Abbreviations are used throughout these notes for the titles of works by Coleridge. They are explained in the list of abbreviations and in the bibliography.
Introduction. The Politics of Reputation, or, the Myth of a Modern Apostate
1. CS, 7–8; also in W, “Modern Patriotism,” (1796), 98–100; EOT, “Men and the Times,” 1:424; EOT, “Party Worst Faction” 2:380.
2. See Southey to Charles Danvers, 15 June 1809. Southey’s response to Coleridge’s own rejection of the Jacobin label was: “It is worse than folly, for if he was not a Jacobine [sic], in the common acceptation of the name, I wonder who the Devil was. I am sure I was, am still, and ever more shall be.” New Letters of Robert Southey, ed. Kenneth Curry, 2 vols. (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1965) 1:511.
3. John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, 4th ed. (London: Longmans, Green, Reader & Dyer, 1874), 90.
4. J. G. A. Pocock, “Cambridge Paradigms and Scotch Philosophers: A Study of the Relations Between the Civic Humanist and the Civil Jurisprudential Interpretation of Eighteenth-Century Social Thought,” in Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 243.,”
5. As he considered law more than “mere statute,” Coleridge also held, by 1814, the state to be something greater than government alone. See EOT, 2:381.
6. For a discussion of providentialism in Kant’s moral philosophy and philosophy of history see J. B. Schneewind “Autonomy, Obligation, and Virtue,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), passim.
7. Coleridge uses these terms (often interchangeably) to describe the dynamic principle of historical change as it is mediated by “certain fixed principles,” certain formative ideas or structures. In this sense, Coleridge believed that there was a philosophy or science of history, a cunning of reason that would “out,” or a providence that was manifest. The science of the legislator inhered in the recognition of reason in the common law, or, as Mansfield described it, “the law was only reason made manifest.”
8. For a discussion of the legal and commercial implications of a sociological jurisprudence, see David Lieberman, “The Legal Needs of a Commercial Society: The Jurisprudence of Lord Kames,” in Wealth and Virtue, ed. Michael Ignatieff and Istvan Hont (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 203–34. Also see David Lieberman, The Province of Legislation Determined (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); for a further discussion of Kames see chaps. 7 and 8.
9. John Stuart Mill, “Coleridge,” in Mill on Bentham and Coleridge, ed. F. R. Leavis (London: Chatto and Windus, 1950; reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 167.
10. For a discussion of Coleridge’s impact on the Victorians and the nature of his conservatism, see Crane Brinton, English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (London: Benn, 1933), 74–86. Also see James Dykes Campbell, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London: MacMillan, 1894); and C. H. Wilkenson, “Some Early Editors,” in Coleridge: Studies by Several Hands, ed. Blunden and Griggs (London: Constable, 1934), 97–109.
11. Donald Greene, Samuel Johnson’s Politics, 2nd ed. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990). See 13–21 for a discussion of Johnson and Toryism. Green’s account of the Whig Samuel Johnson has quite recently been challenged by Jonathan Clark, who suggests that beyond a tendency toward Toryism, Johnson had substantial Jacobite sympathies. See J. C. D. Clark, Samuel Johnson: Literature, Religion and English Cultural Politics from the Restoration to Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and for a full account of the controversy, see Jonathan Clark and Howard Erskine-Hill, eds., Samuel Johnson in Historical Context (Basinstoke: Palgrave, 2002).
12. Brinton, English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century, 74–86.
13. Mill, Mill on Bentham and Coleridge; also see Mill, Autobiography.
14. T. H. Green, The Political Theory of T. H. Green, ed. and intro. John R. Rodman (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1964). See Rodman’s introduction for a discussion of the “Germano-Coleridgian School.” Also one of the first to consider Coleridge as a political philosopher of consequence was J. H. Muirhead, who, in addition to his 1930 study Coleridge as Philosopher (London: Allen & Unwin 1930), associated the “Germano-Coleridgian School” with the development of British Liberalism in both The Platonic Tradition in Anglo-Saxon Philosophy (London: Allen & Unwin, 1931), and his own earlier assessment of Green, The Service of the State: Four Lectures on the Political Teaching of T. H. Green (London: John Murray, 1908).
15. William Hazlitt, The Examiner, ed. Charles Lamb (1816), reprinted in J. de J. Jackson, Coleridge: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), no. 59, 205–9.
16. Hazlitt and DeQuincy contributed to a series of editorial attacks on the Lake Poets in general and Coleridge in particular under the sponsorship of Francis Jeffrey and The Edinburgh Review. Hazlitt’s lengthy attack on Coleridge appeared in the review in August 1817 (28: 488–515); see Jackson, Coleridge: The Critical Heritage, no. 75, 295–324. For a more complete discussion of Coleridge and Jeffrey, see Paul M. Zall and David Erdman, “Coleridge and Jeffrey in Controversy” Studies in Romanticism 14 (winter 1975): 75–83.
17. Affiliation or membership in a social or intellectual coterie has in one study of Coleridge’s political thought been used as a substitute for party, faction, or formal membership in a political society. See Nicolas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: the Radical Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 18–19.
