WHETHER HIS IDEAS found expression in pamphlets, public lectures, or private letters, Coleridge pursued one singular and unified objective in all of his political works from 1795 to 1830. This lifelong goal was to produce a comprehensive and systematic theory of the social state as a living matrix, a matrix that in its best forms would sustain and promote the idea of individual freedom. With that in mind, I have emphasized that Coleridge’s metaphysics and the “medico-philosophical” language of his political and social thought were central components of a larger politico-ethical system. His Idea of the state, therefore, must be viewed as an extension of both his moral philosophy and the “theory of life” that it rested on.
Coleridge argued that life was a dynamic matrix, an integrative system of structures and animate will. Morality was a consequence of that will as it acted in the world. Beyond this, history itself was a force of animate and purposive power; the material contents of the past, directed by the Idea, both constituted and regulated the future. This premise, both historicist and idealist in its implication, was the groundwork for all of Coleridge’s writings on the condition of man in human society. As a consequence, his political thought must be understood as a contiguous extension of his cultural, moral, religious, aesthetic, and ultimately social views of experience. In the light of the fundamental continuity and inherent progression of Coleridge’s intellectual development from 1795 to 1830, in light of “the growth of the poet’s mind,” it is difficult to legitimately sustain the case for “apostasy.” People need not recant to change.
It will be recalled that the “Moral and Political Lecture” of 1795 was published the same year as an “Introductory Address.” More than an introduction to the Conciones, the “Address” was an introduction to what was to be Coleridge’s enduring belief—that politics and morals must be considered as distinctive but fundamentally integrative forces. He articulated this view most completely in his final work of political theory, the 1830 constitutional treatise, On Church and State. Church and State was a dissertation on morality and statecraft, education, law, and constitutional theory, ranging far beyond its ostensible grounding in the dispute on church–state relations. The essence of that relationship was the mediation between political and moral freedom. All of Coleridge’s statements on reform, on law and society, rested on the idea of liberty. Although this liberty may have been inadequate as a condition of public virtue without the stabilizing influence of land, it was, nonetheless, the essential component of the private morality upon which all virtue was ultimately conditional. It was the initiating point of departure for any discussion of civil society. In short, there was no republic without virtue and no virtue without liberty. For without liberty, morality was impossible, and without morality, conscience and duty were meaningless.
Coleridge believed that the active institutions of the state, notably the constitution of government, the national church, and the law, provided the living regulative vessels and organs of the nation or the realm. As such, they constricted, regulated, and advanced the “permeative fluid” of society. Liberty was the “permeative fluid.” It was the “progressive idea” and it was concretized or, to use one of Coleridge’s terms, made “corporific,” in the active mechanisms (or, more appropriately, the living processes) of transaction, exchange, intercourse, discourse, opinion, and commerce. Coleridge regarded this process as osmotic or fluid rather than discretely or atomistically contractual. This understanding also extended to the relationship between virtue and morality, and it was one component of his doctrine of opposites. Such opposition could be detected in the workings of the Common Law.
The Common Law, through the honor of landed society, regulated virtue, while the church and commercial endeavor regulated morality. Liberty promoted morality. Coleridge saw these two great interests of the state as mutually sustaining each other in a close symbiosis. For this reason, he favored neither land nor commerce, permanence nor progression, oligarchy nor democracy, Venice nor Athens. A systemic imbalance in either direction (the ossification of Venetian oligarchy or the mass politics and eventual demagoguery of Athenian democracy) would be equally fatal; sclerosis and aneurysm both resulted in death.
For Coleridge, the language of liberty and the language of virtue were not at war with one another; they were, on the contrary, essential to each other. Therefore, to understand Coleridge’s late and radical contention that commerce provided an expanding liberty, it is necessary to understand that his conception of “liberty” was quintessentially moral. Liberty of the subject was sustained by freedom of conscience. Voluntarism, as the duty prescribed by the moral law of reason, was the foundation of the just republic. This fundamental principle had been the basis of his early defenses of the liberty of the press and, equally, was at the heart of his later criticisms of monopoly, old corruption, and his corresponding defenses of commercial society. “Those sudden breezes and noisy gusts”1 of opinion, which he later called “our intellectual commerce,”2 were at the heart of a healthy political constitution. The matter of regulation of this body politic, a statesman’s rather than physician’s science.
