THE DEBATE ON the proper power relations between church and state permeated British politics and society from the Reformation through the end of the nineteenth century. The church–state conflict was a central, unavoidable, undeniable factor in national life; every political philosopher of consequence in Coleridge’s time took note of it. Although British society had arguably become more secular in the course of the eighteenth century, political and social life still included the church to a greater degree than it would in the twentieth—or even the late nineteenth—century. The border disputes over the size and nature of the spheres of influence of the “spiritual” and “temporal” powers of the realm were therefore fundamental rather than ornamental issues in the years in which Coleridge wrote his political tracts. For this reason, it would have been more remarkable if Coleridge had chosen to ignore this theme of church–state relations than it is that he chose to devote such a monumental and systematic effort to revising understandings of it.
Although less violent and combative than they had been in the era of the Civil Wars, church-versus-state battles still showed themselves extremely capable, throughout Coleridge’s long political career, of raising tempers and dividing the polity. The acrimonious crisis in his lifetime over subscription, toleration, relief, establishment, and ecclesiastical reform raised tempers to such a pitch that they actually inspired riots and other forms of public violence, in addition to more genteel forms of social combat, such as pamphlet wars.1 Clergy, quite naturally, wished to preserve their prerogatives, powers, and influence in the nation against a rising tide of state meddling in the church, control that they termed “Erastianism.”2 Political reformers like Major Cartwright and John Wade, quite naturally, hoped to see the church tamed, if not declawed, and aspired to buttress their domains against the continued intrusions of a power-hungry clergy, incursions that they maligned as “Priest-craft.”3 Because he was heavily influenced, and fascinated, by the writings of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theologians, Coleridge was able to see the deeper roots of these venomous struggles over the strength of church authority in his own time in the rancor of the two centuries that preceded the eighteenth.4
Both his interest in the current antagonisms of church and state and his concern with their deep roots in the seventeenth century fuelled Coleridge’s investigations into church–state friction. Yet his interest was not merely scholarly. Coleridge’s writings on politics, religion, and constitutional sovereignty returned again and again to the central conflict between church and state in an attempt not only to make historical sense of it, but actually to solve it, and by solving it to end it. His work, On The Constitution of the Church and State According to the Idea of Each, must be seen, then, as a proposal for a finish to the old warfare between church and state and a refounding of their relations on better grounds. Such a new constitution, Coleridge believed, would ensure the peace and prosperity of the temporal and spiritual dimensions of the kingdom in a way that the old, misconceived settlements of the church had not. There were three traditional positions on the balance of power in church and state that emerged, between 1550 and 1750, as efforts to sever the eccleisiopolitical Gordian knot. Coleridge considered each of these ideas in turn, concluding them to be partial solutions at best to what was an essentially constitutional question.
Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century divines and politicians had long disagreed on the limit and abuse of ecclesiastical power in the polity. Generally speaking, there were three traditional positions that one could take in this debate. The originality and innovative quality of Coleridge’s solution to this ancient puzzle can only become clear if one understands the degree to which these three positions had become so standardized as to be positively ossified by Coleridge’s time. The novelty of Coleridge’s approach to the dilemma of church/state relations becomes clear when it is compared to the typical stances in the debate that thinkers took before his work on the topic.
The first stance was that the established church’s power was currently being attacked and diminished, placing the church in danger. According to this theory, proper respect for the church’s authority in the state demanded that the state recognize and protect the church’s distinct status as an institution. As such, the church had the power to make laws and administer justice through its own institutions and influence secular politics and morals, as well as to pray and preach and administer Christian sacraments. This had been the opinion of all “High Churchmen,” and although it traced its roots backwards to Lancelot Andrewes and William Laud, it had been expressed with particular vigor and authority in the Convocation Controversy of Queen Anne’s reign, as well as by the High Churchmen of Coleridge’s own day.5
The second stance was that the independent power of the church had always been too great, even after the gains of the Crown and Parliament in the Reformation, and that its secular authority over the affairs of the state should be diminished if not ended. Indeed, many advocates of a stronger state believed that the state had to obtain true political sovereignty over the running of the church in order to preserve social peace, that it must sustain the royal supremacy in fact as well as in name. This had been the opinion of all those called “Erastians” and had been developed with considerable style by John Jewell and Richard Hooker in past times. The doctrine of Erastianism had been further refined and expanded by Benjamin Hoadly in the reign of George I,6 and by the “Low Churchmen” of the late eighteenth century.7
The third opinion was an irenic one, which attempted to end the war between church and state by suggesting that their spheres of influence were complimentary rather than contradictory. Their relation, argued this middle party, was not a zero-sum game. A strong state did not depend upon a weak church, nor did a strong church demand a weak state. The geniuses of the middle party were Edmund Gibson and William Warburton, both bishops. These men, and others like them, managed to negotiate a profitable peace with the Whig supremacy. The church gained more by assuming a stance of cooperation and professing “alliance” and peace under Warburton and Gibson than it ever had by waving the bloody banner of defiance under Atterbury and Sacheverell.
Coleridge’s solution to the war between church and state is most often said to be dependent upon Warburton’s “alliance” theory. In order to understand the true novelty of Coleridge’s plan, it is important to place it in the context of Warburton’s less satisfactory solution to the problem. By doing this, it should become clearer why Coleridge rejected Warburton’s high-political solution and forged a new one of his own devising based on a deeper consideration of the purposes and goals of church and state.
Bishop Warburton’s Alliance of Church and State (1736) attempted to settle the debate irenically by emphasizing the natural interdependency and harmony of the powers of church and state. He argued that they were, and must be regarded as, two distinct bodies with separate duties. This being the case, Warburton contended that an alliance rather than a conflict was to their mutual advantage.
For Warburton’s alliance to work, the independent power of the church, as of the year 1736, would have to be maintained, or even enlarged, to make it able to stand as an equal to (rather than submitting as a vassal of) state power. Warburton believed that independent ecclesiastical power could only maintain itself if it could shake off the yoke of temporal supremacy and rise out of its chains to cooperative equality with the state. The yoke, Warbuton stressed, had not been placed maliciously. Elizabethan divines, in their attempts to weaken the high-clerical claims of papist and Puritan critics of Elizabeth’s Anglican Church, had ceded too much power to the Crown and Parliament.8 Warburton believed that the celebrated Richard Hooker in particular had forgotten the fundamental equality of the church to the state in his desire to close off the avenues of “high-church” Puritan and papist critics of the Elizabethan settlement. The “low church,” or Erastian, view of church and state proposed by “the judicious Hooker” effectively gave all rights of ecclesiastical dominion over to princes. Such an arrangement, Warburton argued, unjustly tipped the balance of power towards the Crown.
It should be remembered, in the face of Warburton’s able criticisms that the Erastian tradition, despite diminishing the powers of the church, did not aspire to eliminate the church from a central role in the nation. Jewell, Hooker, and even “heretical” Hoadly had all been churchmen and throughout their lives adhered to the idea of a single national church for England to which all should conform if they could do so in good conscience. They simply thought that given the church’s distinctly supramundane mission, it should not be accorded a secular power in the realm comparable to that of Crown and Parliament.