18. Norman Fruman, Coleridge: The Damaged Archangel (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1972).
19. The issue of Coleridge’s plagiarism has long been the source of scholarly controversy. While the “borrowings,” so meticulously rooted out by Fruman and, most famously, by Rene Wellek in Emmanuel Kant in England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1931), challenge both the originality of Coleridge’s philosophical ideas and his intellectual integrity, Kathleen Coburn has emphasized the critical and synthetic use which Coleridge made of those from whom he “borrowed.” For a discussion of the “plagerism controversy,” see Thomas McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 1–52.
20. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz, 1961), 176 for “apostasy,” 343 for “disappointed radicalism.”
21. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1960), 12–17.
22. Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background, 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). For a more measured account see Butler’s introduction to Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 114–115, although Butler persists in calling all opposition critics and reformers “radicals.”
23. See Michael Fischer, “Marxism and English Romanticism: The Persistence of a Movement,” in Romanticism Past and Present 6, no. 1 (1982): 364–401. Also, for a Gramscian account of Coleridge, see Peter Allen, “S. T. Coleridge’s Church and State and the Idea of an Intellectual Establishment,” Journal of the History of Ideas 46 (1985): 89–106.
24. Marilyn Butler suggests that “at this time it would be a pity to read Blake as though he were single-handedly the author of his own text. The corporate author is the urban sub-class which emerged through its opposition to Britain’s national policy.” Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries, 43.
25. For a discussion of recent cultural historicist readings of Coleridge, see Raimonda Modiano, “Historicist Readings of the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner,” in Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life, ed. Nicholas Roe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 271–296; and on the problems of Marxist Historicism, see Kelvin Everest “Coleridge’s Secret Ministry: Historical Reading and Editorial Theory,” in Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life, 297–319.
26. John Cannon, Parliamentary Reform, 1640–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), passim, and especially the chapter “Reformer’s Nightmares,” 116–143.
27. H. T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977), see 7–8 and passim. Also, for a discussion of “Radical Ideology in the 1790s,” see chapter 7, 232–269.
28. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977). Also see Pocock, “The Ancient Constitution Revisited” (1986) in The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957; updated ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). See 343 and 351 for a discussion of Henry Neville as “Neo-Harringtonian” and the links between Harrington and the “good old cause.”
29. Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth Century Commonwealthsmen (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959).
30. C. B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism from Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 94–152.
31. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967).
32. Most recently in John Morrow’s Coleridge’s Political Thought: Property, Morality, and the Limits of Traditional Discourse (London: MacMillan, 1990); but perhaps first articulated in J. T. Miller’s Ideology and Enlightenment: The Political and Social Thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (New York: The Garland Press, 1988).
33. R. J. White, The Political Thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Selection (London: Jonathan Cape, 1938).
34. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bollingen Series 75, 14 vols. (London and Princeton, N.J.: Routledge and Kegan Paul and Princeton University Press); Lay Sermons, vol. 6 of the Collected Works, ed. R. J. White (1972; abbreviated LS in references).
35. Essays on His Times in The Morning Post and The Courier, ed. David V. Erdman, 3 vols. (1978; abbreviated EOT in references).
36. John Colmer, Coleridge: Critic of Society (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1959); and Coleridge, Collected Works, vol. 10, On The Constitution of the Church and State According to the Idea of Each (1976; abbreviated CS in references).
37. In addition to her prodigious work as general editor of the Collected Works, Coburn also produced and edited three sets or two volumes of The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, 4 (of 6) vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957; abbreviated CN in references). She was also responsible for the publication and editing of the Philosophical Lectures (London: Pilot Press, 1949).
38. Roberta Brinkley, Coleridge and The Seventeenth Century (Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 1955), passim, and especially “The Old Divines,” 125–392.
39. Nicholas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years, 3–4, 18–19. Roe bases his assessment of Coleridge’s “radical” youth on two less than satisfactory arguments: a narrow equation of political radicalism and rational dissent that ties Coleridge’s political views directly to his Unitarian acquaintances; and a radical membership by “association” rather than direct membership in any of the reform societies. Roe contends that as Coleridge had radical friends and associates in the years from 1794 to 1796, he undoubtedly shared their political views.
40. John Morrow, Coleridge’s Political Thought.
41. John Morrow acknowledges the extent to which Coleridge recognized the distinctions between landed and commercial property and the different social and political significance of these. However, Morrow contends that Coleridge’s institutionalism rested on the cultural and political significance of landed property. His conception of the Coleridgian principles of permanence and progression sets the “cultivating” force of landed property as a bulwark against the morally corrupting tendencies of commercial wealth. He discounts any principle of commercial civil moralism in Coleridge’s political theory, arguing instead for the persistence of civic humanism in “Church and State.” See Morrow Coleridge’s Political Thought, 157–58 and passim.
42. See Alan Ryan, Property and Political Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 1–13, for a discussion of the political significance of different theories of “property.” Ryan makes a particular distinction regarding the instrumentalist-utilitarian English tradition from Locke to Mill and the continental “self-developmental” tradition most completely articulated in Kant. These two different approaches to property as a political idea suggest different moral and legal implications for property as a political institution.
43. R. J. White, The Political Thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1.
44. Most notably in Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
45. Ibid., 141 n.; and J. G. A. Pocock, “Cambridge Paradigms and Scottish Philosophers,” 235–52, especially 249.
46. Donald Winch, “Adam Smith’s ‘enduring particular result’: A Political and Cosmopolitan Perspective,” in Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Michael Ignatieff and Istvan Hont (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 253–70. With respect to the “science of legislation,” see 256–58. Winch is not persuaded by Nicholas Phillipson’s account of “Adam Smith as Civil Moralist,” in Wealth and Virtue, op. cit., 179–202, but does consider the moral and economic discourses in Smith to be complementary rather than contradictory aspects of a broader sociological jurisprudence. See Winch, 263.
