The genuine transformation of individual belief, he argued, occurred through the individual citizens’ freely willed emulation of examples of good deeds or not at all. Coleridge appears to have defined this state of civic virtue as a polity where citizens not only did the bare minimum required to avoid punishment but exerted their liberty by doing well, performing their duties as subjects as best they could. True civic virtue and true exercise of civil liberty would not emerge as a result of homogenous-thinking associations and could not surface in a monoculture. Nor could such virtuous civicism be drummed up through the emotional power of a policy or rhetoric that targeted the base interests of a mob. Here it is useful to recall Coleridge’s timeocratic distinction in The Plot between public opinion and vulgar opinion. Where public opinion was the product of a nation of individuals exercising their liberty of judgment and conscience, vulgar opinion was a form of slavery, for it obstructed all independent thought and therefore all independent action.
Liberty of opinion was an intrinsic component of social liberty (both negative and positive) for Coleridge. The sort of opinions that individual subjects possessed, and their consequent ability to “think well,” played an important role for Coleridge in determining the degree of their ability to “act well,” their civic virtue. People imbibed truth, Coleridge opined, “like insects feeding on a leaf, till it colours their whole heart.”26 If their consciences were fed on nothing, or on garbage, they could only be expected to possess a faculty of liberty that was tainted, stunted and gnarled, and impotent. Therefore, Coleridge insisted, any scheme for encouraging liberty had to begin by considering the general population’s critical acumen, its autonomy of will, and its potential for exerting positive liberty in favor of the community. “That general illumination must precede the revolution,” Coleridge asserted, “is a truth as obvious as that the vessel should be cleaned before we fill it with a clear liquor.”27 A people with unfree minds could not be liberated by an external act of “revolution,” no matter how constitutionally pure or well orchestrated, because they were as yet incapable of performing the higher degree of civic duties that a freer and more democratic form of government would demand. Coleridge likened liberating a people with stunted wills by giving them a newer and better form of government to pouring a fresh bottle of good claret into a “vessel” full of dirt, mold, fungus, and insects as an effort to “improve” the bottle’s capability as a decanter.
Therefore, Coleridge was faced with a dilemma. He had stated clearly that his hoped-for goal was not a world of tyranny and ignorance, but one of liberty and “general illumination.” He had asserted, equally forcefully, that true freedom could only come about through the creation of an enlightened citizenry capable of handling the work of expanded liberties and expanded duties. On the other hand, he had insisted that even the best-designed governments could not force citizens into becoming autonomous moral agents and exerting their freely willed benevolence through an autarchic voluntarism. How, then, could a people become more “free” if they could not be legislated or tyrannized into that freedom, if they could not be “forced to be free,” as Rousseau had suggested?
Coleridge’s solution appears to have been one of “conversion by example.” Throughout his career, even in the 1790s, he regarded an inwardly motivated conversion of the heart and mind as the only way to achieve the autonomy of intellect and will that he desired for all and that he believed was the prerequisite of a freer state. In his advocacy of internal, personal change as the agent of social transformation, Coleridge once more voiced his profoundly Evangelical psychology. His adoption of the wine and wineskins metaphor from the gospels, there used with reference to personal salvation, in a reference to social reform suggests that Coleridge saw the work of Evangelicalism and the work of reform as fundamentally linked. In both spheres, Coleridge implied, it was not enough to perform “good works” simply because the “law” demanded them and one obeyed. True “illumination” (Coleridge’s “inner light” of the Holy Ghost in the state) would bring about a world in which subjects would undertake their duties because they had a purified intent and a clean “vessel.” Such a soul-felt enlightenment could not be brought to the people by the partial and abstracted reason of an arid and desiccated philosophy. It had to be brought in joyfully, Coleridge proclaimed, and with conviction, by a vibrant, living human being: ideally someone who, although he possessed the intellect of a philosopher, was fired by “the zeal of the Methodist.”
This emphasis on liberty as emanating from a purified and well-willing conscience emerged in Coleridge’s early polemics against Godwin. Coleridge argued that Godwin’s idea of general benevolence demonstrated how little Godwin knew of true human nature.28 Coleridge believed that Godwin’s principle, which claimed moral action ought to be blind to the “fellow-feeling” inspired by family and patriotism, was too mechanistic. Godwin’s paradigm failed to incorporate the variables of passion, love, familiarity, loyalty, and the contingencies of daily life that went into most people’s decisions.29 Godwin’s Political Justice, according to Coleridge, falsely assumed a uniformity of the transmission of benevolence from person to person, through reason rather than habit or feeling. Godwin had postulated in a famously eccentric argument (which was more often ridiculed than understood) that people could extend their benevolence evenly with the help of “Reason.” In his advocacy of benevolence, Godwin had made a crypto-Hartleyan claim that an “associative principle”—a sort of rationalized moral sentiment which would recognize the pain of others by mental analogy—would allow disinterested reason to lead to general benevolence. Godwin’s “associative principle” explained the same phenomena as emotional theories of moral sentiments, of the sort that Adam Smith advanced, but categorized those phenomena in such a rationalistic way as to suggest that this net of analogic thinking could cover the world in a vast blanket of “fellow-thinking” rather than “fellow-feeling.” But unlike Smith’s enlightened self-interest, Godwin’s extension of rational benevolence lacked the driver of some form of personal motivation. Those psychologists of benevolence such as Hartley and Smith, while they had not ignored association by mental analogy, had suggested that this process was weaker than the powerful sympathetic pull of habit and affection based upon sense experience and sentiment.30