Coleridge overcame the limitations of these three traditional models in order to formulate his own vision of an improved church-state relations. Although he distilled certain concepts from Warburton, such as the alliance, he was not a “Warburtonian” in the true sense of the word.9 He borrowed from the Erastians both a vision of a strong role for the Crown and Parliament in the managing of church life—as a component in the “nationality” with which government concerned itself—and an ethos of tolerance for diversity in doctrine, as long as it was theistic. He borrowed from the High Churchmen a vision of the centrality of the church’s mission in creating a just and moral nation and encouraging learning and righteousness.
Coleridge’s On The Constitution of the Church and State, like so much of his other writing, attempted to save what was best in the traditional elements of the establishment (of which the church was a very important pillar indeed). It did so even as it admitted the necessity and desirability of change and what we might anachronistically term modernization. Coleridge desired to “reform in order to conserve” in his vision of the revivified national church. He was not so conservative as to think the church was in a perfect if tarnished form, as the High Churchmen did. Nor was he so radical as to think the church was so imperfect as to merit demolition, as the most extreme of the anticlericals did. He hoped for a solution that would retain the church’s role as a moral keel for the nation funded by national wealth but that would also refound the doctrinally defined Anglican clergy as a pragmatically defined Christian-humanist clerisy. He built his conception of the constitution of church and state upon ideas of alliance, but alliance as he conceived it, in a way which Warburton never had: based upon a complex sociological model of the separate social, cultural, and political spheres of commercial independence and landed trust.10 Coleridge’s solution was, once again, an essentially scientific one. His case for devaluing political parties and religious sects as interpretative frameworks for church and state set the critical focus for the reform of the constitution on a deep analysis of structure and function.
The debate over the alliance of church and state often expressed itself, by the 1820s, in terms of the words “radical” and “conservative.” The general problem of applying these labels to Coleridge has already been examined. Here, it is important to address specifically why these ideological-factional labels are less helpful to understanding the originality of Coleridge’s approach than are the three ecclesiopolitical categories of High, Erastian, and alliance/Warburtonian, which are delineated in the preceding section. For Coleridge’s innovations in ecclesiological theory were not strictly political; he did not think that the solution lay in putting more Whigs in place rather than Tories or in putting more Tories in place rather than Whigs. Neither were his positions doctrinal: he wrote no Age of Reason to mock Trinitarian doctrine, as did Paine, nor a systematic theology to defend it, as did Horne11 or Horsley.12 He was silent about party and dogma in his imagined church constitution, and was even antagonistic towards parties and sects as discouraging independence of mind. His self-avowed critical and antiaffiliative intellect makes him peculiarly unsuited to a schematization based on party or sect, for he despised parties and sects to an almost fanatical degree, and hoped for the national church that he envisioned to transcend rather than propagate them.
In recent writings on eighteenth-century politics and society, it has become voguish to trace all politics back to religion. Where historians once sought class as the magic formula for sorting out the complex skein of political opinions in later Georgian Britain, they now turn to religion as the great determinant of political stances. Formerly, one could trust in scratching a Tory and finding a rural landowner, and scratching a Whig and finding a city merchant.13 But, the class-as-politics paradigm has been largely eroded by a steady stream of empirical evidence on Tory stockbrokers and Whig petty landowners. The new magic formula, therefore, has become doctrinal faith. Scratch a radical and find a Unitarian. Scratch a conservative and find a High Churchman.
In due time, no doubt, this new catch-all interpretation will also fall by the wayside, as exceptions to the rules—such as Coleridge—add up in greater and greater numbers. Coleridge seems to have been an Evangelical Unitarian in youth and a Neoplatonic (rather than Athanasian) Trinitarian in maturity and old age. At no time, therefore, even after his Plotinist reconciliation with the doctrine of the Trinity, was he a pure, orthodox Athanasian. Throughout his life, Coleridge not only developed a complex and conflicted Christology uniquely his own, but also kept a great number of heterodox and freethinkers among his friends. The fact that such a man came to believe deeply in the concept of a national church rather than a future of disestablishment and sectarian laissez-faire certainly suggests that Unitarianism and “heterodoxy” were not invariably motors for radical politics. The Unitarianism of his early years did not destine Coleridge to radicalism any more than the self-avowed deism of Lord Bolingbroke persuaded him to become a Whig.
At any rate, Coleridge’s Christological opinions around 1828 are difficult to determine with any certainty. Because his vision of the church was structuralist and functionalist rather than theological, he tended to focus less in his writings on the establishment of “good doctrines” (ortho doxa) than he did on founding “good churches” (ortho ecclesia). Therefore, we might consider Coleridge in his writings on church and state as a political scientist avant la lettre, engaging less in the study of orthodoxy than in the study of orthoecclesiology. Unlike so many of the Trinitarian controversialists of his day, he seemed more obsessed with the proper shape and mold for the church as a vessel for bringing truth to the nation than he was concerned for the exact confessional content of the truths it would proclaim.
Because he tended to “bracket out” high doctrinal theological problems (such as Athanasian formularies of the Trinity) from his study of what made for good national churches, it is difficult to pigeonhole Coleridge’s innovative proposal for a national church in the orthodox-versus-heterodox taxonomy that Jonathan Clark and other historians have found so effective as an analytical tool.14 Indeed, it was his a-doxy rather than his heterodoxy that frightened one of the best critical readers of his treatise. Julius Hare, a professor at Cambridge in the late 1820s, described Coleridge as an “evil genius.”15 He was a “genius” to Hare because, in a way that the rival philosopher could admire, he had applied his discernment and talent to a penetrating social analysis of church and state as national institutions. He was “evil” to Hare because in a book on a “New Model” for the Christian church, he had eliminated particular discussion of the creed that the church was to confess and propagate. Hare recognized that the innovation of Coleridge’s work was that it presented a constitutional model of a national church that “evacuated” or “bracketed out” analysis of the doctrinal mission of the church in favor of discussing its political and social efficacy.
This insistence on forms of political and ecclesiastical organization, rather than on ideologies of parties and sects, was what separated Coleridge as a political thinker from most of his contemporaries. Coleridge believed that a just society could be built by philosophical reflection on the deeper meanings of institutions and their ultimate purposes. He did not seek to effect change by setting up new rules, creeds, and doctrines, as the “radicals” desired. Nor did he seek to retain tradition by making fetishes and totems of prescriptive Loyalty to the old institutions without critically understanding those institutions, as the “conservative ultras” did. His search for a metapolitical “end” of churches and states separated him from those contemporaries who founded their politics either on tradition for its own sake and detestation of change, or on belief in pure political reason, natural rights, or utility. That metapolitical end was to be realized, Coleridge contended, in a new moral and cultural elite, or “clerisy.” Its mission, as Coleridge conceived of it, was the preservation and custodial guardianship of the nation as a sacred and secular trust.
