COLERIDGE USED a number of self-plagiarized catchphrases to describe his view of the processes and powers, both natural and civil, that constituted human experience. These included variously “the Science of the Legislator,” “the Harmony of Government,” “the Science of History,” and “the Life of Nature.” His understanding of the relationship between the science of the legislator and the harmony of government has already been discussed with regard to his accounts of public opinion and political and moral will. However, the underlying connections between these two formulations of political society are best understood in reference to the deepest foundation of Coleridge’s famously amorphous “fixed principles”: the vibrantly organic and dynamically interdependent nature of history and life.
In 1816 Coleridge began the composition of his book Hints Toward the Formation of a More Comprehensive Theory of Life. Because it was not on an overtly “political” subject, this work has often been omitted from the canon of Coleridge’s “political” writings. This omission is unfortunate, for it was in Theory of Life that Coleridge outlined the metaphysical doctrines of dynamism and the interrelationship of opposites that were implicit in every one of his later works. It is no exaggeration to say that without a consideration of Coleridge’s general biological theory of life, his specific theories of politics and statecraft will remain opaque. The Theory of Life provides the interpreter of Coleridge with a master key to the basic ideas that shaped all of his later works of the late 1810a and the 1820s. The views of politics and history that he expounded in such mature works as The Lay Sermons (1817), Aids to Reflection (1825), and, finally, On The Constitution of the Church and State (1830) were all predicated on the conceptions of power and causation that Coleridge developed through the theory of the “objective corollary” in his Theory of Life.
Coleridge’s conception of science had two major contentions. First, he blended the “idealist” theory of categories with the “experimental” tradition of verifiable empirical observations in order to suggest a new hybrid theory of knowledge in the sciences. This hybrid, of course, was the “Baconian” tradition in science that he wished to gain ascendancy over the “Lockean” tradition. Second, he argued that politics and historical process reflected the underlying dynamic interrelationships common to all life.
For Coleridge, history, which was as much a science as biology or astronomy, was an ideal subject matter through which to understand the ways that ideal forms structured and interacted with the material content of human societies. The question of the relationship of form to content became particularly thorny for Coleridge around 1816. After that year, he began to consider the ways in which form became content even as content became form.
Coleridge expressed this study of content-form/form-content relations in the terminology of the “objective corollary.” In the pursuit of this “corollary,” Coleridge put to use the terminology and concepts that he gained through his years of studying Kantian philosophy and natural science, two subjects with which (as we have seen) he had increasingly occupied his time from 1800 through 1815. After 1816, Coleridge returned to the territory of history and politics, which he had left somewhat fallow since his journalistic forays in the first decade of the new century. Throughout his peregrinations, he returned again and again to questions of social process as reflected in institutions and to the related study of teleology, or final causes. In order to understand whether an instrument, or organ, of government was effective, Colerigde argued, one must always return to the question of function or purpose. These questions were often clarified by crisis and failure, by the striking dysfunction of a system out of balance with its own life force. The years of domestic crisis that followed the British victory at Waterloo brought Coleridge to consider the body politic as dysfunctionally stressed and diseased. In his theory of a “state physiology,” the strategy of treatment focused on the underlying causes of disease rather than the superficial reduction of symptom.
Coleridge’s search for the objective corollary turned increasingly towards a “medico-philosophical” vocabulary by 1820. The specific event that caused him to turn his attention towards medicine and biology was the vituperative controversy between two eminent physiologists: The materialist William Lawrence, on the one side, represented the “Lockean” tradition in British medicine epitomized by John Hunter’s widely accepted Theory of Life. The realist John Abernathy, on the other side, had impugned the “narrow rationality” of the Hunterian theory as described by Lawrence. Indeed, Lawrence both lectured and published a new textbook in physiology in order to silence Abernathy. Coleridge, sided with Abernathy and the realists. However, he thought that Abernathy had been tactically foolish in his defense of a deeper truth in medicine. He argued that so long as Abernathy clung “to certain points, so long would he lay himself open to the attacks of Lawrence and the Materialists.”1 It was Coleridge’s decision to make Abernathy’s case in a clearer and more consistent form that led him into the fray occupied until then only by the Georgian medical establishment.
Attempting to describe his understanding of causation with respect to the particularity of organic form and content, Coleridge wrote to J. H. Green on 25 May 1820. In this important letter, Coleridge spoke of “those facts or reflections” that were so strong as “to change belief into insight,” and so strong as to “never lose their effect.” In his consideration of “the physiological question,” Coleridge had come to the conclusion that “reflections” which provided “insight” on a patient and on disease in general were equally important, or even more important, than the ticking-off and adding-up of the experiential “facts” in a case. He compared the true understanding of “the distinctive sensations of Disease” with the aridity of “a mere perceived correspondence of Systems with the Diagnostics of a medical book.” In Coleridge’s view, this central “physiological question” had been (improperly) “generally decided one way by the late most popular writers on Insanity.”2
Coleridge’s close reflection on the problem of understanding the somatic or physiological origins of madness, rather than simply diagnosing its symptoms and prescribing a standardized cure, struck to the heart of the dispute between the rival schools of physiology and psychology in the London of the mid-1810s. He entered enthusiastically into the arena of this battle over what distinguished physical sensations from mental perceptions. He considered where and how pain became anguish. He pondered the difference between pleasure and joy, asking if it were a question of kind or degree. These “deep questions” in medicine and psychology were questions that, in Coleridge’s estimation, the Lockean physicians and Benthamite psychologists had failed to address.3 They ignored these deeper questions because they treated patients as if they were simply steam engines in for repairs. Their uninventive diagnoses and remedies came only out of “a mere perceived correspondence of Systems with the Diagnostics of a medical book.” Coleridge had insisted to Green that medicine had to be about more than crude technics of diagnostics based on physical symptoms alone. True medical research had to consider that “the efficient cause of disease and disordered action & so collectively of pain & perishing” may not be “entirely in the Organs.” Medicine was more than engineering, and curing a patient was more than simply cutting open the mechanism, tossing out the defective parts, and installing new ones.
In a thought experiment involving an hypothetical (and in terms of 1816, impossible) organ transplant by an imaginary being, Coleridge pointed out to Green exactly why he thought a human being was more than the sum of its component “parts.” Coleridge imagined (for the purposes of the parable) that some “other plastic spirit” could “awhile suspend” his “own proper principle of life,” in effect placing him under “suspended animation.” During this period of stasis, Coleridge imagined that the plastic spirit would “reconstruct my body & thoroughly repair the defective organs.” Its tinkering finished, the spirit would set about “reawakening the active principle in me” and, having revived his patient from stasis, “depart.” Coleridge asked Green about the net result of this “tune-up” by the plastic spirit. Coleridge’s little foray into science fiction avant la lettre was more than an amusing tale; its simplicity concealed a difficult conundrum for Green to ponder. Would “Coleridge the patient” be better off or worse off than he was before after his gutting and refitting by the hypothetical plastic spirit?