47. For a discussion of “Addisonian propriety,” moral autonomy, and civility as they related to commercial property, moral virtue, and urban society, see Nicholas Phillipson, “Adam Smith as Civil Moralist” in Wealth and Virtue, op. cit. 179–202, especially 199.
49. This is a “dynamic” as opposed to a “dualist” or static “monist” conception of reality. Kathleen Coburn has consistently emphasized the “dynamic” nature of Coleridge’s philosophy. See Coleridge, Philosophical Lectures. She argues that the Lectures support J. H. Muirhead’s early recognition of Coleridgian dynamism with reference to Coleridge’s use of Kant’s philosophy, describing Coleridge’s allegiance to the “critical way” of the Kantian theory of knowledge in spite of his rejection of its dualism in favor of a “dynamic theory.” See J. H. Muirhead, “Metaphysician or Mystic,” in Coleridge: Studies by Several Hands, ed. E. Blunden and E. L. Griggs (London: Constable, 1934).
50. For a detailed account of Coleridge’s interest in the theological and juridical aspects of Richard Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Politie see Dierdre Coleman, Coleridge and “The Friend,” 1809–1810 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1988), chap. 6, “Hooker and Burke: The Conservative Tradition,” 107–31. Also see Coleridge, TF, 2:26, 150; M, 2:1131–46.
51. It is likely that Coleridge had read Montesquieu’s L’Esprit des lois prior to and in preparation for his 1795 lectures at Bristol. His analysis of constitutional balances and the separation of powers in “The Plot Discovered” uses very similar language to F. Messeres’s 1781 translation of book 11, chap. 6.
52. Direct evidence for Coleridge’s early reading of DeLolme is inconclusive. However, he had read James Burgh’s Political Disquisitions in preparation for The Plot Discovered. Burgh borrowed and quoted freely from the most esteemed comparative constitutionalists of his day and had placed a particular emphasis on DeLolme’s English Constitution and its discussions of the constitutional significance of a free press. Thus, one may confidently speak of Coleridge as having at the very least read a representative sample of DeLolme as filtered and distilled through Burgh’s selections. See J. L. DeLolme, The Rise and Progress of the English Constitution, 2 vols., ed. A. J. Stephens (London, 1838), book 2, chap. 12.
53. Charles LeGrice recalled how Coleridge had memorized all of Burke’s speeches and would perform highlights “viva voci” when they were boys at Christ’s Hospital. See Charles Valentine LeGrice, “Recollections of Christ’s Hospital,” in Elia Essays Which have appered under their signature in the London Magazine (London: Printed for Taylor and Hessey Fleet Street, 1823). Coleridge wrote a sonnet to Burke in 1793 and described Burke as “Keen and Far-sighted” as late as 1809 (Coleridge, TF, 2: 21).
54. Mill, Mill on Bentham and Coleridge, 3.
55. Along with Newman, John Keble, Edward Pusey, and Hurrell Froude, had all been members of Oriel College Oxford. Keble preached his sermon “National Apostasy Considered” in July 1833. The Tractarians, especially Froude, were influenced by Coleridge’s arguments for establishment in CS. Froude and Newman also expanded aspects of Coleridge’s educational and cultural theories, particularly the idea of a “Clerisy.” See Newman’s The Office and Work of Universities (London: Longmans, 1856).
56. Carl Sanders’s Coleridge and the Broad Church Movement (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1942) notwithstanding. Also, for a discussion of the “liberal” dimensions of this movement, see Duncan Forbes, The Liberal Anglican Idea of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952).
57. Mill, “Coleridge,” in Mill on Bentham and Coleridge, 68–112.
58. Isaiah Berlin makes the classic distinction between positive liberty, or the “freedom to,” and negative liberty, or the “freedom from.” Berlin is dubious about the coherence of the concept of positive liberty, an idea defended more recently in the writings of Charles Taylor and John Rawls. See Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), chap. 3, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” 122–34.
59. These terms have been more recently clarified by Taylor in “Cross-Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate,” in Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed. Nancy Rosenblum (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 159–82.
60. See this volume, chapter 2.
1. Romantic Radicalism
1. David Erdman and E. P. Thompson have emphasized the role of Napoleonic imperial expansion and the failure of the Peace of Amiens as critical factors in Coleridge’s “political realignment” after 1802. See Thompson, “Disenchantment or Default? A Lay Sermon,” in Power and Consciousness, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (London: London University Press, 1969), 149–81. Lewis Patton’s introduction to his edition of The Watchman for the Bollingen series (1970) charts the “retrenchment” to the passage of the two acts of 1795. See Coleridge, W, xxxvi–xli. Joseph Cottle had accused Coleridge of a very early “defection” from radicalism in his Early Recollections, Chiefly Relating to the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London, 1837). Patton sets Cottle’s judgment against Cottle’s own late and embittered resentments toward the lake poets.
2. Marilyn Butler refers specifically to the levée en masse that in English society formed around the defence of “John Bull.” See Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background, 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford, University Press, 1981), 4.