Coleridge concerned himself throughout his career with finding a constitutional theory that could define and preserve the political and cultural institutions that were already extant in Britain rather than with defining abstract general principles for a newly minted government. Through this effort, he developed the idea of the trust as the center of his rationale for the continued influence of landed property in a rapidly commercializing and slowly industrializing nation. His political thought increasingly focused on two major points. The first was his conception of landed property and its significance as a permanent public trust. The second was his belief that the commercial spirit was the dynamic that vivified this trust and breathed life into liberty.16
Coleridge envisioned the public trust as conserving and distributing nationally held (i.e., nonprivate) reserves of property. He named this reserve the “nationality.” The government would hold this reserve of public lands and public funds in trust and use its income to maintain an independent cultural and intellectual elite, or clerisy. The clerisy were to be distinct from the ordained Christian clergy of the national established churches of England, Scotland, and Ireland, who would still be funded and paid either by their own rectorial freeholds and tithes or by the wages provided by a lay proprietor, another clergyman, or the Crown. The clerisy, in contradistinction, would provide a source of generic conscience and ethical guidance rather than specific political ideologies or doctrinal religion. Their mission was deliberately left vague. Coleridge hoped that the clerisy would serve as critics and public philosophers, unmasking through their skeptical gaze several baleful influences in the kingdom. The divisive influences that Coleridge expected the clerisy to erode included the narrow-mindedness of political faction, the sectarian parochialism and doctrinal infighting of confessional religion, and the rigid orthodoxy of state religion as it had been previously constituted. Such a clerisy would also provide the “democratic” and integrative motive force behind the idea of the constitution, the cultural ecclesia.
Coleridge’s argument for preserving and refunding a national church had certain conservative resonances in a generation (1820 through 1840) that initiated intense debate on parliamentary control of church revenues, such as Irish sees, and even seriously opened discussion of disestablishment. One naturally associates attempts to strengthen the church’s influence in the state with the old traditions of Laud and Atterbury, with the new influence of John Keble in his famous “Sermon Against National Apostasy,” and with the young Tractarians who were fired into action by Keble’s battle cry. On the other hand, the advocacy of the institution of a single national church did not in itself imply Tory High Churchmanship or Trinitarianism. Most of the republicans of the commonwealth and protectorates, after all, had called for a nationally funded and administered Puritan clergy and had approved a new national liturgy to replace the Anglican Prayer Book.17
Coleridge’s plan differed from the national churches envisioned by the Laudians, the Kebleites, and even the old Commonwealthsmen of 1640 to 1660 in that it hoped to purify institutional forms while avoiding the issues of doctrine and confession that had so obsessed earlier churchmen. His bold invention of a national church as a doctrinally vague institutional form (unlike the Christian Church), was a break with almost every potential solution to the problem of church and state that had come before him, whether Anglican or Puritan.18
Where Coleridge differed from most “Tories” of his day was in his willful inattention to the battles over the Athanasian definition of the Trinity and other high-theological disputes among the clergy. Most “church and king” Tories of the 1820s defended the old doctrine-based discrimination and the Test Act as long as they could because they felt that national unity and tradition demanded that only confessing Anglicans be allowed full civil rights and participation in the state. In comparison to the typical Tory’s defense of doctrine as a bar to civil participation, Coleridge was a lifelong critic of religious orthodoxy. He despised institutionalized dogma as forging shackles and chains to impede the advance of the search for truth. His vision of a national church was of a very broad church indeed, one that was most significant in its form or constitution rather than its particular doctrinal content. It is not surprising that Coleridge has been seen as a founder of the Broad Church movement of the nineteenth century.19
Yet his system did not aspire to create an entirely free market in ideas. Coleridge’s church perhaps most resembles the civic religion proposed by the French Revolutionaries, in that while it made all Christian sects equally legal and ended the discriminatory preference for adherents to the old established confession, it still vocally condemned atheism and immorality and sought to inculcate ethics broadly. While the Coleridgean church absolved itself from the propagation of belief and understanding of a positive doctrinal system such as the Thirty-nine Articles or the Creed of St. Athanasius, it drew the line of ne plus ultra before atheism. Coleridge believed that such a national church, even after it had divested itself of the homogenizing influence of the traditional creeds and formularies, could be a civilizing force. As he himself described his civic religion, borrowing a phrase from the Roman poet Ovid, “Emollit mores nec sinit esse feroes” (It softens the manners and does not permit them to be brutal).20 But civilization was not desirable without cultivation, and manners, while a refinement of morality, were not a substitute for morality. For this reason, landed property was the rock on which Coleridge built his national church.
It is beyond doubt that the vision of an ecclesiastical polity that Coleridge invented in Church and State was built on concepts of virtue, honor, and land ownership. Landed property was the foundation not only of the wealth from which Coleridge aspired to fund his clerisy, but also of the values of love of country and patriotism that he believed sprang from connection to that land. Land was not the exclusive foundation of Coleridge’s constitutional theory, but land mattered for Coleridge in a way that placed it at the heart of his scheme for a new established church.
Some critics, notably J. T. Miller and John Morrow, have considered Coleridge’s early writings to be neo-Harringtonian in tone.21 Morrow has charted what he believes to be a transition in Coleridge’s later writings on politics toward a language of civic humanism. This language is undoubtedly present in Church and State, and Morrow is quite right to emphasize it. Coleridge, however, augmented this agrarian-virtue theme with a celebration of the role of commerce in promoting civility and progress in the nation. This lionizing went well beyond the classical republican account of civic pride in the polis to cognize the more modern accounts of law and commerce that Scots moralism and the Whig skepticism had advanced.22 Unlike most neo-Harringtonians, Coleridge did not have the gentleman-farmer’s suspicion that a rising tide of prosperity and wealth was going to hurl the kingdom into perdition. Unlike most neo-Harringtonians, he thought that the risk of the polity dying from stagnancy was as great as the risk that it would die from corruption. For Coleridge, land and commerce were both crucial parts of the body politic.
Throughout his career, Coleridge maintained that the principle of landed property was, and must be, the stable foundation of any good government. Landed property was the basis of the Common Law, and as such it was the foundation of the ancient constitution. It provided, through the Common Law and the constitution, the “fundamental liberty” of the nation. Land alone, however, was not enough to guarantee the freedom of the kingdom. Only the additional principle of a constantly growing liberty that sustained and regenerated a just and dynamic polity could bring about true freedom. “An expanding liberty,” as Coleridge termed it, was the product not of the landed property which created fundamental liberty, but rather of the culture and workings of commercial urban society. The Idea of a state depended, for Coleridge, on the combined operations of both landed and commercial society. Commercial wealth, when taken alone, corrupted liberty because it left it adrift without the moral anchor that landed property provided. Landed wealth alone stagnated liberty because nothing urged it onward into new ideas and new innovations that commercial activity brought. Only an alliance of land and commerce could insure the survival of a liberty that was both fundamental and expanding.