Coleridge believed that the transplants of the afflicted organs would not have, as Hunterian physiology had it, “removed … all pain and disease.” He also denied that after the meddling of the plastic spirit that he would “stand in the same state as I stood in previous to all sickness & to the admission of any disturbing forces in my nature.” This was not, for Coleridge, the way human bodies worked. They were not as steam engines or other machines, where to stick in a new part was to fix the whole. “On the contrary,” Coleridge suggested, “such a repaired organismus” would “be no fit organ for my Life.”
Using a second parable, he compared the meddling, imaginary spirit who had operated on him to a man who owned “a worn lock with an equally worn key.” This man, Coleridge told Green, had “exchanged” his old lock “for an equally perfect Fac Similie of the same Lock, such as it was as when it was new.” Unfortunately, he still had his old key. Coleridge asked Green to consider whether “the key might no longer fit the lock?”4 In this second parable, Coleridge underlined his earlier concern that putting fresh parts into a faulty system would only result in a continuance of the failure of that system (in this case, a human body), despite the “new parts,” or even because of them.
The point here is not to consider Coleridge as an early advocate of holistic medicine or to question his (dubious) medical wisdom in denying the utility of transplants for patients with dysfunctional organs. The validity of Coleridge’s somewhat eccentric gestalt theory of disease has been considered in depth elsewhere by scholars who have looked specifically at Coleridge’s contributions to the medical debate of the 1810s.5 Rather, the point here is to see the incredible degree to which his view that the sum of a system was greater than the total of its constituent parts was the cornerstone of his theory of the state. Coleridge criticized the Hunterians in medicine for thinking that all one had to do to cure a patient’s disease was to follow a rigid “cure” set down in a book and “fix” the afflicted part without reference to the body as a whole. Coleridge criticized the Lockeans and utilitarians in government for imagining that all one had to do to reform a corrupted polity was to follow a universally valid policy set down in a book and to correct the corrupted institution without reference to the morality or virtue of the citizenry as a whole. In this sense, Coleridge considered his reflections on the nature of science and the body as not only relevant but essential to his study of the function of social and political interactive forces in the state.
Coleridge emphasized his vision of an integrated association between natural science, the study of history, and political science in a letter to John Hookham Frere in 1826. He presented a model of knowledge to Frere which was an “Isociles triangle.” The first side of the triangle was “a philosophical spirit, and the introduction of philosophy in its objective type, among our physiologists and naturalists.” The “basis” of the triangle was “dynamic Logic.” The “Apex” of the triangle was “Religion.” Within this schema, history was a cognate discipline of the natural sciences. “The historic Idea,” remarked Coleridge, “is the same in Natural History (Physiognomy) as in History, commonly so called.” The difference between natural science and history was only that the “idea” in each was “but polarized or presented in opposite and correspondent forms.”6 In this context, it is not surprising that Coleridge believed his theory of medical interdependency of the body in “Natural History” bore great consequences for his theory of change in “History, commonly so called.” For in science and history both, the “historic Idea,” not the simple accumulation of facts and stratagems, was the basis of true understanding. When these ideas were translated from sick human bodies to corrupt bodies politic, Coleridge’s medicophysical theory of animal physiology was applied to the historic Idea of the state.
In the years after 1816, Coleridge’s speculations on the difference between “symptoms” and “causes” in medicine led him to examine the institutional forms that might best suit the dynamics of individual action and change in politics. In the course of this work, Coleridge moved from his medicophilosophical interests of 1816 toward revised theories of action and value in the constitution of a state. He summed up these connections explicitly in a letter to his brother Edward in 1825, the year in which his Aids to Reflection reached print. This letter contrasted crude behaviorist psychologies with true studies of ethics, such as he considered his own efforts. Sciences which dealt only with the “outward Deed,” which included “Schemes of Ec[onom]y, social and political—such as Paley’s (mistitled) Moral and Political Phi[loso]phy,” invariably failed to understand anything but simple stimuli and responses. What students of behavior needed was a science of “the inward principle of responsible Action”; only an emphasis on virtue and on motive could create “the science of pure Ethics.”7 Coleridge himself (modestly) hoped to provide such a science.
For Coleridge’s “science of pure Ethics,” it was not enough to consider the outworks of men’s characters, as did the political economists such as Malthus and Ricardo (for whom his scorn had not significantly diminished). The inward principles of responsible action must also be considered. The “Unreformed Constitution” maligned by the utilitarians and radicals was the “worn lock” of Coleridge’s parable; the degraded virtue and agency of a people was the “worn key.” The reformers of the 1820s, to Coleridge, schemed for an improved “Fac Similie of the same lock, better than the old lock was “when it was new” in 1688. Unfortunately, they still had the “worn key,” an immoral and corrupt people. Such a “worn key” “might no longer fit” the bright, shiny, allegedly more efficient new lock of reformed government.8 Only a pairing of politics with metaphysics, and a “science of pure ethics,” maintained Coleridge, could address “disordered action” and make the worn key of the corrupted people new and solid so that it would fit a new lock.
In his account of the importance of the study of history and the “Historic Idea” Coleridge advanced a working description of the relationship between “Structures et Evenements.” In short, he conceived of the study of the historic Idea as the intellectual process by which the interrelationship of lock and key, of institutions and peoples, could be best studied. He also advocated history as the field of study in which the “science of pure ethics” was best shown in its applied form, the historic Idea. In both the natural and human sciences, the development of this historic Idea was a constantly changing, living, and organic process. This master process, even when considered through the veil of fragmentary and partial human knowledge, perpetually revealed the principle of its working in actions, intentions, and institutions. This endeavor was the “science of history” to which Coleridge referred in 1830 in his study of church and state.