3. Crane Brinton, The Political Ideas of the English Romanticists (London: Oxford University Press, 1926).
4. Brinton, Political Ideas, 66.
5. McFarland argued directly against the “apostasy thesis” as regards the radical years in an unpublished paper, “Coleridge and Jacobinism,” delivered at All Souls College, Oxford, November 1986.
6. J. G. A. Pocock, ed., Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 291–92.
7. Thompson, “Disenchantment or Default,” 193. Thompson, of course, locates the “apostasy” as taking place in 1802, after the Peace of Amiens.
8. Pocock also acknowledges the complexity and ambiguity of Coleridge’s (as opposed to Southey’s) appropriations of this language.
9. Jonathan Mendalow, The Romantic Tradition in British Political Thought (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 14.
10. See E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz, 1961), 363.
11. Here I mean “myths” not in the sense of lies, but in the sense of stories of any sort (whether true or false) whose evocative power earns them a place as famous commonplaces (loci communi) in the literature or folklore of a group or nation.
12. E. P. Thompson, The Making of The English Working Class, 109. An earlier articulation of the “romantic apostacy” argument came from A. Dicey according to Harold Beeley, “The Political Thought of S. T. Coleridge,” in Studies by Several Hands, ed. Edmund Blunden and E. L. Griggs (London: Constable, 1934), 151–75. This interpretation has survived so effectively as to have recently surfaced (in the form of an aside) in Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837, (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), 312–13. For a careful discussion of Thompson’s impact on later historical accounts of “romantic radicalism,” see Nigel Leask, The Politics of the Imagination in Coleridge’s Critical Thought (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1988), 12–17.
13. Meyer H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), chap. 1.
14. The implied linkage of conservative political ideology with such phenomena as decreased testosterone and male pattern baldness will invariably please some readers of Abrams more than others. One may be excused for presuming that major political ideas are predicated on more than the degree to which a political theorist is a “burned out case” who has learned that since he cannot win, he should not try.
15. For a discussion of the middle ground of the reform party and its changing relation to the antiwar faction, see J. E. Cookson, The Friends of Peace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); and, by the same author, Lord Liverpool’s Administration, 1815–1822 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1975), 40–47.
16. For instance, music, botany, mathematics. See the entry in the OED.
17. J. C. D. Clark, Our Shadowed Present: Modernism, Post-modernism, and History (London: Atlantic Books, 2003), 221–22. Also see Clark, English Society, 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice During the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 289–313. Also see the revised edition, English Society, 1660–1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge University Press, 2000), for an expanded consideration of the nature of radicalism during the revolutionary period.
18. H. T. Dickinson, British Radicalism and the French Revolution, 1789–1815 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 8.
20. Of the “British Jacobins,” Dickinson writes “these radicals made advances in organization, extended their membership further down the social scale, advanced more revolutionary aims, and developed new means of achieving their objectives” (ibid., 9). With regard to the radicalism of the petitioning movement, Frank O’-Gorman is cautious, suggesting that it had been instrumental in strengthening the cohesion of the Rockingham party. Its utility in this respect may be viewed as a sign of the movement’s appeal to mainstream Whig interests. He argues that “given the absence of political consciousness and political organization in the country at large, it would be unwise to regard the petitioning movement of 1769 as a spontaneous eruption of freeholder’s indignation.” See O’Gorman, The Rise of Party in England (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1975), 242.
21. Gunther Lottes, “Radicalism, Revolution, and Political Culture: An Anglo-French Comparison,” in The French Revolution and British Popular Politics, ed. Mark Philp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 79.
22. With reference to the “continued discourse of the preceding decade [with regard to] universal suffrage, equal representation and annual parliaments as a restoration of the constitution.” Lottes, “Radicalism, Revolution, and Political Culture,” 83.
23. For a discussion of the philosophical and transhistorical rather than contextual approach to political theory, see Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s “Two Treatises of Government” (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), 3–5. For a contemporary example of this approach as activism rather than scholarship consider Christopher Hitchens, writing in The Nation (September 1993), about a protest for which he had been imprisoned in his student days, recalling how he and his fellow-prisoner Raphael Samuel spent their jail time discussing the way in which E. P. Thompson’s lecture on Enclosure and Common Lands, which they had attended before the protest, had stirred them into action through raising their sense of connection with the great working-class radicals of the past.
24. John Dinwiddy, “Interpretations of Anti-Jacobinism,” in The French Revolution and British Popular Politics, ed. Mark Philp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 41.
25. Thomas Philip Schofield, “Conservative Political Thought in Britain in Response to the French Revolution,” The Historical Journal 29 (September 1986): 604.
27. Coleridge, On The Constitution of the Church and State: According to the Idea of Each (London, 1830). Reprinted as vol. 10 of the Bollingen series, and references to this edition are abbreviated CS in the text and notes.
28. See Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), chap. 7, 208–67, and chap. 8, 291–308. Also see Carl Cone, The English Jacobins (New York: Scribner and Sons, 1968).
29. In reference to Coleridge’s 1795 pamphlet The Plot Discovered or an Attack Against Ministerial Treason reprinted in Lects. 1795.
30. Goodwin, Friends of Liberty, introduction.
31. Coleridge’s own challenge to his critics was: “I defy my worst enemy to shew [sic], in any of my few writings, the least bias to Irreligion, Immorality, or Jacobinism.” The Friend no. 2 (8 June 1809); TF, 2: 25.