Coleridge’s political ideas are best understood in terms of decisions about the shape of active institutions, rather than as decisions about the sort of ideologies that would fill them. He saw institutions not in terms of particular doctrinal or ideological content, but as structures of power and distributors of resources that facilitated the cultural freedom and prosperity of the nation. If such institutions were effectively conceived and executed, stability for the community (authority) would coexist with the individual’s capacity for self-actualization (liberty). Two principles animated Coleridge’s Idea of the state: permanence and progression. Briefly stated, the forces of permanence emanated from agriculture and landed property, whereas the forces of progression flowed from moveable property and the mercantile economy. Coleridge’s “binary” model of the state comprised the twin poles of land and capital, or permanence and progression.
Permanence contributed stability and continuity in Coleridge’s ideal constitution. It was embodied in the one thing that did not alter as a physical base, nor diminish in social value: landed property. Land could not be made or destroyed by men, only transformed into greater or lesser degrees of productivity.23 Land was a finite resource that was always necessary to habitation or enterprise. It was fundamental to life and survival in a way that ships and banks and shops and joint-stock companies were not. Land could not be exported, nor could it be fabricated. Its attainment and trade therefore cut, recut and shared out the pieces of a pie that was essentially fixed in size even before the first British tribes had settled in the isles. This predetermined and permanent quality of land kept its economic value relatively stable. In addition, its ownership remained relatively constant in the great landed families. The perfection of entail and primogeniture in the late seventeenth century had contributed to the establishment of landowners as (seemingly) permanent presences on the land, who had been there for generations and who would remain there for generations to come.
While land always remained a constant resource and a source of permanent presence in a locality, its status as the sole source of value in the polity changed as soon as trade appeared. Coleridge believed that there was a socioeconomic basis to culture and that the rise of trade transformed all cultures where it occurred. Commercial activity was inherently mobile and volatile. Both the sum total and the relative economic value of manufactured goods and services were in constant fluctuation. Where land, which was uncreated, perpetually stayed in the same place, goods were created and moved across counties or even oceans in search of buyers. In the eyes of early-nineteenth-century economic theorists, Commerce rode an eternally spinning wheel of fortune.24 The winners and losers of the market place were determined by cycles of boom and bust, through periods of expansion and contraction in productivity and enterprise, by shifting patterns of consumption, by changing conceptions of wealth. Mercantile wealth, unlike landed wealth, did not tend to be handed down or entailed in the same family, and the death of the founder of a merchant house often resulted in the dissolution of the firm as a corporate entity in the state. Commerce was, therefore, especially in comparison to land, a fluid, dynamic and progressive force. It was also the basis of Coleridge’s second great principle of an ideal constitution, the principle of progression.
The progressive spirit, as realized in the activities, relations, and productions of commerce and finance, was the opposite of permanence. There were times and places, Coleridge argued, in which agricultural activity was overshadowed by industry, trade, and brokerage. At such times, the social and economic realities of a nation were transformed. Cultural and moral values, political and social institutions and expectations were all reconstructed by the rise of commercial endeavor as the mainspring of a national economy. Yet Coleridge did not see the transmogrifying power of commercial activity as a discrete and unmediated force. The progressive principle of commerce and finance was indissolubly related to the permanence of land, whether or not it desired such a relationship. Land would always remain the base for the entire economy, by virtue of its existence as the territory on which all economic activity perforce took place and by virtue of its status as the seedbed of permanent (i.e., aristocratic) cultural and social values. The rise of trade and finance, Coleridge insisted, did not replace the landed economy; it simply transformed and influenced it, at the same time as landed wealth exerted its tidal pull on the rising economy of trade and finance.25
Thus permanence and progression, once progression was born, evermore existed in “equipoise.” Progression regenerated the nation and launched it forward toward its goals. Permanence counseled that power, and in doing so preserved the realm’s continuity, traditions, and institutions. Together, permanence and progression formed a binary system that allowed for the dynamic growth of finance and merchant capital to be guided by the ancient and fundamental traditions of land ownership, and for land ownership to be revivified by the innovations and enterprise of commerce. This binary system, for Coleridge, was the true Idea of the nation-state.
Both Morrow and Miller conceive of Coleridge’s principles of permanence and progression as suggesting a disdain for commerce and a less than critical admiration of landed values. These interpreters argue that Coleridge viewed landed society as a leash to hold back the undisciplined and dangerous beast of commercialization.26 Those who interpret Coleridge as an heir to the country Tory “politics of nostalgia” argue that he saw aristocratic values as mainly a defensive bulwark against the onslaught of the corrosive tendencies of commercial society.27
Only a deep misreading of Church and State, however, could identify Coleridge with pure, Bolingbroke-style, Country Party nostalgia. The “Country Coleridge” is a failed paradigm because it suggests the Country “antagonism” model of the defense of landed culture against the hostile attack of moneyed men as the best analytical lens through which to read Church and State. Coleridge, however, did not share this “antagonism” model. Instead he saw an alliance in the relations of permanence and progression, and an unusually beneficial relationship between these two social and political forces. Where Bolingbroke and his circle tended to see landed society as a victim, under siege and barely able to hold its own, Coleridge saw it as a partner in the first phase of a long and dynamic relationship with commerce, a partnership in which land would affect commerce every bit as much as commerce affected land. The pure Country model posited a static and reactionary role for the landed interest; Coleridge’s model placed the landed interest in a dynamic and progressive role.
How could Coleridge think that landed society was “opposed” to moneyed society and yet not see the two, as the Country tradition did, as doomed to be “contrary” enemies? The answer lies in Coleridge’s own technical use of those terms. Coleridge began his discussion of the Ideas of permanence and progression with an extended note of caution:
Permit me to draw your attention to the essential difference between opposite and contrary. Opposite powers are always of the same kind, and tend to union, either by equipoise or by a common product. Thus the + and - poles of a magnet, thus positive and negative electricity are opposites. Sweet and sour are opposites; sweet and bitter are contraries. The feminine character is opposed to the masculine; but the effeminate is its contrary. Even so in the present instance, the interest of permanence is opposed to that of progressiveness; but so far from being contrary interests, they, like the magnetic forces, suppose and require each other. Even the most mobile of creatures, the serpent, makes a rest for its own body, and drawing up its voluminous train from behind on this fulcrum, propels itself onwards. On the other hand it is a proverb in all languages, that (relatively to man at least) what would stand still must retrograde.28
Coleridge argued that the forces of permanence and progression, being opposites, complemented rather than contradicted each other. He did not give formative priority to either of them. Like the head and the tail of the serpent in his example, they each depended on the other for their mutual viability. To see the principle of land as a bulwark against the invasion of commerce, as the early-eighteenth-century Country Party had, would have been to value permanence over progression, which Coleridge did not do. Indeed, if there was any priority of influence or intent suggested by his note on “opposing force” it was the dynamic or vibrant principle that was emphasized. For “what would stand still must retrograde.” The traditionalist’s view, that society ought on principle to deny efforts at change and rest confidently in its current form, was, therefore, a recipe for stasis and, through stasis, death. Coleridge chose instead to emphasize a genuine interdependency or alliance, a binary system in which each body exerted its pull and influence on the other. No living body could survive without the integrated connections of muscle and bone. Living flesh without its supportive structures was a shapeless mass of fleshy pulp. But a skeleton without the animating fluid of blood and tissue was nothing more than a dead thing, a desiccated and lifeless shell. So it was with all forces of permanence and progression. As in life, so it was in the state.