Coleridge wrote in his 1826 letter to Frere that the “purpose” of history was “to exhibit the moral necessity of the [Idea of a] whole [society] in the freedom of the component parts: the resulting chain necessary, each particular link remaining free.”9 Most historians, complained Coleridge, were only capable of showing either the “big picture” of the broad sweep of social development or the small day-to-day details of human decisions and anecdote. In the works of the sociological macrohistorians—a group in whom Coleridge placed “Hume, Robertson, [and] Gibbon”—the great waves of history and large-scale change were well defined, but any idea of individual will or of heroic or villainous acts having any influence on the deep course of the longue durée was lost. It was a masterfully rendered landscape without figures. In the works of the anecdotal microhistorians—a group in which Coleridge lumped “our old chroniclers and annalists” (presumably Bede, Geoffrey, Holinshead, Foxe, and their ilk)—the moral value of the heroes and villains was well defined, but the sense that there was any Idea of the grand development of the society, anything beyond a long parade of one thing after another, was lost. It was a cabinet of miniatures with no arch design behind their collection except for the love of detail. Coleridge later described such a view of history as “a great heap of little things.”10
Coleridge had only found two books that both “exhibit[ed] the moral necessity of the whole [society]” and detailed “the freedom of the component parts”: The History of Herodotus and the Hebrew Bible. True science, whether studying nature, culture, or politics, had to concern itself with the grand scheme and the detailed account at the same time. True science, claimed Coleridge, also had to reconcile the freedom of the individual in history with the “moral necessity” of deep social forces. He summed up this interaction in a phrase from his letter to Frere: “The absolute Freedom, Will both in the form of Reason and in its own right as the ground of Reason[,] is the principle of the whole in the component parts.”11 Any ethics or politics worth the name would examine this “Reason” and its foundation in the “Freedom” of the “Will.” He considered the ordering moral imperatives behind human action, the “Will,” to accord ultimately with living processes. Living processes, in turn, all possessed some absolute structuring principle that animated and determined them.
The state, Coleridge pointed out, operated as the most common and pervasive “structuring principle” for human social, economic, and political activity. This structuring principle was not a rigid box that (like the bed of Procrustes) forced everything put in it to conform to its own shape. The “structuring principle” was instead a living process, an “Idea, which was itself constantly changing due to the actions of individuals. In this context Coleridge argued that even as men made the state, the state made men. The hypothesis of a deep Idea of the state that was more profound than individual acts (and which in large part conditioned those acts) did not, in Coleridge’s development of it, suggest that the process was inevitable or that human agency did not matter. Coleridge’s model of the individual’s agency in a social structure was a dynamic process, in which the individual’s actions and intentions themselves became part of the determining force that had shaped his actions in the first place. Human will and action became a part of the structuring matrix of the state and helped to constitute its ultimate aim or telos. Because of Coleridge’s theory of the relations of individuals to social and cultural determinants, he consistently argued that individual freedom could not be discussed without reference to social activity or common goods. It was the importance of this individualist and voluntarist principle in politics that led Coleridge to his second critique of Malthus, essentially a historical-relativist attack on pure materialism.
Coleridge thought that the political economists were determined to consider action as entirely conditioned by environment and society, without reference to intention (or the morality and virtue which the embrace of intention implied). His criticisms of Malthus’s revised theory turned on such a distinction. In his marginal notes to the second edition of Malthus’s Essay On the Principle of Population, Coleridge summed up his objections. He considered “[the] Whole question” posed by Malthus as capable of being summed up in one query: “Are Lust and Hunger both alike [in being the mere products] of physical necessity … independently of reason, of the Will?” He thought that Malthus’s very act in daring to ask such a repulsive question brought “Shame upon our [human] Race.”12 Obviously, for Coleridge, while “Hunger” could be credited entirely to “physical necessity” and deemed “independent of reason,” “Lust” could not be similarly biologized without traducing the ethics which made humans distinctive.
Malthus had himself revised his theory between 1798 and 1803 to consider the issues of moral restraint and human decision as constraints on what he had originally argued was a reproductive growth regulated only by scarcity of food. In Coleridge’s eyes, Malthus had not truly revised his old errors but merely tacked on a petty exiguous doctrine of morality’s effect on the birthrate as an afterthought to fend off critics. To Coleridge, Malthus’s theory was still at heart immoral. In the end, Malthus simply asserted that the rise in population was an arithmetic progression that invariably outpaced the geometric advance in food production. The causes, motivations, and moral constructions of these cycles, claimed Coleridge, were still not addressed. Even the “revision,” which in Coleridge’s eyes “wholly confute[d] [Malthus’s] former pamphlet,” still stuck to too many of the old errors. Coleridge inveighed against the revised Malthus with an even greater fury than he had against the first edition: “Merciful God! Are we now to have a Quarto to teach us that great misery & great vice arises from Poverty & that these [social vices] be [only the signs of] poverty in its worst shapes. Where ever there are more mouths than loaves and more heads than grains!”13
Coleridge attacked Malthus’s ethology for the same reason that he attacked Hume’s, Gibbon’s, and Robertson’s histories: they presented only great sweeping material forces and ignored the morals of individuals or the influences of virtue. By doing so, Malthus and his acolytes implied that morals and virtues were a specious “superstructure” slapped atop the true structures of society. Only material conditions, argued Malthus and his followers, truly conditioned behavior. All other social phenomena were mere reflections of that deeper truth.
Coleridge wished to argue, against Malthus, that norms of morality and virtue, as Ideas, were actually part of the deep structure of social life and were as important in reckoning the likely reproductive behavior of a pair of humans as the amount of grain harvested that year. The study of society, asserted Coleridge, was not as simple as totaling up “mouths” and “heads” of the population and comparing them to the available “grains” and “loaves” produced to feed them. Coleridge argued that all moral decisions had to be understood in light of the ineffable and immeasurable work done by intentions and the will, and not solely in light of things which could be counted, such as the material consequences of “heads” and “loaves.”
Indeed, Coleridge thought that Malthus’s revision, in its attempt to tack on a “moral view” to an essentially immoral thesis in the first edition, was all the more wicked. For Malthus’s 1798 edition at least had the courage to bracket out virtue and vice as baggage not worthy for scientific contemplation. The 1803 edition, more cowardly, hid behind a patina of “morality” to reiterate the same grotesque lies. Coleridge attacked Malthus’s “Ignorance,” which he demonstrated by calling his work “a moral view” but writing it “without stating what a moral view is.” Indeed, Coleridge believed that the Reverend Malthus’s heartless calculations were cruelest because they made economics simply a matter of utility, without any reference to the Christian values that Malthus himself was bound to propagate. “If it be immoral to kill [a] few [unimportant men] in order to get [the] population of a country capable of sustaining a 1000 times as many capable and happy men,” Coleridge thundered, “is it not immoral to kill millions of infants[,] then[,] by crowded cities, by hunger and by the pox?”14
The crucial point that Coleridge made in his lambasting of Malthus was that all political theory was “moral” or “immoral.” The attempt by Malthus and the other dismal scientists to escape the boundaries of the traditional language of virtue and vice in social policy was a failed one. A treatise on the poor that viewed them as a population no more interesting than one of rabbits was inherently “immoral” because it wrongly suggested that the starvation of “millions of infants” could be examined dispassionately as a regulative mechanism rather than as an intolerable social evil. In treating starvation and reproduction as sociobiological issues only, Malthus, asserted Coleridge, had stripped the poor of their humanity.
