COLERIDGE CLAIMED THAT he was “ever a man without a party.”1 Others, including contemporary friends and associates from Robert Southey2 to Henry Crabb Robinson, have viewed Coleridge’s portrait of himself as a lifelong “independent” as disingenuous. But careful examination of the political thought of Coleridge from his earliest writings on politics and religion in 1795 to his last and most coherent work of political thought, in On the Constitution of the Church and State in 1830, confirms that neither a “Young Radical” nor an “Old Tory,” Coleridge contributed to what Mill himself termed a second school of liberalism.3
“Liberal” is a term at least as problematical as “radical” and “conservative.” All three of these terms entered the British political lexicon during or immediately after Coleridge’s lifetime, and he was a key participant in the debates that shaped their origin and meaning. In considering Coleridge’s life and thought in terms of these ideological categories, one invariably challenges and thereby clarifies those categories. Liberalism has, from its origins in the works of John Locke (as described by both C. B. Macpherson and Richard Ashcraft), been associated with atomistic visions of individual liberty, the doctrine of natural rights, the fiction of an “original social contract,” and the discourse of jurisprudence. But more recent notions of liberalism have tended to emphasize its connection to questions of social welfare and moral freedom. One might garner a more useful assessment of the term “liberal” from that greatest exponent of the classical republican paradigm, J. G. A. Pocock. He observes, with an eye to a twentieth-century context, that “the rise of the social to preeminence over the political (to denote which is at present one of the cant usages of the term liberalism) seems to have rested on a psychology of sentiment, sympathy, and passion better equipped to account for politeness, taste and transaction than was the rigorous individualism of private interest.”4 In considering a political thinker such as Coleridge, whose conception of the social was both determined by and in turn determined the political, one may hope to avoid cant while considering the source of a strand of liberalism that comprehended the interests of both citizen and commonwealth.
It was certainly Coleridge’s view that the pursuit of ideas of “sympathy,” “virtue,” and “rigorous individualism of private interest” were not incompatible goals. Indeed, Coleridge believed that recognition of the interdependency of these values was essential for the constitution of a sociopolitical state. This interdependent moral and political force in what amounted to a social and cultural matrix could only be cognized as science. Coleridge attempted explicitly to set out the principles of this statesman’s science in his work The Statesman’s Manual, but the synthetic intersection of history, nature, and law as essential and defining principles behind virtuous government was a thesis implicit in all of his political writings.
Coleridge’s approach to the idea of the “State” sought to integrate the principles of organic nature, the philosophy of history, and the science of the legislator.5 The principles of organic nature he derived from a combination of the works of Bacon, Cudworth, Kant, and Schelling. His own view of organicism, whether associated with history, nature, or law, was expanded in reference to these ideas through his ongoing interest in medicine and chemistry. This “medico-philosophical” approach, as he described it, was developed and indulged in the lectures on chemistry and magnetism that he gave for Humphry Davey at the Royal Society and through the lectures on anatomy that he gave at King’s College London. These he delivered at the insistence of his friend and amanuensis, J. H. Green. Coleridge also developed his own account of life for his friend Dr. James Gilman and dictated large portions of his Hints Towards a More Comprehensive Theory of Life to Green in 1816. It was published posthumously. His “Lectures on Philosophy,” which were also delivered at King’s, suggest much of the connection that Coleridge invariably made between natural philosophy, natural law, and organic nature.
The idea of organicism was also the basis of Coleridge’s conceptions of historical change, and in this he had considerable sympathy for Burke. He believed that the history of society was a record of a living process of growth and decay, of mutation and regeneration. The institutional form that accompanied and in some instances unnaturally constricted this process was the law. Coleridge believed that the common law and the ancient constitution revealed, through an ongoing adjustment and accommodation of social and political will, the workings of reason and providence. He believed that reason and the common-law were fundamentally related ideas. In this view, providence was the (Kantian) “cunning of reason”6 or the (Coleridgian) “science of history”; it was a providence of second causes. Coleridge’s conception of “organic nature,” his understanding of “philosophy of history,” and his belief in the “science of the legislator”7 are interdependent ideas, all of which point towards the development of a sociological jurisprudence.8 For Coleridge, as for Kames or Smith, the bridge between the moral and the commercial discourse was to be found in the law.