To Coleridge, commerce liberalized and regenerated land, at the same time that land tempered and stabilized commerce. Landed society was not a virtuous bulwark against the perfidy and moral vacuity of the commercial world. Coleridge did not envision an ideal state like Gulliver’s Brobdingnag, nor did he hope for a Spartan paradise with commerce and towns almost nonexistent and the plough and the hoe the major implements of life. Nor did he look back, as Bolingbroke had, to an idealized Elizabethan Age when commercial society “knew its place” as the subordinate to land and aristocracy.29 Instead, he saw commerce and land as welcome and active partners in the state; both forces had a crucial role to play, and either was insufficient on its own to sustain liberty and virtue.
This model of “integrative dynamism”—what I have termed the binary system of mutual influences—was the linchpin of Coleridge’s Idea of a state. Its primary object, the preservation of landed property, had to be constantly adjusted to accommodate those changing uses and understandings of the meaning and value of that property brought about by trade and finance. How did Coleridge envision this integrative system that brought about the binary equipoise between commerce and land? The answer lies in his description of the nature of the two principles and the two orders of society that sprang from them. Significantly, Coleridge began his account of the workings of church and state by explaining the benefits of land and commerce in their capacities as engines of permanence and progression.
In describing the importance and the limitations of the Idea of permanence in the principle of land, Coleridge described both landed property and landed society as a constant and stable social base, even after their transformations by emergent commerce. This constancy, permanence, stemmed not only from the durability of land as a material and concrete form of wealth, but also from the consistent status of land as a primary object of human ambition. He assumed as self-evident that landed property and the social meaning that accompanied it were desirable goals. “It will not be necessary” insisted Coleridge “to enumerate the several causes that combine to connect the permanence of a state with the land and the landed property.” The desire for permanence was natural, instinctive, and deeply human. “To found a family, and to convert his wealth into land are the twin thoughts, births of the same moment, in the mind of the opulent merchant, when he thinks of reposing from his labours.”30 For Coleridge, the acquisition of landed property was the ultimate ambition of every citizen and the ultimate end of all capital accumulation. (Significantly, historians’ analyses of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century merchants’ investments have shown that Coleridge’s description of British society’s prejudices in favor of landed wealth were essentially correct. Most merchants in his era eventually hoped to place their earnings into what they hoped was the more lasting and estimable form of wealth, land.31) Land was the most desirable form of property, the most “real” estate, because it was the most immovable, the most permanent.
This permanence was important not only because it seemed to secure economic stability for the landholder, but because the ownership of immovable landed property in a given nation and locality suggested perpetual membership and participation in the politics of the “country.” Beyond material wealth, land imputed both rank and history to its owners, even if they were not themselves of unusually old family; it communicated its own permanence to the person of its current possessor. The ultimate value of landed property and the final objective of all human action argued Coleridge, was cultural and social continuity. Individual experience was, he suggested, only made meaningful in its relationship to the history that inhered in the “land” and the “country.” He asserted that a man “from the class of the Novi Homines” (i.e., the “new men” or nouveaux riches) altered his very nature when he purchased an estate. Coleridge felt that such a man “redeems himself by becoming the staple ring of the chain, by which the present will become connected with the past; and the test and evidency of permanency afforded.”32 In the end, only permanence could grant stability, and only stability could confer meaning. He continued his defense of landed tradition, not for its own sake, but for its inherit historical and, therefore, structural merit. “To the same principle [of permanence] appertain primogeniture and hereditary titles,” maintained Coleridge, arguing that “the influence that these exert in accumulating large masses of property” was to counteract “the antagonist and dispersive forces, which the follies, vices, and misfortunes of individuals can scarcely fail to supply.”33
One who read only that far in the treatise might be forgiven for presuming that Coleridge’s Church and State was a pure pro-landed-culture polemic along the lines of Bolingbroke or even of Burke’s “Letter to a Noble Lord.”34 For Coleridge, as for them, land represented tradition, veneration, the weight of history, the brake on excessive social change, and the best way of chaining individuals to their country and their born (or acquired) duty as aristocrats or gentry. Yet the degree to which Coleridge found landed values, taken exclusively, to be an inadequate as social forces seems clear. He acerbically noted that the entail and primogeniture existed to protect the elite from their own “follies [and] vices.” Obviously, land itself did not guarantee civic virtue; it only guaranteed a greater chance at displaying it to advantage.
In the end, Coleridge stressed that permanency with nothing to modify it was insufficient for a good society. Permanency in isolation, in the style of the Spartans or Brobdingnagians, was an imperfect principle. To the stabilizing continuity of landed society, Coleridge noted, “tends the proverbial obduracy of prejudices characteristic of the humbler tillers of the soil.” Such simple rusticity produced an “aversion even to benefits that are offered in the form of innovations.”35 It was clear to all Country Party theorists that the vulgar “new man” needed the integrity and virtue and permanence that investment in land offered him. Coleridge, however, knew something that they and their heirs in the second Tory party ignored. He knew that the “tillers of the soil,” whether humble or noble, also needed qualities that commercial society alone could bring them: civilization, polish, enterprise, and energy. Without the leaven of commerce to make it rise, Coleridge knew, the vaunted country virtue was but a very dull lump of “proverbial obduracy of prejudices” indeed.
Coleridge delineated next the properties and advantages of the commercial spirit. The political principle of progression, or “the progression of the state, in the arts and comforts of life,” was fundamentally engrained in all that could be called civilizing, as were the gifts and blessings of the commercial or competitive spirit. Where the land brought honor and virtue to the state, the towns and their commerce brought material progress, refinement, sociability, and the energy of emulation. In those ancient and medieval states where the culture of towns and trade had not yet arisen, war, raiding, and plunder had fulfilled this role. War provided a more brutal and less pleasant way of introducing new ideas and wealth to the nation than did trade. But at least it assured the circulation of the produce of the arts and sciences throughout the world and by its tempting fruit motivated plundering peoples to become civilized in their own right. Because plunder and conquest were active forms of enterprise, they were (despite their obvious crudity) preferable as instruments for the spreading of culture than were tyranny or monopoly.
That Coleridge saw more evil in monopoly and a placid pastoral tyranny than he did in the bloody havoc of conquest and raiding societies speaks volumes. It demonstrates beyond doubt that he saw the stoppage of commerce and progression as every bit as great a threat to society as the erosion of landed permanence. In considering the disaster of permanence without progression, Coleridge turned his attention to the case of Italy. The political failures of Florence and Venice provided Coleridge with the means to repudiate the pure civic-virtue theory of the classical republicans.