Coleridge’s objection was that Malthus’s moral calculus not only ignored broader social and ethical problems, but that it was inherently evil because it did so. Coleridge also, as has been stated, assaulted Malthus because Malthus suggested that material causes were the strongest determinant of behavior. Malthus proceeded on the deterministic assumption that overpopulation alone was the cause of all poverty and that poverty was the cause of all crime and vice. By reducing population, Malthus argued, one would decrease poverty and thereby abate crime and vice. Coleridge argued in response that there was no reason to suppose that such a causal link existed or that Malthus’s projections were credible, mostly because Malthus had ignored the motivations behind vice and had made a mockery of the actual meanings of the terms “vice” and “virtue.”
Paradoxically, Malthus’s “immorality” was less culturally relativistic than Coleridge’s own defense of the study of morality. Malthus had, in his second edition, spoken of “Promiscuous intercourse, unnatural passions, violations of the marriage bed, and improper acts to conceal the consequences of irregular connections” as “clearly” belonging “under the head of vice.”15 This meant that Malthus, whatever his opinions of the underlying causes of vice and the degree of culpability that the poor bore for succumbing to it, knew perfectly well which acts were vicious and which were virtuous. Coleridge’s marginal note on that passage from Malthus relativized and historicized that argument. Where Malthus saw virtue and vice as stable constants, Coleridge saw virtue and vice as slowly emerging, historically conditioned Ideas. Coleridge condemned Malthus for speaking of morality “without having stat[ed] the meaning of the terms Vice and Virtue.” Obviously, the crimes that Malthus had listed were all “vice in the present state of society.” But Malthus, because he ignored the depth of the Idea of vice and virtue, had also ignored that the very definition of what was virtuous and what vicious was historically conditioned and was not universally that held by sensible parsons in late Georgian England. If he had known that “Promiscuous intercourse” was a vice in Georgian England, Malthus had conveniently forgotten that “celibacy” was an even more heinous crime in the “Patriarchal ages.” “Vice and virtue,” Coleridge insisted, “subsist in the agreements of the habits of a man with his reason & conscience.” Coleridge stressed in his marginal note that his foray into relativism was not meant to suggest a total relativism that would deny that anything could be described as moral or immoral: “We mention this [relativity of morals in various stages of civilization] not under the miserable notion that any state of society will render these actions capable of being performed with conscience and virtue.”16
Coleridge argued in his attack on Malthus that value in the sphere of action was something that must be gauged in terms of particular historical norms. To this he added the important qualification that virtue, although historically conditioned, was always moving towards a telos of perfection and universal relevance. Virtue meant that an agent acted “authentically” and consistently in the light of what was known in his time to be the standard of “reason” and “conscience.”17 However, while codes of conduct that related to action had to be gauged with an eye to particular circumstances, the ultimate intention or motivation behind human conduct looked toward a perfected human morality that was not only superior to that of the primitive “Patriarchal ages,” but was also superior to the smug morality of Georgian England, which Rev. Malthus had considered the measure of all things. For Coleridge, the “cunning of history” was the final arbiter of moral value, as it alone reflected the essential dictates of reason and the will. His marginal notes condemning Malthus suggest that “reason” and “conscience” “can have but one moral guide, Utility or the virtue & happiness of other rational beings.” Note that under the heading of “Utility” Coleridge included not only the “happiness” of other humans and their presumed state of being well fed with “loaves,” but also added “virtue.” This was an anti-utilitarian use of the principle of “Utility,” for it suggested that the greatest “virtue” of the greatest number was an equally important goal as the greatest “good” or “happiness” of the greatest number.
Coleridge could never bring himself to “believe works like Malthus” which were at their “warmest” when they suggested “that man never will be capable of regulating the sexual appetite by the laws of reason.” He also defied once again Malthus’s notion “that the 
Lust is a Thing of physical necessity equally with the gratifications of Hunger.”18 In the end, Coleridge’s objections to Malthus turned on his detestation for Malthus’s view that human agency and volition were not as important as population biology and food supply in determining the rate of reproduction and the frequency of crimes in a society.
The parallels between Coleridge’s visions of the demerits of the Hunterians in the medicophilosophical debate and the demerits of Malthus in the debate on population were striking. In both cases, he argued against carnal definitions of processes of change. For Coleridge, the Malthusians, like the Hunterians, viewed human society in narrowly materialist terms that admitted little or no causal role for Ideas, morality, and human volition. In the case of medicine, he argued that physicians, if they truly wished to cure their patients, should think of human bodies as more than the sum of their constituent organs. In the case of statecraft, he argued that reformers, if they truly wished to reform their societies, should think of institutions such as churches and states and normative Ideas such as virtue and vice as intrinsically important to the success of their endeavors. They should not dismiss mores, as Malthus had, as irrelevant superstructures ineffective in the study of the “basic” material truths of birth and procreation and death, hunger, and satiety. Instead, they should consider those social frameworks of institutions and values as the particular and imperfect material manifestations of a much greater and more perfect telos toward which their society was travelling. This institutional framework of laws, political bodies, and mores, according to Coleridge, constantly modified itself through the actions of its constituent members. The framework also changed through constant processes of generation and evolution, competition and decay, which were as natural as the processes of growth and decay in the human body.
Coleridge viewed human societies and their moral norms as constituting fragmentary yet evolving manifestations of history, nature, and truth. As we have seen in previous chapters, Coleridge insisted that the unfortunate trend in legislative thought from 1790 to 1830 had been an increasing preoccupation with specific actions and novel methods for their own sake, as opposed to attention to constitutive principles. Most modern governments and new constitutions failed, argued Coleridge, because they legislated for particular events and evanescent contingencies rather than essential functions.