The young Coleridge was certainly more “conservative” than his “radical” critics have suggested. The old Coleridge was far more “radical” than his Tory supporters could have imagined. As Mill observed, Coleridge’s real opinions on society, politics, and religion were, even under Lord Liverpool’s patronage, “sufficient to make a Tory’s hair stand on end.” Continuity based on a commitment to the idea of liberty is the distinguishing mark of a career that “rescued from oblivion truths which Tories had forgotten and which the prevailing school of liberalism never knew.”9 It may be useful to take Mill’s lead in this and consider that the “prevailing school of liberalism” was not the only school of liberalism. Coleridge’s perspective as a social and political critic, his concern for a constitutional polity that could promote communal goods without obviating personal agency, his interest in a sociological jurisprudence that could compass history, power, and law in terms of natural organic processes, are all suggestive of this second liberal party that at once paralleled and opposed the “prevailing school” of the Benthamites.
Beyond being a man of no party, Coleridge was, from first to last, a great classical scholar. His understanding both of the oratory of the greatest exponents of classical rhetoric and their principles was extensive. He had read the classic texts of English civic-humanist thought, such as Cato’s Letters and Oceana. But his acquaintance with the discourses of virtue, corruption, liberty, and tyranny was rooted far deeper than those shallow recensions. Coleridge read his Machiavelli first hand, rather than through neo-Harringtonian intermediaries. He had read in the Greek and Latin the political texts of Cicero, Seneca, Plato, and Aristotle. He also read broadly in the “moderns,” reading Descartes, Rousseau, Spinoza, Leibnitz, and Kant. While it is true that his distaste for “Scotchmen” became legendary, he read Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Sir James Steuart of Goodtrees, and Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun. His preoccupation with Hume was so vivid and lively that it amounted to a virtual, although necessarily one-sided, editorial engagement in The Friend. While attacking Smith, by way of undermining Malthus and Ricardo, there is much in Coleridge’s later writings to suggest that his understanding of the social, political, and moral significance of the new Scottish economic science was considerable. Through these considerations, most evident in Church and State, Coleridge united, or at least considered in tandem, aspects of the thought of Montesquieu and Kames, Rousseau and Smith. In the political thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the language of classical republicanism and the language of jurisprudence found a certain accord.
Coleridge scholarship has passed through a number of recognizable phases since the poet-philosopher’s death at the age of sixty-two. One must begin by saying that Coleridge “studies” began largely with an informal, discipular tradition, relatively uncritical in its admiration for the “Sage of Highgate,” in the nineteenth century.10 The amount and variety of Coleridgiana and the number and variety of both single and collected editions of Coleridge attest to his popularity among the “Victorians.” Coleridge, like Samuel Johnson11 and Walter Scott, was erroneously thought to provide justifications of “Tory” principles and a “Tory” way of life in general.12 Yet he had a more important and influential status beyond his position as a Tory saint. Coleridge’s statements on the formative power of ideas in society influenced the mid- and late-nineteenth-century political theorists, even those who did not think of themselves as within the “Idealist” or “Tory” traditions. His writings received respect and attention from John Stuart Mill13 and T. H. Green14 not merely as artifacts in the history of ideas but as a vital rethinking of persistent problems of politics.
Alongside this tradition of praise, of course, there arose a parallel tradition of criticism that saw Coleridge as an “Apostate” from the cause of democracy. Implicit in this critique was the suggestion that Coleridge’s treason inherently demoted his thought to a second-rate category. Coleridge’s contemporary and critical adversary William Hazlitt was the first to refer to him as an “apostate,”15 and Hazlitt and Thomas DeQuincey both attacked Coleridge in editorials and reviews during the early nineteenth century.16They accused Coleridge, as well as the other Lake Poets (William Wordsworth and Robert Southey), of turning their backs on the cause of parliamentary reform, spurning the principles of the French Revolution, and betraying the “Radical” ideas and loyalties of a Jacobin youth in favor of the comfortable haven of Anglican piety and Tory patronage.