Incessant competition, either of merchants in civilized polities or warriors in barbaric nation-states, made adaptation and technological innovation a way of life essential to survival. The interaction and circulation of the scientific innovations produced in this ceaseless one-upmanship advanced through the avenues of emulation, greed, comparison, competition, and theft. This swirl of competitive and emulative activity invariably and unwittingly expanded civil liberty even in states, such as ancient Rome, where the rulers did not wish this increase of liberty to ensue. Coleridge argued that
the progression of a state, in the arts and comforts of life, in the diffusion of the information and knowledge, useful or necessary for all; in short all advances in civilization, and the rights and privileges of citizens, are especially connected with, and derived from the four classes of the mercantile, the manufacturing, the distributive, and the professional. To early Rome, war and conquest were the substitutes for trade and commerce. War was their trade. As these wars became more frequent, on a larger scale, and with fewer interruptions, the liberties of the plebeians continued increasing.36
So far, so good. But when the progressive circulation of commerce halted, liberty shrank accordingly, even in states where the ruled did not wish this decrease of liberty to take place. Coleridge ended his socioeconomic analysis of the rise and fall of liberty on the Italian peninsula with a vision of a modern Italy that, lacking in either imperial conquests or trade, languished in a backward pastoral stupor. There, a purely agricultural economy of latifundia had created a world of bucolic and picturesque oppression, whose beauty “like a garden” could not entirely obscure the repulsiveness of its stagnation, its lack of freedom. Italy “is supposed at present to maintain a larger number of inhabitants than in the days of Trajan or in the best and most prosperous of the Roman Empire. With the single exception of the ecclesiastical state [the Papal States around and including the city of Rome], the whole country is cultivated like a garden. You may find there every gift of God—only not freedom.”37
Coleridge, unlike Harrington and Harrington’s followers, asserted that a chiefly pastoral and agrarian society not based on incessant plunder, and successive wars of conquest was absolutely incompatible with freedom. Only during the old plundering days of the Roman republic in Cicero’s time, or in the era of the canny, volatile, and acquisitive commercial city-states of the Italian Renaissance, did liberty prosper. The loss of all “virtue” and “liberty” in Italy, according to Coleridge, had not been due to her change toward an individualistic market and merchant economy and consequent loss of common values and amateur military arts, as Machiavelli, Guiccardini, and their English disciples had argued. Instead, Italy had lost its virtue and liberty through her embrace of backwardness, sluggish rural peace under an absentee foreign yoke, and an abandonment of the vitality of the Renaissance city for the safety and torpor of the baroque palazzi. Modern Italy exemplified for Coleridge the dangers of permanence without progression, the dangers of a serpent that was all tail and fat and no head or muscle.
For Coleridge, an excess of Country Party values emphasizing the superiority of rural morals to urban morals, rather than a dearth of them, had strangled Renaissance liberta. Italy, argued Coleridge, was “a country rich in the proudest records of liberty, illustrious with the names of heroes, statesmen, legislators, philosophers.” Its history was “alive with the virtues and crimes of hostile parties, when the glories and the struggles of ancient Greece were acted out over again in the proud republics of Venice, Genoa, and Florence.” Because of this, “the love of every eminent citizen was in constant hazard from the furious factions of their native city.” Yet despite this, “life had no charm out of its dear and honoured walls.” So much so that “all the splendours of the hospitable palace, and the favour of princes, could not soothe the pining of Dante or Machiavel, exiles from their free, their beautiful, Florence.” But, for all of that, Coleridge concluded, “not a pulse of liberty survives.”38
It was through the forced suppression of trade, Coleridge argued, that the conquerors of Italy in the early sixteenth century had destroyed the liberties that had flourished in the fifteenth century, even in the “tyrannies.” The Hapsburgs had brought Italy to its senescence through a conscious policy of pastoralization:
It was the profound policy of the Austrian and the Spanish courts, by every possible means to degrade the profession of trade; and even in Pisa and Florence to introduce the feudal pride and prejudice of less happy, less enlightened countries. Agriculture, meanwhile, with its attendant population and plenty, was cultivated with increasing success; but from the Alps to the Straits of Messina, the Italians are slaves.39
The preceding passage is both evocative and articulate in its emphasis on the liberalizing tendencies of commerce and the stultifying tendencies of agriculture. Coleridge once again demonstrated in this analysis that permanence on its own, without the vivifying influence of progression, naturally and inescapably led to “the feudal pride and prejudice of less happy, less enlightened countries.”40
In all of this, Coleridge’s views are in alignment not with the Harringtonians, but with the proponents of skeptical Whiggery and those other defenders of commerce as a force for morally improving the nation. Coleridge’s denial of the self-sufficiency of Tory and Country Party landed values has not escaped the notice of critics such as J. G A. Pocock, who have regarded Coleridge as one of the late-model expositors of an eighteenth-century skeptical Whig tradition that saw commerce in a positive light. This tradition, dating back to the “Whiggish” Tory David Hume, rejected the Country Party equation of commerce with corruption and arbitrary power. Instead, Hume and his successors stood the neo-Harringtonian argument on its head by making commerce, wealth, and civility the essential building blocks rather than the destructive wrecking balls of liberty. Indeed, Pocock, more than most, has been able to penetrate the fog of party names and cant that lies in such thick layers on the nineteenth-century political landscape. He has seen that the “Old Tory” Coleridge, like so many “Old Tories” of the second Tory party (including his old enemy Pitt), were the ideological heirs of the old “conservative” wing of the Whig party. These old-style Whigs had liked the revolutionary principles of 1688 so well that they saw little need to advance much farther forward from them. Pocock notes that Coleridge “further complicates the meaning of the word ‘Tory’ at a time when it was increasingly used to denote a last-ditch defender of the Whig order.”41
Coleridge’s acquaintance with the “skeptical” defenders of commerce and finance was extensive. He had read the works of David Hume, James Steuart of Goodtrees, and Adam Smith by 1811. While Coleridge rejected what he perceived to be “multitude of sophisms” in Steuart and Smith, he also maintained that their principles, though clothed in what he considered the specious pseudoscientific cant of the new economists, contained a moiety of “just and important result[s]” that were deducible from the “simplest principles of morality and common-sense.”42 Like Smith, Coleridge believed that culture and morality and political institutions were integrally related to each other by and through their historical development as social practices. As such they were intrinsically tied to a process of human order in which cities and commerce played an active and important role. This interpretation was not located exclusively in the discourse of juridical/individual rights, nor was it to be found exclusively in the vocabulary of civic-humanist/communitarian duties. Coleridge, like Montesquieu, Rousseau, and arguably Smith, viewed the state as the agent of a sociologically originated jurisprudence that comprehended the lexica of both liberty and civil rights and civic virtues and duties. David Hume and Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun had both emphasized the liberalizing and civilizing effects of urban commercial life in their considerations of the importance of local power and local communities in preserving liberty and happiness. For Hume, capital cities were “centres of law, government, culture, and … trade.”43
Nicholas Phillipson has traced this idea of the commercial city as defender rather than corrupter of freedom from the unlikely sources of Fletcher and Hume to its great expositor, the skeptical Whig Adam Smith. Smith’s market theory and moral philosophy were, for Phillipson, a development of earlier eighteenth-century ideas of civicism. He considers Smith a practical moralist who emphasized the quotidian role of cities and provinces in encouraging a cultured and easy civility. Smith, in perfecting this argument, deflated the bombast of the classical republican litany of melodramatic statements on how the corrupt city dwellers could only be fended off by the stoic resolve and civic virtues of the frugal and incorruptible gentry.44 Phillipson further distinguishes Smith’s views from communitarian civicism by emphasizing Smith’s focus on ideas of propriety and the moral development of the individual rather than the virtue of the community at large.