32. Coleridge quoted Milton (sonnet 12: 11–12): “License they mean when they say Liberty! For who loves that must first be wise and good.” See EOT, 2: 380n2.
33. Coleridge frequently referred to “half-truths” as the most dangerous form of lie. As early as “A Moral and Political Lecture” (1795), Coleridge used this term, but he expressed it most succinctly in his advertisement for On The Constitution of the Church and State According to the Idea of Each (1830) where he lamented “a world of power and talent wasted on the support of half truths, too often the most mischievous, because least suspected of errors.” CS, 2.
34. For a detailed consideration of the romantic phenomenology of fragmentation and decay, see Thomas McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), 1–5.
35. Coleridge, LS, 63–64.
36. Despite Coleridge’s Unitarian experiment, he retained a strong Anglican bias predicated on an Evangelical soteriology. He declined an offer of the Unitarian pulpit, described his “Confessio Fidei” as “negative Unitarianism” in a letter of 26 July 1802 (see CL, 2: no. 447; 820), and dedicated an early poem, “The Fall of Robespierre,” to Mrs. Hannah Moore. See James Dykes Campbell, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London: Macmillan, 1894), 35.
37. Coleridge’s early concern with atheism was not its denial of any particular positive creed, but as a manifestation of infidelity. In the case of Godwin, Coleridge considered this failing to suggest a “faithless” cynicism which allowed “reason” to sacrifice “feeling.” In this context, Coleridge remarked to Thelwall, “it is not atheism which has prejudiced me against Godwin, but Godwin who has prejudiced me against Atheism.” See CL, 1: no. 133. Mark Philp has argued, on the subject of Godwin’s irreligion, that Godwin’s loss of faith in 1788 was addressed to organized religion rather than the belief in God. For this reason, Philp believes that we should be wary using the term atheist with respect to Godwin’s religious belief. See Mark Philp, Godwin’s Political Justice (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), 34. Coleridge, in contrast, was troubled by Godwin’s “faithlessness.”
38. See CL, 1: no. 33 (8 February 1794) for a strong suggestion of evangelical conversion. Also, Coleridge’s writings after 1796, while critical of religious enthusiasm, suggest an awareness of the Clapham sect. Coleridge wrote to Cottle on 27 May 1814, “It is no small gratification to me, & that I have seen and conversed with Mrs. H. More—she is indisputably the first literary female, I ever met—in part no doubt because she is a Christian” (CL, 3: no. 933).
39. John Morrow, Coleridge’s Political Thought: Property, Morality, and the Limits of Traditional Discourse (London: MacMillan, 1990), 2–7.
40. The Monthly Magazine 48 (1819): 204.
41. Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Also, compare Coleridge’s warning against “half-truths” and insistence on “the critical way,” to Strauss’s observation that “we know that there cannot be the simply true substantive view, but only a simply true formal view; that formal view consists in the insight that every comprehensive view is relative to a specific perspective, or that all comprehensive views are mutually exclusive and none can be simply true.” From “What is Liberal Education?” in Liberalism Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 8.
42. William Hazlitt, Joseph Cottle, and Robert Southey have done the most to advance this view. Hazlitt was Coleridge’s most vicious and competitive critic, Cottle a bad poet and neglected publisher, and Southey a bitterly disappointed friend. See Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1989), 366–70. Also see J. R. de J. Jackson, ed., Coleridge: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970).
43. Robert Southey to Charles Danvers, 15 June 1809, New Letters of Robert Southey, ed. Kenneth Curry (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1965), 1: 511.
44. Lewis Patton, introduction to Lectures, 1795: On Politics and Religion, by Coleridge, vol. 1 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bollingen Series 75 (London and Princeton, N.J.: Routledge and Kegan Paul and Princeton University Press, 1971), xxxii (Lects. 1795).
45. Coleridge to Sir George Beaumont, 1 October 1803, CL, 2: no. 522; 999.
46. Coleridge and Southey wrote The Fall of Robespierre together. It contained a dedication to Hannah More (which is suggestive of the moderate and evangelical ambitions of this dramatic poem) and was published (Cambridge, 1794) by Benjamin Flower.
47. Coleridge to George Coleridge, 6 November 1794, CL, 1: no. 69; 125; italics mine.
49. Coleridge presumably knew that whereas the antireform Peace Party hated the war because they felt it drove down the economy to a point where the rabble might cry out for French-style reforms, he himself hated it because it allowed Pitt to use the claim of “national emergency” to institute broad-reaching, unconstitutional powers in the same manner that he believed Robespierre had. In this case, Coleridge’s antiwar stance and that of the antireformers were, although they shared the same ends, constructed from quite different assumptions about the danger the war presented to the constitution.
50. See Isaac Kramnick, “On Anarchism in the Real World: William Godwin and Radical England,” American Political Science Review 66 (1972): 114–28.
51. Perez Zagorin, The Country and the Court (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969); Zagorin, “Two Cultures? Rhetoric of Court and Country in the Early Seventeenth Century,” in Origins of the English Civil War, ed. Conrad Russell (London: MacMillan, 1973); J. R. Jones, The First Whigs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961); Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968); J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977).
52. John Morrow, Coleridge’s Political Thought, 12.
54. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event (5th ed., 1790; reprint, ed. and intro. Conor Cruise O’Brien, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), 37.