Perhaps the most forceful exposition of Coleridge’s argument relating political and moral forces to natural forces came in his 1820 letter to Green. In it, Coleridge detailed an idealist model of change. Coleridge’s letter to Green argued against the “system of materialism” that emphasized the study and reform of the “means” of “organization” rather than keeping its eyes on “Nature[,] or God, & Life &c. as its [end] results.” Materialism, he pointed out to Green, had the advantage of banality: it offered comfort in its promise to “remove a great part of the terrors which the soul makes out for itself.” It had the disadvantage of soullessness, “remov[ing] the soul too, or rather preclud[ing] [the use of] it.” A social “organization,” argued Coleridge, was “primarily” dependent on its clear-sightedness in defining the “result,” or grand ends of the institution, in terms of nature, virtue, and other transcendental concerns.
It was “only by reaction” that a short-term goal, which Coleridge described as a “cause,” mattered much in constitution building. Doctors could only cure their patients if they gave thought to what a truly healthy individual would be and diagnosed the various nonbiological factors that contributed to their patient’s ills rather than simply troubleshooting specific ailments in that specific patient “by the book.” Reformers, likewise, should focus less on the methodology and technique of reform and figure out what the general ends of government were and what government ought to aim toward being and doing. Otherwise, they would end up treating the entire endeavor as if it were a club for claret rather than the embodiment and enhancer of the morals and aspirations of an entire people. “It would be well [for physicians] to consider,” Coleridge had stressed to Green, “what causes are, in this life, in which the restoration of the organization removes Disease.” In most cases, Coleridge alleged, the “restoration” of the general “organization” (i.e., the organism as a whole) was more effective in “remov[ing] Disease” than the specific spot cures of a physician to various diagnosed ailments. Certainly, it was a bad idea to subject the body to a set of “new” organs if the general health was poor, just as it was a bad idea to buy a new lock if one planned on keeping the old, worn key. In the end, Coleridge informed Green, a vital, lively, and self-renewing polity, in which one could remove small stumbling blocks to its workings as the need arose, was sound. Certainly it was sounder, he asserted, than one that underwent the sort of wholesale revision of essential organs that he had imagined happening at the hands of the hypothetical “plastic spirit.” “Is the organization ever restored, except as continually reproduced? And are not the majority of instances [of successful wardings-off of disease] cases of removal of mechanical or chemical obstructions [tumors, etc.] from the organization?19 One sees again that Coleridge’s discussion of disease, like his discussions of reform, pertained not to a particular organism or constitution but to a broader conception of “organization” or system.
Coleridge distinguished in his letter to Green between “restoration” of the “organization” and the “continual … reproduc[tion]” that brought such “restoration” about. His conception of historical progress was central to this distinction. In restoring an organic organization, an old lock could not be replaced unless a new key was bought along with it. The essential workings, the institutional forms, had to be restored and revived along with the outward institutions and rules and techniques, so that the organization could continue to evolve or develop dynamically. It was of no use to put a fresh set of lungs into a corpse. The process of reform, believed Coleridge, should reveal or unfold providentially that which was inherent in the design of all such institutions but which was as yet imperfectly realized in that specific example.
In Coleridge’s scheme, each moment in history and each society was unique, although conforming to certain essential teleological forms. Such organizations actively constituted the building blocks of everyday reality—loaves of bread, people, buildings, state papers, political offices. These elements themselves participated in the evolution of the institution, the organization, or the state. Coleridge detailed the interactive nature of this process in the conclusion of his letter to Green. Writing of God, causation, and the will, he remarked, that “no power” could be “redemptive” that did not at the same time “act in the ground of the Life as one with the ground.” This meant that the “power” in question must “act in [the individual’s] Will and not merely on [the individual’s] Will,” even though it always worked simultaneously “extrinsically as an outward Power, i.e. as that which outward nature is to the organization.”20
Coleridge’s phraseology in his letter to Green evoked his recurrent theme of institutions simultaneously living inside and outside the individual citizen. He had already gone beyond the crude theories of “social control” in which the state “act[s] … merely on [the individual’s] Will” and had recognized that the subject-object relationships of states and citizens were far more complex. Effective governments, although they kept their status “extrinsically as an outward Power,” acted in the individual will. It was in this regard that Coleridge would argue that the state made men and that “a State like a river constitutes its own products—subsists in its own productive Ideas.”21
One cannot help noticing the resemblances in the 1820 letter to Green between Coleridge’s vision of the state’s existence inside the will and the interior, heart-centered salvation doctrines of Evangelical Anglicanism. Evangelical soteriology asserted that grace working in the heart of the individual believer was stronger by far than the mere external power of the law. Compare this to Coleridge’s assertion that “no power” could be “redemptive” that did not at the same time “act in the ground of the Life as one with the ground.” Additionally, Coleridge saw the state as a “redemptive power.” The strong undercurrents of this language in the theology of grace suggests that Coleridge was already working towards certain of the ideas and emphases of his treatise on church and state, in which the two are somewhat conflated. Evangelicalism’s stress on the superiority of the religion of the heart to that of the head may have echoed in Coleridge’s higher ranking of the inward reform of the moral constitution of a nation to the outward reform of its mere externals.
It will be helpful at this point to turn toward a representative instance of the application of these general principles of government and change. This will suggest not only how Coleridge saw generic processes of change working within the state but will also evince how he employed these principles to analyze and support a specific piece of legislation. Specifically, Coleridge’s defense of Peel’s Factory Bill provides a telling portrait of the “Tory” crusader against laissez-faire and physiocracy. By 1818, Coleridge turned his theories of progressive agency to his criticisms of specific legislation. His view of the proper role for individual agency in public life allowed him to defend Peel’s Factory Acts and reject contemporary Whig arguments for a completely “free market” in labor. Coleridge maintained in his contributions to this debate that true liberty was best advanced on occasion by rare and specific limitations on individual freedom. It should be recalled that Coleridge’s theory of liberty only allowed the government to intervene in the private sphere of “liberty to do as one liked” when an individual or group was threatening to destroy the rights of individual citizens. Thus, the Coleridgean law would not prosecute a factory owner who blasphemed (and hurt no one but himself), but could legitimately prosecute him for needlessly endangering the life of a factory worker. The factory owner’s “right” to do as he pleased on his property at the mill ended for Coleridge whenever exercise of that right interfered with a worker’s right to life.
Coleridge’s limitations on the “free market” in labor, although they diminished liberty of individual citizens in the short view, in the long view were intended to enhance the general social and economic welfare of all. It was characteristic of Coleridge’s theory of teleology that he argued that it was more important in considering the bills to see their impact on the long-term goal of liberty rather than focus on their short-term diminution of the factory-owners’ particular liberties.