Smith’s civic moralism rested on ideas of moral autonomy and voluntarism. Civic moralism was an idea that seems to have been echoed in Coleridge’s writings after 1816. It was founded as a riposte to the tendency in commonwealth arguments to seek “global” (i.e., societal rather than individual) amelioration and to mistrust individuals, especially those with money. In contradistinction, civic moralism proposed an idea of virtue—like that developed by Addison in the 1710s and repeated by Coleridge in the 1820s—that strove to improve the general social good of all citizens without condemning commerce or individualism as unpatriotic. Indeed, the success of the civic moralist program positively depended on the personal agency of well-intentioned persons such as “Addison’s urban and urbane Christian gentleman.”
The civic moralists sought to do for patriotism what the latitudinarians had done for religion: make it smoother, less strident, less rough, more comfortable with cosmopolitan culture, more sophisticated (in the good sense of the word), and more open to the possibility that well-intentioned individuals might engender change. Reed Browning gave a differnt name to this change in political style than the old dichotomy of civic-humanist and juridical rights. He described the great divide as consisting of the emulators of Cato opposed to the emulators of Cicero. According to Browning, whereas the Catonian style was strong on accusations and bluster and last stands of patriotism against tyranny and corruption, the Ciceronian style sought to reach the same goal of liberty by a less rugged road of compromise, prudence, and urbanity that recognized the difference between a government which was truly corrupt and one that was simply slovenly.45
Donald Winch has produced a very constructive approach to Smithian civic moralism and social anthropology. Winch’s analysis clears up much of the current scholarly confusion that seems to attend the discussion of the relative influence in a given individual’s political thought of the (allegedly incompatible) discourses of jurisprudence (with its guarantee of individual liberty and rights and its dependence on volition) and the civicist tradition (with its focus on community and duty and virtue as the basis for freedom). Winch believes that for Smith, the discourse of justice and rights was not incompatible with the discourse of duty and civic virtue. Refusing to privilege an exclusively materialist economic reading of Smith’s use of the four stages, Winch believes that the stages described by Smith must be considered as having both economic and political meanings. The four stages in this reading become significant because they show how Smith believed that laws and governments “grew up with” rather than were “produced by” social and economic development.46
Using Winch’s analysis of Smith as an heir to the sociological jurisprudence of Montesquieu, it becomes possible to understand Coleridge’s ongoing attempt to balance or, more pointedly, to integrate socioeconomic, jurisprudential, and moral concerns into a single cohesive state theory. Commerce and virtue, liberty and law, were to be sustained by institutional equipoise. Linking commercial activity with cultural and moral development was a persistent theme of Coleridge’s. Like Smith, his greatest objection to monopoly was that it was an unnatural suspension of economic and social discourse, or commerce. The suppression of trade, similar to the censorship that Coleridge had decried in 1795 as the suspension of opinion, “hushed to death-like silence” the voices of exchange.47 In short, monopoly censored and censorship monopolized; both degraded or halted the natural interactive workings of the social and historical forces of change. Both undermined the logic and wisdom of the “science of history.” Coleridge increasingly developed his theme of virtue and liberty’s dependence upon commerce after 1802 and continued to refine it in his later writings through 1832. Dependent as they were on commerce in its relationship to land, liberty and virtue existed in equipoise; their spheres of influence, like those of permanence and progression, were cognized and realized in the laws and legislature of Britain.
Having considered the merits and disadvantages of both landed and commercial society, Coleridge turned to the task of considering the variety of interests that were represented by these two orders. The “subjects of the state” he divided into “two orders, … the agricultural or possessors of land; and the merchant, manufacturer, the distributive and the professional bodies.” Both were to be legally cognized “under the common name of citizens.” Coleridge had considered the benefits of commerce at some length and he had argued for the “civilizing” virtue of trade and its capacity for “expanding liberty.” Landed society, for its part, brought to the task of government the need to cognize its peculiar qualities, of honor and of entitlement. Land, as a stable basis for trust, was the foundation of promise, commitment, fidelity, and, finally, law. These questions of honor and entitlement, when realized as fiduciary promise, were the foundations of all civil polities. They reflected “by the nature of things common to every civilized country,” or “at all events by the course of events in this country,” the underlying principles of the law. The ancient constitution, in the oldest records of the Common Law, or “in imitation of our old law books,” had “subdivided” these interests “into two classes,” which “we may entitle the Major and the Minor Barons.” These, “either by their interests or by the very effect of their situation, circumstances, and the nature of their employment” were “vitally connected with the permanency of the state.” As such, their concern was with the “institutions, rights, customs, manners, privileges” of that state, placing their power in a dynamic opposition with that of “the inhabitants of ports, towns, and cities.” This latter group represented the interests of artisans and burgesses, or the manufacturing and commercial influence. They were, as such, but “in like manner and from like causes … more especially connected” with the dynamic or liberalizing elements of the state, “with its progression.”48 While the inhabitants of towns may contribute through their various interests to progress and liberty, it is the principle of law in the entitlement of landed society that forms the basis of the “institutions, rights, customs, manners,” and “privileges” of the state. For unlike “expanding liberty,” the law reflects a principle of constraint. Its efficacy and stability are a function of its history as customary right. In short, the legitimacy of the law rests on its institutional permanency.
The origins of the common law may be traced back to the laws governing land use. Those laws, which did not accord with the entitlements and privileges of landed society, had been characterized as innovative and arbitrary by seventeenth-century common lawyers who had appealed to the landed rights of baronial oligarchy against the centralizing tendencies of the Stuart Crown.49 Rules were considered arbitrary, and therefore unjust, according to the degree of their suddenness, their unconventionality. Hale believed that “impetuousity” in law presented considerable problems for “civic ordering.” He deemed unfair and inequitable those rules that abruptly violated expectations, habits of conduct, and promises.50 In short, it was believed that arbitrary law undermined compliance as it undermined trust. Coleridge believed that “breach of trust” constituted more than a “breach of contract” or a broken promise; it was a form of dishonor. Honor touched on reputation, habit, and expectation. Coleridge associated the origins and foundations of the law with relationships that emanated from landed society. He believed this to be a matter of juridical principle as well as a historical precedent generated from the Common Law rights governing the disposition of real property.51 Detailing and enumerating the particular interests of the separate spheres of commerce and land, Coleridge intentionally emphasized the complexity and significance of each with respect to his two principles. With particular regard to the landed interest, he depicted the possession of land as determining not just a limited “economic” interest, but an entire set of social and juridical relationships.52 In this regard, sovereign consensus was predicated on the idea of recht as much as macht. “Right” was a power and a property.53 It was founded on commitments, expectations, and duties.54 Coleridge considered the idea of property to be significant not merely as the accumulation of particular wealth, but for the social, cultural, and political institutions that its specific form and usage determined. He believed that the “world order” generated by a relationship with the land was antithetical, although not contrary, to the social structures that emanated from commercial activity. The principle of permanence existed in complementary and integrative opposition to that of progression. They formed a unity when in equipoise.