56. This is not the case with political theorists, however; Noel O’Sullivan devotes a chapter to Coleridge in Conservatism (London: JM Dent, 1976).
57. John Sterling, John Stuart Mill, Frederick Denison Maurice, and Thomas Carlyle all regarded Coleridge as an original and disturbing talent, as I suggest in the introduction.
58. Donald Greene’s study of Samuel Johnson’s politics, for instance, takes another famous “Tory” and shows him to have held principles which were essentially “Whiggish” but mediated by a mistrust of party politics and an inherent skepticism about the motives of “patriots” and innovators. See Greene, Samuel Johnson’s Politics, 2nd ed. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990). The resemblances between Coleridge and Johnson as writers of similarly skeptical temperaments, have been explored by Lawrence Lipking in his review of the final volume of Rene Wellek’s History of Criticism. It is as least certain that those political writers who liked to think of themselves as inveterate critics were often bad partisans in political battle: they tended to take apart the clichés and cant of politics rather than spread them as gospel.
59. John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, 4th ed. (London: Longmans, Green, Reader & Dyer, 1874), 71.
60. Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), xliv.
61. Dierdre Coleman argues that Coleridge was drawn to Kant’s thought because “he saw, mirrored there, his own dualistic conception of man.” See Coleman, Coleridge and “The Friend,” 1809–1810 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1986), 137; G. N. G. Orsini, Coleridge and German Idealism (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), 57–171 passim, esp. 137.
62. Coleridge called them “Plotinists rather than platonists.” See STC, Philosophical Lectures, ed. K. Coburn (London: Pilot Press, 1949), 317. Orsini observes that Coleridge read and took notes from Cudworth in 1796. Cudworth held a doctrine of a priori but rejected innate ideas, observing in The True Intellectual System of the Universe: The First Part: Wherein All the Reasons and Philosophy of Atheism is Confuted; and its Impossibility Demonstrated (London, 1678), 2d ed., 2 vols. (London: Thomas Birch, 1743), that “our human mind hath other cognitions or conceptions in it, the ideas of intelligible natures and essences of things, which are universals, and by and under which it understands singulars.” Orsini, Coleridge and German Idealism, 64–65.
63. R. F. Brinkley argues that Coleridge considered most of the essential principles of Kantian logic to have existed in English seventeenth-century philosophy. With particular regard to the idea of synthetic unity and trichotomy, she details Coleridge’s debt to Lord Bacon’s Novum Organum and Richard Baxter’s Methodus Theologiae. See Roberta Brinkley, ed., Coleridge on the Seventeenth Century (Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 1955), 109–21.
64. Hints Towards the Formation of a More Comprehensive Theory of Life was written by Coleridge in 1816, largely dictated to J. H. Green. It was not published until after Coleridge’s death in 1834.
65. See Norman Fruman, The Damaged Archangel (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1972).
66. For example: from Locke conceptions of natural law, from Hartley the doctrine of association, and from Godwin the centrality of right reason, duty, and conscience. Deirdre Coleman ascribes Coleridge’s preoccupation with duty to the influence of Kant’s The Metaphysic of Morals. However, an earlier source is Godwin’s Political Justice.
67. Here and throughout the chapter, when I have referred to Coleridge’s own technical use of the terms “Idea” and “Conception,” I have capitalized these terms. This typographical convenience will serve to alert the reader that in those cases where the terms are capitalized, the words are used in that sentence in their peculiar meaning in Coleridge’s own unusual philosophical lexicon, as opposed to their general meaning in twentieth-century philosophical or political thought.
68. “The moral world” is a term to which Coleridge frequently returns, but which first appears in “Lecture Six on Revealed Religion” delivered at Bristol in 1795. Coleridge used the term “realworld” to describe the ideal world of Platonic forms, as opposed to the “moral world” of contingencies and relative value.
69. Also argued in Biographia Literaria (BL), Church and State, and Logic (L).
70. Coleridge’s own distinction between the school of Aristotle or materialism and the school of Plato and the idealists may be viewed as a gross simplification of the many discourses of a “dialectical” history of philosophy. However, it was his contention that all men belonged (ultimately) to one or the other of these two fundamental schools. He considered himself to be a Platonist, Locke and the “adherents of the mechano-corpuscular fallacy” to be Aristotelian, materialists. See CL, vol. 2, letters to Wedgewood on Locke.
71. Aids to Reflection, ed. Derwent Coleridge (1825, reprint, London: E. Moxton, 1854), also ed. J. B. Beers, Bollingen Series 9 (London and Princeton, N.J.: Routledge and Kegan Paul and Princeton University Press, 2003); and The Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (London: George Bell and Sons, York Street, Covent Garden 1848), 88. Coleridge in his psychology of faculty appears to have drawn freely from Kant’s categories of time and space. Coleridge’s “constitutive” theory of ideas bore striking similarities to the Kantian categories of time and space. In both theories, the categories were assumed to be transcendent as categories in the ideal realm, but conceived of as imminent in their particular execution in the material realm. The constitutive power of the idea was objectively but contingently real. This Coleridgian vocabulary of perception versus abstract thinking was made more sophisticated by Coleridge’s encounter with Kant but was in truth born earlier of Coleridge’s first encounters with Cambridge-Platonist theories such as “plastic nature.”