Hazlitt and DeQuincy were not the last to view Coleridge or the language of political affiliation during the critical years after 1793 in simple and defamatory terms.17 The theme of betrayal and disappointed promise, both political and literary, has survived in many of the accounts of Coleridge that literary scholars have produced. It is most striking in Norman Fruman’s Damaged Archangel,18 which emphasizes Coleridge’s personal vices and failures, his addictions and plagiarisms.19 But it also became a stalwart interpretation of political and social historians like Edward Thompson, who revived the charge of “apostasy” in his paean to the 1790s radicalization of plebeian and artisan London, The Making of the English Working Class.20 Thompson’s work exercised a considerable influence on the analysis of romantic “Radicalism” that literary and cultural critics of the 1960s and 1970s produced. Most notable amongst Thompson’s contemporaries was the work of Raymond Williams,21 although more recently Marilyn Butler’s slight but now standard volume, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries,22 has continued this tradition. Thompson, Williams, and Butler have all, in their different fashions, approached the cultural politics of this period through the lens of Marx-influenced ideologies, whether economic reductionism or Gramscian hegemony theory.23 In the pursuit of what Butler has described as a radicalized and politically self-conscious “urban subclass,”24 certain questions of incongruity have been ignored. Butler has established a new industry in the historicist study of romanticism, and many of the most recent accounts of Coleridge’s work have been undertaken with a more careful eye to the contexts of their production. Yet, we find the idea of context to be itself a hotly contested concept, and while the best of the new historicism is oddly reminiscent of the best of the old historicism, the worst of it is curiously unhistorical in its historicity.25
The historically uncritical treatments which followed from these assumptions of class formation and consciousness failed to take heed of John Cannon’s careful discrimination of the various factions, languages, and styles of reformers that were characteristic of the opponents of the Unreformed Constitution during the last decade of the eighteenth century.26 Nor did they consider the strategic development of “oppositional” rhetorics during the long eighteenth century from 1688–1832. The ideological considerations which must follow from H. T. Dickinson’s careful charting of the changing significance of eighteenth-century oppositional languages of corruption and virtue—marked by the transition from “Whig” versus “Tory,” to “Court” versus “Country,” and finally to “Radical” versus “Conservative” rhetorical dichotomies—suggest the need for caution when reading “Radicalism” out of all reform rhetorics.27
Beyond the contextual problems of ideological and rhetorical analysis by which some of the less historically careful of the literary accounts have been plagued, there is the problem of Coleridge himself. Thompsonite advocates of “Apostasy” have also failed to reconcile the striking continuity of Coleridge’s political, moral, and social thought—and his persistent assertions of political independence in matters of conscience and party—with the problem of “Radicalism” as an ideological category during this period. “Apostasy” is a term loaded with religious sentiment, and, in the case of Thompson and those Marxist social historians who followed him, it was the religion of political radicalism that Coleridge had betrayed.
More recent scholarship has considered both Coleridge and “Radical” ideology with an evener temper. J. G. A. Pocock’s treatments of the ancient constitution and the classical republicanism of James Harrington and his disciples has provided a subsequent generation of scholars with a new understanding of the rhetorical and ideological strategies of Georgian Britain.28 Caroline Robbins’s careful examination of the agrarian-gentry classical republicanism of what she termed the “Commonwealthsman” described a world of gentlemen politicians who were as concerned with issues of virtue and the corrupting influence of excessive property (luxury) as they were with the use of liberty as a strategy for protecting their own property.29 Robbins’s thesis was countered by the liberty-as-rationale-for-property possessive individualism of C. B. Macpherson’s Lockean urban-bourgeois “man of property.”30 The Lockean thesis produced its own wider influences, particularly in accounts of the politics of the American Revolution. Overturning the idea of a “Lockean Liberal” revolution, Bernard Bailyn reconstructed Robbins’s commonwealth thesis, tracing the language of republicanism across the Atlantic and considering its impact on the “Patriot” faction in the thirteen colonies of British North America who subsequently evolved into American “revolutionaries.”31 It is arguable that those scholars who have more recently enlisted under the banner of the classical and communitarian model pioneered by Robbins, Pocock, and Bailyn have as much of an “ideological” axe to grind as the disciples of Thompson or Macpherson. The Robbins/Pocock/Bailyn thesis, which began its life as a fresh new “heresy” against the monolithic vision of a single tradition that recognized only “Lockean liberalism” and the Whig-versus-Tory dichotomy from 1688 to 1789, has itself hardened into a rigid orthodoxy as stultifying as the paradigm which it unseated.
In this new humanist and communitarian synthesis the language of individual property, liberty, and natural rights was eclipsed by the agrarian republicanism and civic virtue that Pocock has associated with the Catonian and Florentine Republics. It is this “Classical Republican paradigm” which has been providing the theoretical assumptions for the most recent accounts of the political thought of Coleridge.32 In this manner, the post-1968 Marxist accounts of radical consciousness were overturned in favor of the competing languages of Old Whig/Country Tory politics versus the religious and political significance of rational dissent. Radicalism in the 1790s was constructed anew; the model based on class struggle and artisan consciousness gave way to a paradigm of Unitarianism and the Good Old Cause.