Coleridge published his Two Addresses on Sir Robert Peel’s Bill in April of 1818. In it, Coleridge supported Peel’s legislation to limit the hours worked by children in the Lancashire cotton mills. The focus of Coleridge’s address was the “free labour” arguments that the M.P. for Lancashire, Lord Stanley, had advanced on behalf of the manufacturers among his constituents.22 Coleridge identified Stanley’s arguments with antique physiocratic ideas and with the more recent innovations of the political economists. Lord Stanley and his allies argued that the free market would itself create social equity and eliminate hazardous laboring conditions if the forces of the owners’ enlightened self-interest and the freedom of the labor market were not hindered by intrusive law.
Coleridge expressed his concerns over the debates surrounding the bill in a letter to Henry Crabb Robinson. He sentimentally tugged at Robinson’s heartstrings with maudlin images of “the poor little children employed in the cotton factories who would fain have you in the best of their friends & helpers,” but he had the more hard-headed goal of discovering whether there was yet any law regulating the employment of either children or adults or both in white-lead manufacturing. A report of the Select Committee of the House of Commons on the state of children in the cotton factories in 1816 contained a statement by Mr. Ashley Cooper that there was such a law. Coleridge sought from his friend “any … instances in which the legislature has directly, or by immediate consequence, interfered with what is ironically called “Free Labour.’” Coleridge used the term “Free Labour” sarcastically. He thought the phrase the worst sort of cant because it hid the filthy truth of “soul-murder and infanticide on the part of the rich” and “self-slaughter on that of the poor” behind a veil of euphemism.23
Coleridge’s appeal to Robinson for precedents was the beginning of his crusade against the factory lobby’s laissez-faire arguments. He was especially eager to suggest that although the owners allied against the bill represented themselves as the advance guard of the forces of progress and advancing liberty and a freer society through “free” labor, that they were in truth the stodgy defenders of a rapidly passing and indefensible way of life. It is striking that Coleridge considered Stanley’s argument and the arguments of the factory owners to be essentially conservative objections to progressive innovation. Coleridge identified the “free market” pundits with a regressive and reactive view of legislation.
In his “Remarks on the Objections which have been urged Against the Principles of Sir Robert Peel’s Bill,” Coleridge’s enumerated the five major attacks made by the factory owners upon the bill. The first attack, that “children were happier in factories,” Coleridge believed could be dismissed summarily as “nonsense.” However, he suggested that the remaining four arguments held wide support in the nation and could not be ignored. The second strand in the owners’ “objections,” according to Coleridge, was “the impropriety of legislative interference with free labour.” Factory owners had suggested that the beginning of regulation of the free market in labor and wages was the first step onto a slippery slope leading to the government’s tyranny over manufacturers. Coleridge pointed out that the mill-owners thought the acts were a “danger” on account of their “beginning a course of innovation, without any certainty at what point it may stop, and thus of encouraging an endless succession of claims” for social amelioration by statute. The third contention of the owners was that the bills would be ineffective. Coleridge described how the mill owners assaulted “the inadequacy of the [legislative] measures proposed to the removal of the [social] evil.” The fourth argument of the owners was that the bill would create an unrealistic attitude among the people; they might claim that all of their grievances should be cured by legislation. Such an idea was inimical to the principle of laissez-faire. They suggested that the bill raised false hopes “by attracting attention” to schemes for ameliorating society through law. The factory owners claimed “the excitement of hopes” drummed up by supporters of the bill were “incompatible with the present state of society, and with the indispensable conditions of a commercial and manufacturing nation.” By unleashing rising tides of expectations where there had been few or none before, the owners gathered that the bills “are calculated to increase discontent in a greater degree than they can be expected to palliate the grievance.” Their fifth and final argument against the bill, reported Coleridge, was that a combination of the philanthropy of individual mill owners, the market forces, which made it evident to owners that healthier workers were more productive, and a general growth of benevolence and civilization in the land would get rid of the factory evils faster than the law could. “What can be done towards the removal of the evil can best be brought about by the master manufacturers themselves,” or so claimed the manufacturers. The owners presumed that the acts of the owners as “individuals,” rather than as a class, and “the humane spirit of this enlightened age,” when combined with “the consequent growth and increasing influence of an enlightened self-interest” would lead to better conditions for factory workers. “We may rest assured,” the owners claimed, “that the said individual [manufacturers] will gradually more and more attempt to do what they alone can do effectually.” The factory owners’ five attacks on the Peelite legislation, admitted Coleridge, were “formidable” not so much “in themselves” but “on account of the impression they appear to have made” among the literate public.24
Coleridge flatly denied that either the “enlightened self-interest” of mill owners acting as buyers in the labor market, or the increasing “humanity” of the “enlightened age” and the increase in sympathy for the downtrodden would impel the owners of the offending factories to address the suffering of the factory worker. The “individual” who Coleridge’s theory posited had the right to be the “best judge” of his own “happiness” could legitimately be restrained from his pursuit of that goal by a coercive government whenever he “encroach[ed] on another’s sphere of action” and thereby violated his prime duty as a citizen. The magistrate had a compelling reason to hold back citizens from doing evil to one another. It was of no import, argued Coleridge that such evildoing might be done with the complicity of the injured party and thereby be described by the evildoer as the “free” act of the injured.
Coleridge addressed one by one the arguments of the opponents of the bill. First, he attacked the charges of “legislative impropriety” and of a slippery slope towards government abridgement of liberties. “On what grounds” was this “impropriety” “presumed” asked Coleridge. It was his perception that neither “past experience” nor “the practise of the British Constitution” prevented regulations on wages, hours, and working conditions. Indeed, argued Coleridge, the “statute books” of the kingdom were “(perhaps too much) crowded with proofs to the contrary,” that the government could regulate laboring conditions and prices. The “first institution, by law, of apprenticeships,” Coleridge pointed out, was an “interference with free labor.” The statutes on apprenticeship, which date back to the Middle Ages, contained (according to Coleridge’s account) “various clauses that regulate the time, privileges, & c. of the individuals.” Indeed, the ancient law went so far “in many cases,” attested Coleridge, that it indulged in “controlling the power of masters, as well as the employment of the free labour of adults, however skilful, who had not been previously bound to the trade.… The recent regulations of the labour to be required from apprentices” in early modern times, he claimed, were “still more unfavourable to the presumption” advanced by the factory lobby that commerce in labor and wages was free and unfettered by the state before the turn of the nineteenth century.25
At the same time that he was one of the leading advocates of a more active role for the state in setting the standards for social and economic welfare, Coleridge retained his fundamental assumptions about constitutive principles and the importance of the common law and the ancient constitution of the realm. He still contended that new legislation was too often short sighted and superfluous, as witnessed by his remark that the statute books were “perhaps too much” filled with Byzantine regulations on labor. The law had to interfere to protect the “sphere of action” of a free subject from the intrusions of rapacious members of society such as the factory owners. Given this unpleasant necessity of adding new laws to protect the subject, Coleridge thought it best for the drafters of the bill to write the new rules to reflect existing but imperfectly developed “constitutive” principles, old developments that already had a firm foundation in precedent and the common law.