73. Archibald Foord, His Majesty’s Opposition, 1714–1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964). See the chapter “Parties and Creeds in the Age of Fox and Grey, 1782–1830” for Foord’s most complete discussion of the imergance of an oppostitional dynamic in politics, 439–51.
75. Thomas McFarland argues for the pervasiveness of a language of fragmentation in Romanticism and The Forms of Ruin, 5.
77. White remarked that “if we dismiss Coleridge’s metaphysics, we shall understand neither the origin nor the true nature of his political ideas.” R. J. White, The Political Thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Selection (London: Jonathan Cape, 1938), 11.
78. Muirhead describes Coleridge’s idea of the state in Augustinian terms: “Coleridge regarded all actual constitutions, including that of his own country as temporary and imperfect embodiments of an ‘idea’ that was slowly revealing itself on earth, if not as a city of God, at any rate as a society of seekers after him.” John Muirhead, Coleridge as Philosopher (London: Allen & Unwin 1930), 194.
79. Although, Jerome Christensen and Raimonda Modiano agree with Michael Fischer’s contention that “when Coleridge chooses metaphysics over politics, he is not choosing between evasion and power, but between two kinds of power,” in Fischer, “Coleridge and Politics,” Studies in Romanticism 21, no. 3 (1981): 457–60.
2. Attacking the State
1. Coleridge continued to develop this theme after 1795, as his favorable reference in 1799 to Hume’s arguments against the “Euthenasia of the Constitution” demonstrates (EOT, 1:26).
2. See E. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, Victor Gollancz, 1961), 234, for a further account.
3. Viz the assassination plots against Charles II (1683) and William III (1696). In France, Damiens’s attempt on the life of Louis XV was politically significant beyond its immediate dangers.
4. For example, William III at the Boyne in 1690, or George II at Dettingen in 1743.
5. For general “high” estimates of the loathing for the king among the populace in 1795 and 1796, see studies such as: Malcolm Ian Thomis and Peter Holt, Threats of Revolution in Britain, 1789–1848. (London: Macmillan, 1977); and Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class. Also, c.f., Ian Christie, Stress and Stability in Late-Eighteenth-Century Britain: Reflections on the British Avoidance of Revolution (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1985).
6. See Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979). Also see Edmund Burke’s Letter to a Noble Lord (London, 1796), which was a venomous indictment of fashionable democratic fervor among nobles.
7. Treasonable and Seditious Practises Act (1795), S.L. xi. 561, 36 Geo. 3, c. 7.
8. Seditious Meetings Act (1795), S.L. xi. 564, 36 Geo. III, c. 8.
10. Earl of Lauderdale, Speech to the House of Lords, 17 November 1795, Parliamentary Register, Lords, vol. 43, 222.
11. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Speech to the House of Commons, 17 November 1795, Parliamentary Register, Commons, vol. 43, 224.
13. For a discussion of Pitt’s wars, both domestic and foreign, against Jacobinism, see Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty; Holland Rose, Life of William Pitt, (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1923); and John Ehrman, The Younger Pitt: The Reluctant Transition, vol. 2 of The Younger Pitt (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1983). John Derry takes the coalition with the Portland Whigs as evidence of genuine concern by government for matters of domestic security. See Derry, Politics in the Age of Fox, Pitt, and Liverpool: Continuity and Transformation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 87, 94–96.
19. Bolingbroke, The Craftsman The Craftsman, nos. 1–511, 5 December 1726–17 April 1736 (London: R. Franklin, 1731–1737); but most particularly James Burgh’s Political Disquisitions (London: Dilly, 1774) and its discussion of legislative corruption.
20. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, book 1, chap. 7, paraphrasing Montesquieu, Esprit des Lois, 11:6: “Were the judicial power joined with the legislative, the life, liberty and property of the subject would be in the hands of arbitrary judges, whose decisions would then be regulated only by their opinions, and not by any fundamental principles of law.” See also William Paley, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (London: R. Faulder, 1785), book 7, chap. 8.
24. The “Ancient Constitution” had traditionally been traced back to (freely mythologized) Saxon times; arguments based on it tended to say that the constitution was perfect in primitive times but had been corrupted by the “Norman Yoke” after 1066 and only restored partially in 1688. In contrast, the “Revolution Principles” were, it was freely admitted, to be newly founded in the “Balanced Constitution” of king, Lords, and Commons after 1688. The Country Party opposition used the myth of the ancient constitution to claim what they argued were the rights of freeborn Englishmen as preserved by the Common Law and the history of constitutional practice and amendment born in the days of King Alfred. Sir Robert Walpole and the Whig establishment scornfully responded that the ancient constitution was a font of oppression rather than liberty. Walpole’s polemicists borrowed arguments that absolutist royalist Tory scholars in the reign of King Charles had used to discredit Whig images of “ancient liberty”; they argued that there was no real liberty under the feudal law, in which the king was the font of all law and all justice through “his” Parliament and “his” courts. Only the 1688 settlement, the 1689 Bill of Rights, and the 1701 Act of Settlement had created a truly “free” Britain where the Parliament and the courts were not merely dogsbodies deputized to enact the king’s Norman prerogative.
29. Except in the case of Scotland, which sent fifteen “representative peers” to represent the entire nobility of Scotland.