If Coleridge was obviously discontented with Godwin’s rationalism, he was even more irked by what he (wrongly) saw as Godwin’s reliance on “private societies as the sphere of real utility.”31 Godwin, Coleridge alleged, had exposited a trickle-down theory of truth which claimed that “Truth by a gradual descent may at last reach the lowest order.”32 The mistake in Godwin’s thought, argued Coleridge, was his failure to realize the magnitude of the gulf between rich and poor, a gap which meant that “those immediately beneath” one might be too far away to be reached by truth. “Society as at present constituted does not resemble a chain that ascends in a continuity of links,” complained Coleridge. Therefore, truth had to be sent across the gap between rich and poor by a specific messenger deputized for that purpose. Individual efforts aimed at neighbors and familiars were not enough. “The best as well as the most benevolent mode of diffusing Truth,” claimed Coleridge, was to employ a messenger “who[,] uniting the zeal of the Methodist with the views of the Philosopher, should be personally among the Poor, and teach them their Duties in order that he may render them susceptible of their Rights.”33
This axiom, “teach them their Duties in order that he may render them susceptible of their Rights,” was one of the most foundational pillars of Coleridge’s timocratic and evangelical scheme for social reform. Coleridge’s elitism is clear in this passage, as in so many others. The active partner in this enterprise was the messenger who will “teach them” and “render them” politically competent (my italics). The “Poor” were assumed to be as yet incapable and incompetent agents of their own reform. This form of paternalism, which denied that the poor were capable of their own self-advancement—and the accompanying distrust of the “People” in their unwashed state—is usually seen by interpreters of the period as quintessentially a “Tory” trait. (That this was not invariably the case can be seen by a cursory glance at similarly paternalistic comments made by timocrats of the period active in the Whig party in the United Kingdom and of the Federalist party in the United States. As Jonathan Clark has pointed out, what we would today consider an arrogant condescension towards the poor was the rule rather than the exception in a society which was still unabashedly “aristocratic” in its patrician mores.34) It is therefore interesting to see the “young” Coleridge exhibiting his “friendship” with the people in a way more characteristic of Hannah More or John Wesley than of John Thelwall or the other “radicals.”
Coleridge’s conception of liberty relied centrally, as we have seen, on an understanding of freedom in some perfect philosophical sense. He argued that true freedom found expression through the performance of right action at the behest of individual choice and agency. Because he defined the Idea of government as a propertied trust founded on a bonding of rights and duties, he attempted to prove that government could arbitrate the inevitable conflict between the competing free choices of individuals and group interests in the “moral world.” Throughout his writings on liberty, Coleridge consistently paired external freedom of conscience with autarchic constraint of action. Ideally, he thought, citizens would be offered the freedom by the state to do all the good that they could and be denied the opportunity to do any evil by the promptings of their “fixed principles” and consciences.
Coleridge believed that the proper concern of the state’s material law dealt best with those conditions where action involved others. In contrast, private conscience did not typically “involve others”; it was a silent interior discourse of citizens in their own souls. Coleridge did not think it was the state’s business to make “windows into men’s souls,” to borrow the epigram of Queen Elizabeth. He conceived of the limits of government’s intrusive powers as the border that separated the private from the public. Actions that harmed or threatened other persons besides the individual could be constrained legitimately. Thoughts and words, which harmed no one but the individual who uttered them, were only restricted by tyrants. It was not the province of governments to police thoughts and words unless such words harmed another through action, as in cases of slander and libel.
It is evident that Coleridge’s opinions on this point combined aspects of theories of negative liberty and theories of positive liberty and community interest. Coleridge was an advocate of negative liberty on this point inasmuch as he suggested that even noxious opinions should be left free of state interference until they resulted in some tangible wrong of a specific rather than a vague sort. His opinion that deviant thoughts were not crimes contradicted centuries of socially monist, traditional communitarian belief in continental early modern European political thought.35 Coleridge’s views also contradicted a long and well thought-of (in his time) British tradition of antiheterodox communitarian monists stretching from Sacheverell in 1709 to the authors of the two bills in 1795 to the last Ultra defenders of the Test Act in 1828. All of these men had argued with varying degrees of success that the state had a moral obligation, for reasons of promoting community and ensuring political survival, to punish or eliminate deviant views. Despite Britain’s fragile tradition of toleration from 1689 onward, and “free speech” from 1695 onward, such ideas still held great popularity and had gained in popularity even more as a result of the backlash of the “British community” against the French Revolution.
But this defense of liberty of thought and speech was not a libertarian polemic to grant citizens the right to “think as they pleased.” Coleridge conceived of his work as a defense of the positive liberty to exercise the conscience of a citizen. This freedom, he most fully conceived of as the freedom to “do” as one ought. The positive source of this civic duty was in the free choice of an autarchic and righteous “Will.” Contrasting the will of the citizen to the animal instinct of the mob, Coleridge advanced a theory of the “metaphysical Will” as the basis for material political obligation.
For Coleridge, the will was the source of all moral choice. Through the guidance of conscience, it became the agent of moral obligation and the executor of civic responsibility. Because the citizen’s will either led or failed to lead to the performance of that citizen’s civic duty, Coleridge thought that the study of human will ought to be at the core of any account of political thought. Although he failed to convince many of the validity of the thesis that preferred the principle of “moral will” as the center of political study, he applied it rigorously to his own thought. His aim throughout his career was to find a moral anchor for the vicissitudes and uncertainties of political and social life. His search for “certain fixed principles,” as he had described them in “A Moral and Political Lecture,” forced him to look at political action through the lens of what he referred to somewhat confusingly as “religious philosophy.” This religious philosophy was developed and explored most completely by 1825 in Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection, which combined an account of individual spirituality with a critical moral philosophy established on transcendental and aesthetic grounds.