Coleridge’s argument in favor of Peel’s bill, therefore, was not a blank check for the activities of Tory or Whig or radical reformers to unleash their pent-up goals in a torrent of ream after ream of new legislation. The “mature” Coleridge of 1818 was no more confident of the ability of governments to mend a sick polity by the passage of new legislation than the “younger” Coleridge had been in 1809 or 1795. Coleridge appears to have persisted throughout his life in a belief that all legislation stood or fell on the basis of its grounding in ancient precedent and teleologically evaluated constitutional fitness. Legislation that reached too high too fast was doomed to fail. (In this respect, Coleridge shared the factory lobbyists’ doubt in the efficacy of mere statute built on utopian dreams. He simply thought that Peel’s bill was better founded than they did.)
Coleridge insisted that since the factory lobby could not argue against the bill on the basis of precedent statute and the common law (“the practise of the Legislature”), their claim was even weaker when one considered it in the light of an “appeal to the principles and spirit of the British Constitution.” One could only implement Stanley’s policies wholesale, he argued, if one ignored the long tradition in the Common Law of labor regulation and the teleological Idea of the constitution to provide freedom to the poor. Indeed, he contended, “only under a military despotism,” of the sort that would be “entitled to dispense with [the Constitution] at all times for its own purposes,” could the “principle” of unregulated market forces in labor and other commerce “be even partially realized.” At any rate, Coleridge thought the plans of the physiocrats and the advocates of laissez-faire would invariably result in economic as well as political disaster for the nation. Pure laissez-faire, argued Coleridge, would “reduce all classes to insignificance, [except for] those of soldiers and agriculturalists.”26 Ironically, in doing so, they would destroy and bankrupt the very factory owners and other capitalists who had hoped to use the “free” market in labor and the “Iron Law of Wages” to increase their empire of lucre.
It had certainly been the case, he asserted, that unbridled laissez-faire competition had brought despotism and doom to France. He contended that the legislative policies of the opponents of the bill constituted a move towards French principles.27 He maintained that the “states and countries” that had been “the most prosperous in trade and commerce,” and at the same time the “most remarkable for the industry, morality, and public spirit of the inhabitants,” were “Great Britain, Holland, the Hanseatic & other free towns of Germany.” Those states, noted Coleridge, all had one trait in common, despite their manifest differences. They all had been “governed and regulated by a system of law and policy in almost direct opposition to the so-called Physiocratic principles of modern Political Economists.” The “result of their adoption in France under all the revolutionary schemes,” and “with more especial predilection under the last government” of France (Napoleon’s), did not tend to weaken any “doubts” in his mind of their counterproductiveness and danger.28
Coleridge believed that a well-regulated market in labor was a fundamental component of the authentic growth and power of commercial and manufacturing society. Civil liberty had expanded in the free states of Europe, he appears to have believed, through the medium of increasing property ownership in the nation at large. This development of a middle class or bourgeoisie advanced the principle of progression by the empowering of commercial and manufacturing interests—from shopkeeper to banker, artisan to entrepreneur. As the kinds and number and sophistication of forms of property advanced, Coleridge implied, increasingly complex forms of law were needed to determine its rights and uses. Labor, as a form of property common to all, was no different.
In his treatment of labor as a commodity whose commerce ought to be regulated as all commerce historically was, Coleridge again chained together the Ideas of liberty and property. In suppressing the “freedom” of “soul-murder and infanticide on the part of the rich” and the “freedom” of “self-slaughter on that of the poor,” no true liberty (in the Coleridgean sense of the word) was lost. For just as the rich man could not use the euphemism of “free labor” to destroy the lives of his workers in deadly conditions, neither could he use the same euphemism to describe the choiceless, hunger-induced “self-slaughter of the poor.” For Coleridge, rapine and suicide were not legitimate freedoms, nor worthy of protection or expansion by the state.29 Indeed, because Peel’s bill increased for the worker the “sphere of action” in which he could exercise his individual will, it could be argued that the legislation actually expanded liberty. Certainly, the bill was congruent with Coleridge’s principle, expressed in The Friend, no. 9, and his “Remarks on the Objections” that the law existed to balance and adjust the claims of the individual against those of the community. “The principle of all constitutional law,” he reminded his readers, “is to make the claims of each [citizen] as much compatible with the claims of all, as individuals, and as those of the common-weal as a whole.… Out of this adjustment,” he concluded, “the claims of the individual first become Rights.”30 Those claims that could not be made compatible with the claims of “all [citizens] as individuals” as well as “those of the common-weal as a whole”—for example, child labor—could not be considered valid nor worthy of being described as rights.
The law, insisted Coleridge, regularly and unabashedly denied the rights of property owners to do as they pleased with their “property.” This was especially true when that “property” had a “sphere of action” of its own as a citizen, such as a worker who had sold his labor to a mill owner. It was also true in cases of inanimate property, such as canals, Coleridge pointed out, if the state could make a compelling argument that unfettered exercise of the right to do as one likes with one’s own property would injure the commonwealth. (One may not exercise the freedom to open one’s own dike, for instance, if in doing so one would flood one’s neighbors’ fields and thereby ruin their crops and houses.) Canals, of course, were for the most part in 1818 in private hands. Yet, as they were (like turnpikes) public conveniences in private trusts, the state had an interest in regulating them and preventing profiteering or unsafe operation. “Every Canal Bill,” argued Coleridge, “proves, that there is no species of property which the legislature does not possess and exercise the right of controlling and limiting, as soon as the right of the individuals is shewn to be disproportionately injurious to the community” (my italics). Having said this, Coleridge needed to identify a palpable injury that the community suffered because of child labor and unregulated factories. Coleridge identified the injury not in the materialist terms of damage to health of the workers, but in transcendental and moral terms as “the subversion of morals.” That “contra bonus mores, the subversion of morals, is deemed in our laws a public injury” was, Coleridge argued, an axiom of English law. He added that the principle was so widely recognized that it would be “superfluous to demonstrate.”31
Coleridge’s conception of individual freedom was tempered by considerations of injury, or harm, to the individual citizen’s “self-duties” and “sphere of action.” Two ideas emerge in this passage. The first is the issue of balance or “proportion.” The second is the notion of public welfare. What could not be tolerated or sanctioned by law was a disproportionate injury (“disproportionately injurious”) and thus a “public injury” against the “common-weal.” The Idea of the government, after all, as Coleridge defined it in 1809 in The Friend, was “to watch incessantly, that the State shall remain composed of Individuals acting as Individuals, by which alone the Freedom of all can be secured.”32 It was pointless to use individualist arguments such as laissez-faire to allow the continuance of conditions under which those “Individuals” were so sucked dry of vitality and were forced into such a narrow “sphere of action” that they were in effect condemned to eternal servitude without hope of remission.