It is striking, however, that with several notable exceptions, the work that was produced on Coleridge’s politics in literature departments failed to keep pace with the changing face of debate in historiography and political theory on eighteenth-century rhetoric, ideology, and party. Some of the best works on Coleridge have, arguably, been produced by the meticulous editors of the Bollingen collected works. R. J. White,33 who was the first to edit Coleridge’s writings on political thought, annotated The Lay Sermons for the series.34 David Erdman produced the volumes comprising the journalism of the Napoleonic years originally issued as Essays on His Own Times.35 John Colmer, who understood the unique and independent quality of Coleridge’s political and social thought, presented him as a “critic of society” in both his own work of that title and his edition of Church and State.36 These are only a few of the editors of the series whose work combined extensive explications of allusions in the texts themselves with perceptive and subtle readings of the works in their introductions. Significantly, they were also those who, along with the general editor, the late Kathleen Coburn, have produced the best interpretative works on Coleridge as a political thinker.37 Unlike those of their colleagues who have emphasized the broad ideological significance of Coleridge’s thought, they remained scrupulously within the boundaries of the texts that they explicated.
J. T. Miller was likely the first to reconsider Roberta Brinkley’s evidence for Coleridge’s debt to seventeenth-century thinkers.38 Brinkley had examined how, in addition to his uses of seventeenth-century divines like Ralph Cudworth and Robert Leighton, Coleridge drew heavily on the writings of Locke, Milton, Sydney, and Harrington. Miller argues that Coleridge’s appropriation of Harrington and the “neo-Harringtonians,” Trenchard and Gordon, established him within the parameters of Commonwealth and Country Party ideology. But, in view of Robbins’s careful distinctions between the differing political views of the Commonwealthsmen, it is important that Coleridge’s republicanism is not too hastily inferred from his laudatory references to “Milton, Sydney, Harrington, and Locke.” Miller contends that Coleridge undertook “radical ends through conservative means.” His comment is a provocative and appealing way of arguing for some degree of continuity in Coleridge’s thought. But his study is an interpretation that continued, in some degree, the problems of ideological “lumping” that blighted the earlier accounts by Thompson, Butler, and, most recently in that tradition, Nicholas Roe.39 It is not useful to demolish Coleridge as a “Radical,” if he is only to be resurrected as a “Classical Republican.” The question becomes how “Radical” was Coleridge’s “Republicanism”?
John Morrow has produced the most recent, and in many respects the most satisfactory, account of Coleridge’s political thought to date.40 Like Miller, Morrow emphasizes the importance of Commonwealth and Country Party arguments in Coleridge’s writings from 1795 to 1830. He charts a shift in Coleridge’s views of property and its moral and political significance after the Peace of Amiens in 1802. He echoes Miller’s focus on Coleridge’s equation “Property is Power,” a formula strikingly similar to that of Harrington. The question begged by both Morrow and Miller was, what kind of property41 and what kind of power?42 Morrow sustains the old myth of Coleridgian “Apostasy.” However, he believes that Coleridge’s concerns after 1800 shifted away from the more “Radical” appropriations of republican language that characterized his youthful writings, through the politics of the Napoleonic era, toward a conservative classical synthesis in the later years of Aids to Reflection and Church and State.
Morrow’s account is persuasive, and it is a careful attempt to explain the development and changes that attended Coleridge’s maturation as a political thinker. However, it is possible to consider change, growth and development, without returning to the old songs of apostasy and betrayal. Coleridge did change, as did the world in which he lived, but he did not recant. R. J. White’s early assessment, made in 1939, stands very well: “Coleridge was never a radical nor a Tory. He was a liberal philosopher and a great Christian seer.”43
Coleridge’s conviction was, from first to last, that political liberty was secured by independence of conscience and reason, that this independence was undermined by party allegiance, that positive institutions and the Common Law rather than an encoded charter of natural rights was the best hope of a just and lasting polity, and that virtue and voluntarism were the prerequisites required for a free and liberal society.
Perhaps the most striking deficiency in Morrow’s otherwise measured and careful account is that in the service of the civic humanist/classical republican paradigm, he failed to consider adequately one of the central aspects of Coleridge’s thought: the philosophical significance of his constitutional theory. Coleridge’s persistent concern with constitutional and Common Law arguments separated him from both the radical/Tory dichotomy and, more interestingly, from the civic humanist paradigm, at least in its Harringtonian incarnation. The philosophical underpinnings of Coleridge’s late political theory suggest a far more “radical” view of state and society than any he compassed in his early career.