If law, landed society, and the principle of permanence existed as a structural base that generated the institutional form of the state, then, Coleridge argued, it was the dynamic of commercial activity that animated that form. Commerce was the engine; it was the catalyst or mover that generated the resolution of these opposites. Recall that in his discussion of permanence and progression as opposite not contrary forces, Coleridge had employed the image of a snake as the metaphor for his living state. Accordingly, land became the rest of the body and commerce the tail that propelled it on. “Even the most mobile of creatures,” whether “the serpent” or the state, “makes a rest of its own body,” but, sustained by the deep roots of country prosperity, the city gathers and brokers the commonwealth and, “drawing up its voluminous train from behind on this fulcrum, propels itself onwards.”55 Coleridge continued his description of equipoise as a historical process—“in a very advanced stage of civilization, the two orders of society will more and more modify and leaven each other.”56 Landed society cultivated honor; the commercial world civilized and made virtuous the landed. And what is quite clearly meant by civilized is the expansive liberty that was for Coleridge the very essence of the civic principle. Making this relationship between law and liberty, between virtue and civility, explicit Coleridge, insisted that “the necessity for external government to man is in an inverse proportion to the vigour of his self-government.” Consequently, “where the last is most complete, the first is least wanted” or, most succinctly, “the more Virtue, the more Liberty.”57 Coleridge described, in sociopolitical and economic terms, the practical mechanism of this process. It was reflected in the constitution of Parliament, where “at all times the lower of the two ranks, of which the first order consists, or the Franklins, will, in their political sympathies, draw more nearly to the antagonist order than the first rank.”58
The tendency of the gentry to ally with the merchant classes, or franklins with burghers, was the foundation of the division of the two houses.59 With the expansion of commercial society following Britain’s financial revolution of the 1690s came a consolidation and realignment of “country” interests with borough representation.60 The integration of both interests was, Coleridge maintained, essential to any criteria of citizenry. Thus the landed interest is secured against corruption and the commercial order allied to the greater national interests of the state. This resolution of opposites at the parameters of interest is an inherent principle of Coleridge’s Idea of the state. A property-based law and constitution would provide not only the institutional form, but also the necessary stabilizing constraint for an urban commercial cosmopolitanism marked by vitality and flux. Both created by and creating history, the constitution as an Idea, was, in Coleridge’s view, the active instrument for the interrelation of particular interests and broader social relationships within the living state.
In summary, it has been argued that Coleridge considered the ideal constitutional balance between the Lords and the Commons to reflect his two formative constitutional Ideas of permanence and progression. The “major barons,” or peers, represented the landed interest of permanence in the House of Lords. The “minor barons,” or franklins (landowning freeholders), in combination with the burgesses, or the “moneyed interests,” represented the personal and commercial principle of progression in the House of Commons. These two “estates” operated in conjunction with the church, which Coleridge (borrowing a phrase from Elizabeth I) termed the “third great estate of the realm.”61 No one of these three estates—hereditary aristocrats, commoners, or churchmen—was intended by the Idea of the constitution to exist in a state of subjugation to, or lordship over, the others. No single interest in this triad, argued Coleridge, could profit in the long run by grossly undermining the power of another interest. He stressed throughout his treatise that the fortunes of the three estates were not a zero-sum game in which the peers could gain permanent wealth by beggaring the commoners. It was Coleridge’s contention that all three estates of the realm were involved in a common, collective endeavor in which the true enrichment of one was the enrichment of all, and the pauperization of one the pauperization of all. Systemic imbalance might lead to temporary, short-term gains for a portion of the polity but in the end would harm all, even that portion that had originally believed itself to gain by the imbalance.
If the Lords gained such power that they pauperized the commoners, then Italian-style pastoral tyranny would ensue. (Such was his warning to the landowners who defended the Corn Laws and who squelched the importation of East Indian barks in order to keep the prices of their own bark artificially high). If the commoners amassed such power that the lords were no longer a brake upon their ambitions, then the nation would lapse either into the excessive turmoil of Athenian-style demagoguery or the fossilized torpor of Venetian plutocracy. (Such was his warning to the “radical” sections of the reform movement, which believed that the lords were a superannuated institution with no use in an enlightened age). Make the church gain power at the expense of the lords and commons, and one replicated the abuses of the papal church before the sixteenth century, whose transnational scope caused it to pauperize the “nationality” of England to which it should have been devoted. (Such was his warning to the High Church, and even more so to the philopapists who wished to spend English monies to fund Roman priests). Make the lords and commons gain power at the expense of the church’s “nationality,” and one re-created the conditions which had led to the worst aspects of the Henrician profiteering or the acts of the Scottish Thanes in the Regency. (Such was his warning to the various parliamentary hands that were edging their way into church coffers in search of monies to appropriate for schemes social amelioration).
Throughout his neo-Polybian constitutional theory of balance in triads, such as king/lords/commons and lords/commoners/church, Coleridge consistently pointed out that all three played necessary roles of regulation, energy, and tension. Their relationship was, to use an anachronistic term, symbiotic. Coleridge believed that one who acted only from “Conceptions” rather than “Ideas” of statecraft might initially see the existence of at least one of the members of a triad as useless but would soon find that if he diminished or (even worse) eliminated that force in the triad, then the entire organism from which he had unwittingly removed a vital organ either sickened or died. The very “obstructionism” that hindered the ambition of any one segment of the state was itself a beneficial effect of the oppositions and tensions inherent to Coleridge’s Idea of the state. These balances and oppositions might make governance arduous and unwieldy, but they also maintained the health and strength of the body politic, preventing it from slipping into the seizure of excessive change (unlimited progression, civic “corruption,” the Athenian and Jacobin disease) or the coma of excessive tradition (unlimited permanence, civic “ossification,” the Venetian and Tuscan disease). A Hobbesian-framed state in which a single sovereign instituted his decrees without let or hindrance from any other interest in the nation was an abhorrent thought to Coleridge, since he explicitly believed that the seeming “obstruction” to the will of the sovereign was actually a beneficial demonstration of his theory of progress through dialectical opposition.
Coleridge’s third estate, the church, was the ultimate focus of his constitutional theory because it was the synthetic fulcrum on which the other two estates (permanence and progression) balanced. Unlike either the commons or the lords, which were composed of partial and fragmentary interests, the national church alone constituted a single Unis Fraterum, a brotherhood of the nation which comprehended and included all subjects of the realm.62 In this national church, the private, individual, and free consciences of men could be cultivated and sustained by the public trust: Coleridge’s national reserve of the “nationality,” the state trust. Landed property may have been the “rock” on which Coleridge’s national church would be built, but the clerisy that it sent out into the nation was drawn from both the landed and landless populations. The clerisy, in its emphasis on individual freedom and moral autarchy, had its roots in the “progressive” forces of commerce and civility. As such, Coleridge understood it to be an inherently “liberal” institution.