Coleridge’s early political writings were preoccupied with questions of moderation and balance. His central argument in Church and State, some thirty-five years after the Bristol lectures, was for institutional “equipoise” and the systemic balance of the ideas of permanence and progression. Landed society and the Common Law provided the principle of “permanence,” as both were themselves principles of historical continuity. The Common Law revealed essential truths of morality in a way that statute never could because Common Law represented cumulative wisdom and so transcended the prejudices of immediate interests. The Common Law had time enough to generate and evolve ideas that were more than “half-truths.” It had time to instill and promote (but also to reflect) ideas of virtue, honor, and justice. It regulated through habit, promoting virtue by example.
The vessels of regulation also evolved and grew over time, accommodating the ebb and flow of freedom, adapting to the systolic pressure of the “permeative fluid.” In this way the instruments of government, the increasing complexity of the bureaucracy, and the broadened comprehensions of the law could be tuned to the changing needs of society. They could be reformed to accommodate the shifting rhythms of a mass culture in a market economy as it grew and contracted, as its balance of interests moved from land to commerce and on, perhaps, to a renewed but irrevocably transformed use of the land. Coleridge’s “permeative fluid” was freedom, represented materially as action, opinion, exchange, or trade. In this sense, Coleridge believed that it was the growth of the body from infancy to maturity that allowed the organism to become most completely what it is.
Coleridge believed that the ultimate (long-term) rather than the medial (short-term) goal of politics and society was the evolution of a state that could most perfectly foster the freedom of individual, developing conscience and will. Liberty was, for Coleridge, the absolute precondition for the moral advancement of the human spirit. Perfected humanity was the ultimate telos of human existence. His providential philosophy of history was animated by freedom, if sustained by certain teleological ideas. These ideas, or goods, “concretised” themselves in historical institutions such as the national church, the Common Law, and the constitution. In the case of his idea of progression, the “moneyed interest,” the constitutional representation was the House of Commons.
The legislative role of Parliament in creating statute was regulated by the Lords but emanated from the Commons. The civil law developed with greater complexity as the forces of commercial transaction rapidly progressed, necessitating a greater complexity of regulation. The “rights” of landed property were more perfectly sustained by the Common Law. Either of these forces of permanence and progression risked corruption if its influence was “overbalanced.” Coleridge criticized monopoly equally with laissez-faire policies. He argued for factory acts and against the monopoly of the East India Company. He did not regard his ardent support for the Scottish civil servant and “free-trader” Dr. Thomas Crawfurd as contradicting his defense of Peel’s factory legislation and his attack on the doctrine of the “free-market in labour.” In this regard, Coleridge’s belief that the liberty of commerce must not be interpreted as the license of commerce mirrored his fundamental view that the legislator must only coerce within the “requisite bounds of each.”
Liberty was not merely political for Coleridge: it was the fundamental moral principal that animated and structured all human experience and historical agency. The idea of liberty had been mediated throughout history by structures that stabilized, harnessed, and lent a progressive continuity to that fundamental human principle. These structures, or institutions, were in turn transformed by that animating and “permeative fluid” that they (more and less at various times) contained. They were forces of nature as much as law, of physics as much as politics. They must be understood as science. The statesman, then, becomes a calculator of political and moral force as a physicist unraveling the mysteries of natural force or as a physician diagnosing the hidden ailments of the body, in this case the body politic. The concepts of “natural philosophy” and the “law of nature” were extended in their implications, by Coleridge, not as metaphors and analogies of political life, but as offering direct and unified explanation of the deepest causes and conditions of the social and political world as somatic function.
A commitment to the idea of liberty, in all of its physical and moral manifestations, is the hallmark of an intellectual career that can never be understood as fragmentary and never reduced to simple questions of factional allegiance or sectarian affiliation. Coleridge’s political thought culminated in a genuinely synthetic social and juridical state theory;, one that attempted to reconcile moral freedom with social and political justice and to elevate the art of the politician to the science of the statesman.