One aspect of Pocock’s early conceptions of the discourse of virtú is that it was a language incompatible with the language of ius. Philosophically, Pocock argued, rights and virtues cannot be the same thing; therefore, theories that emphasize the one must invariably devalue the other. For this reason, the classical republican paradigm is inevitably antagonistic to the juridical one. Quentin Skinner and Richard Tuck have both suggested instances where the juridical and humanistic discourses allied rather than clashed.44 In particular, Richard Tuck has devoted considerable attention to the juridical–civic humanist syntheses in the political thought of the Dutch Republic. Pocock chose to treat this discovery dismissively, describing the writers rediscovered by Tuck as obscure and marginal: “some Dutch contemporaries of Spinoza’s.”45 But beyond these examples of parallel discourses, some of the most interesting connections to be made recently between ideas of liberty, law, commerce, and virtue have come from those scholars who work on the Scottish literati.
Donald Winch, in particular, has argued with regard to the “Adam Smith problem” that the bridging discourse between Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations may be found in the “Lectures on Jurisprudence.”46 Indeed, Pocock himself has described the Scottish Enlightenment to be the partial respondent and partial heir to the Commonwealth tradition. In the case of Scotland, Pocock argues, the Addisonian conception of civility and urban virtue, so popularized by the proliferation of Spectator Clubs in Edinburgh, engendered a Ciceronian (as opposed to Machiavellian or Catonian) conception of classical republicanism in the Scots.47 This more urban and urbane conception of virtue promoted a temperate sociability that made Scotland more conducive to a legal and commercial world of professionalism than did the military and agrarian view that Harrington, Trenchard, and Gordon celebrated.
Coleridge was certainly aware of and admired aspects of the works of Harrington, Trenchard, and Gordon. Although retaining a conviction that something in the permanent value of landed property anchored social values and constitutional principles, Coleridge also conceived a role for the moral significance of commercial property in the development of what he called “an expanding liberty.”48 While his earliest conceptions of the political and moral importance of property suggested more than a passing debt to the republicanism of the seventeenth-century Commonwealthmen, he also focused on the idea of liberty as a function of the ancient constitution and the Common Law. He produced his final synthesis of these parallel discourses, which ran throughout his writing, in Church and State. This treatise was an institutional theory of government and society predicated on an understanding of dynamic “equipoise.”49 This dynamic was to be understood as the fundamental and integrative fusion between land and commerce as active forces driven by “lived experiences,” in short, by human, moral, and social agency. Both landed and commercial interests were sustained by and regulated by the law. Accordingly, Coleridge’s juridical assumptions as to the nature of liberty and law were historical and sociological in nature. His political thought owed as much to the arguments of Hooker,50 Coke, Montesquieu,51 DeLolme,52 Blackstone, and Burke53 as it did to the republicanism of “Milton, Sydney, and Harrington.”
More than any other political thinker of late-eighteenth-century England, Coleridge provides a unique opportunity to examine the rhetoric, ideology, and, beyond that, the political ideas of his age. His complexity as a political and moral thinker was such that John Stuart Mill believed that Coleridge and Bentham were the two keys to the intellectual life of the nineteenth century.54 Coleridge’s impact throughout the nineteenth century on figures as varied as Mill, John Sterling, Frederick Denison Maurice, Thomas Carlyle, John Henry New-man, Hurrell Froude,55 and Thomas Hill Green has yet to be adequately considered.56 His ambiguous reputation as a Tory philosopher who was “more liberal than liberals”57 underlines the central role that Coleridge certainly played in the development of definitions of “positive liberty” by later twentieth-century thinkers such as Isaiah Berlin58 and Charles Taylor.59
A “positive” conception of liberty, or the idea that freedom as moral choice was the foundation of duty and citizenship, was certainly the point of origin for all of Coleridge’s political ideas.60 He detested the corruption and abuse that he associated with the unreformed constitution and was a persistent critic of the excessive encroachment by government on the liberties of its subjects. However, Coleridge believed that the state had a positive role to play in the betterment of social conditions and, through the right institutions, such as the Common Law and the church, the moral improvement of individual citizens. In this regard he developed arguments that paralleled as much as they derived from those advanced by Kant on questions of morality and law. Coleridge emphasized that rights were a subset of duties, stressed the importance of public and private virtues, and advocated a government founded upon active and living institutions. Throughout his writings, he always returned to the central importance of voluntarism, of human agency, and of the free discourses of commerce and opinion. It is possible that in considering the political thought of Coleridge, certain of Professor Pocock’s questions and challenges may be advanced.