Neither constitutional principle nor the Common Law could sustain the absurdly high doctrine of “personal property” that occasioned unwarranted harm or ran recklessly against the common good. Where statute contravened this principle of “commonweal,” either through a positive rule or an omission in drafting, Coleridge suggested, the law had erred and needed to be mended. This, Coleridge argued, had been the presupposition behind the increased regulation of canals: private property constrained by the government. In the case of the Factory Bill controversy, “the subversion of morals” through the failure to regulate child labor and other abuses in factories, constituted a public injury. As such, it violated the principles of English law and merited response.
Coleridge’s concept that broader human concerns for the commonwealth and community were explicit in the English law and Constitution was in keeping with his objections to the “mechano-corpuscular” philosophy. Such reductionist theories as those implicit in Malthusian psychology or laissez-faire economics were presumed suspect by Coleridge. Stanley saw the “free labour” problem of 1818 in terms of rational actor theory and Homo aeconomicus; Coleridge saw the “free labour” problem of 1818 in terms of “soul-murder,” “infanticide,” “self-slaughter,” and “the poor little children employed in the cotton factories.” Where their advocates saw the theories of Malthus and Ricardo as providing for the first time a truly scientific basis for political decision making and more efficient laws, Coleridge saw those theories as a heartless and unethical traduction of essential principles of the rights of workers both as “Individuals” and as members of a “common-weal.” He insisted that general principles such as the “Iron Law of Wages” or the geometric/arithmetic dilemma of Malthusian population and food analysis “are apt to deceive us.” Instead, it was far wiser to “Individualize the suffering which it is the object of the Bill to remedy.” For, if one could “follow up the detail in some one case with a human sympathy” then “the deception vanishes.”33.
There is a proto-Dickensian aspect to much of Coleridge’s writing on this subject, probably because of the similarity of his invective against the economists to the critique of Mr. Gradgrind and other products of the “Dismal Science” in Dickens’s novels, but also because of his insistence that social problems can best be understood by “human sympathy” and “Individualize[d] detail in some one case” rather than columns of statistics. In his final attack on Stanley and the anti-Peel factory owners, Coleridge ridiculed the contention that reform would be best left to the good sense and humanity of the factory masters. He pointed to the actuality of industrial development and the urban factory system that underlay the prosperity and progression of British society.
The purely technical progress in division of labor and increased productivity had, if anything, degenerated the human condition. Ironically, the introduction of machines into labor had not created more leisure for workers but had in fact created more work, so that children were drafted into the service of the factories with more frequency as mechanization increased. Coleridge declared it “notorious” that “within the last twenty years the time and quantum of the labour extorted from the children has been increasing.” In light of this depredation, the degree of civilization of the United Kingdom might be questioned, however unrivalled its technical achievements might be. A nation, suggested Coleridge, might be on the rise in money, productivity, and technological sophistication, and yet be further and further from their goal of an “enlightened age” than they were before the rise of mechanical science. “The growth of the sciences among the few, and the consequent increase of the conveniences of life among the people at large,” Coleridge reminded his audience, “are however, far from necessarily implying an enlightened age in that sense which alone applies to the case in question.… There are few who are not enlightened enough to understand their duties,” he added, as a rebuke to the factory owners. Concluding that only those who by their actions blinded themselves to moral concerns could ignore such clear duties, Coleridge said that the majority of Britons would have to “wink hard” and shut their eyes to the suffering around them in doing so, “not to see the path laid out for them.”34
Coleridge outlined a distinction between reason, duty, and conscience, in his program for the practical realities of law and social policy. He acknowledged the benefits that “progress” had brought to the different orders of society: knowledge to the elite and mass-produced and mass-consumed material comforts to the growing propertied classes. Yet this was insufficient. “Something else is wanted here,” he insisted, “the warmth to impel and not the knowledge to guide” (my italics). He recalled to his readers that “the age” had been “complimented with the epithets of enlightened, humane, & c.” for many years before the abolition of the slave trade. A speedy comparison of the two ages would, Coleridge was convinced, render into nothing the arguments of the factory owners that their own benevolence and economic self-interest would improve the conditions of their workers. “That [slave] Trade,” Coleridge reminisced, was not “abolished at last by the increasing humanity, the enlightened self-interest, of the slave-owners,” but by the moral outrage and indignity of those who saw beyond the profits, losses, and balance sheets for plantations into the “human sympathy” and “Individualize[d] detail in some one case.” His outrage was barely concealed: “dare our Legislators even now trust to these influences [of the owners’good-will]?” especially given the feeble reaction to the worse evil of slavery? He considered “the bills passed” and “the one now before the House concerning the Slave Trade” as “the best reply.”35 Those who waited for the advocates of increased profit and productivity to ameliorate the lives of slaves and children, who resembled each other in being “property” in labor, would wait in vain.
Throughout these remarks, Coleridge lashed out at malign influences and interests. His underlying suspicions of “corrupt interests and secret influence” had only found different targets since The Plot Discovered and his objections to Paley’s philosophy of expedience. Stanley had drawn a line of division between “sides” in his critique of the bill. On the one side, Stanley had placed the “liberal” liberty “to do with one’s property as one” likes, the freedom promised by laissez-faire economics, and statistically based modern science. On the other side, Stanley had placed “conservative” meddling in individual rights, arbitrary power over citizens’ property, and backwards, unscientific nescience which denied the gains of the “enlightened age.” Coleridge had not honored that line.
Instead, Coleridge developed a view of progressive agency that addressed questions of both human frailty and political expedience in a complex, stratified, and diverse social world. Such a world was conditioned and advanced organically, as a living tissue of sinuous constraint and fluid agency. These living forces were best understood historically, as temporal and spatial powers of change and order, through the principles of permanence and progression as constituted in the ideas of church and state.