31. Ibid., 308–9. Coleridge also cited the pamphlet The State of Representation of England and Wales, delivered to the Society, the Friends of the People, associated for the purpose of obtaining a Parliamentary Reform, on Saturday the 9th of February 1793 (London, 1793), which reported that “162 return 306 out of 513 Members.” Also cited in Lects 1795, 273n3. See also R. G. Thorne, ed., The House of Commons, 1790–1820, 5 vols., History of Parliament Series (London: Secker & Warburg, 1986).
36. See Thomas Paine’s letter to the Marquis de Lafayette, 9 February 1792, as printed before the preface of part 2 of The Rights of Man: “The only point upon which I could ever discover that we differed was not as to principles of Government, but as to time. For my own part, I think it equally as injurious to good principles to permit them to linger, as to push them on too fast. That which you suppose accomplishable in fourteen or fifteen years, I may believe practicable in a much shorter period.” Paine, The Rights of Man, 1791–1792; reprint, ed. and intro. Eric Foner (London: Pengiun Books, 1975), 151.
38. Coleridge was increasingly interested in the interdependency of rights and duties. While he considered both to be essential, neither was to be taken singularly as alienable from the other. See W, 122.
43. Pitt’s speech of 12 Jun 1781, see Parliamentary Register, Commons, vol. 20, 564; Lects. 1795, 64.
44. Coleridge commented that “the great and good Dr. Jebb foresaw his [Pitt’s] Apostacy.” Lects. 1795, 64–65.
56. J. L. De Lolme, The Constitution of England; or an account of the English Governemnt, ed. William Hughes (London, 1771, 1834).
3. Defending the Constitution
1. Coleridge refers here to Thelwall; Lects. 1795, 297.
2. See Lects. 1795, Conciones ad Populum, “Introductory Address,” 33.
3. Coleridge would later expand on this in works on logic, specifically addressing the vacuity of Hartleyan association in BL, 1: chaps. 6 and 7. For a contemporary insight, see CN, 1:22.
4. See BL, 1:173 on imagination and fancy. Also see Logic: “the happiest illustration of the act of the intuitive imagination and its close connection with its product … I have seen in the ephemerae and other minute and half-transparent insects who exceeding velocity of motion actually present to our eyes a symbol of what Plotinus meant when … he says her [Nature] contemplative act is creative and one with the product of her contemplation.” L, 74.
6. Coleridge derived the concept of “plastic nature” from his reading of Ralph Cudworth’s The True Intellectual System of the Universe: The First Part: Wherein All the Reasons and Philosophy of Atheism is Confuted; and its Impossibility Demonstrated (London, 1678); 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London: Thomas Birch, 1743). In addition to his interest in Newton and More, Coleridge’s Platonism had been nurtured through his Greek studies at Cambridge. He uses the image of plasticity in his 1797 poem “The Aeolian Harp.” For a complete discussion, see most recently Ian Wylie, Young Coleridge and the Philosophers of Nature (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1989).
7. J. A. W. Gunn, Beyond Liberty and Property: The Process of Self-Recognition in Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (Kingston, Ont.: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1983), 271.
8. General Evening Post 5655 (9–11 June 1770), as cited in J. A. W. Gunn, Beyond Liberty and Property, 278.
11. Ibid., 312. Later, in The Friend (1809), Coleridge compared the flow of public opinion in society (“our intellectual commerce”) to the flow of water in the River Thames. Both opinion and the river must follow a reasonable course and not be allowed to recklessly overflow its banks and endanger life, but neither must be dammed off entirely out of fear of such overflow. To build a dam of gagging laws across the river of information and opinion, Coleridge asserted, would be “to render its navigation dangerous or partial.” To “render the press ineffectual” would make “the law odious,” by using as “materials the very banks [of reasonable regulation] that were intended to deepen [opinion’s] channels and guard against its inundations” (TF, 66).
14. Here the phrase “quasi-independently” must be stressed and emphasized. The great constitutional struggles of the seventeenth century had modified rather than destroyed the medieval theory of the king as font of all law and all justice. The major changes were limits rather than abrogations of royal influence. The Crown, as of 1795, still had the right to summon, dismiss, and prorogue Parliament at will—although tradition since 1689 went against such an act—and the king still legally possessed an indisputable veto over legislation, which had not been used since Queen Anne’s time. The Crown also retained the right to appoint judges to what were still theoretically the “royal” common law courts, although after 1689 it had to appoint them for a term of good behavior rather than as long as they pleased the Crown by their decisions. The Crown also had a constitutionally impeccable right to suspend habeas corpus in emergencies, thus circumventing the typical operation of the laws. See Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist Papers, ed. Charles Rossiter, intro. Charles R. Kessler (New York: Signet, 2003), no. 69.
20. David Lieberman, The Province of Legislation Determined: Legal Theory in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 55.
21. See Lieberman, The Province of Legislation Determined, 125, citing Blackstone, “City of London and the Dissenters,” as reported in Philip Furneaux, Letters to the Hon. Mr. Justice Blackstone, concerning his Exposition of the Act of Toleration … in his Celebrated Commentaries of the Laws of England, 2d ed. (London, 1771), 278; my italics. David Lieberman points out the presence of universalizing Natural Law arguments in Blackstone’s Commentaries, despite Blackstone’s explicit commitment to a particular historical analysis of the Common Law as based on custom rather than morals. Lieberman suggests that Sir Edward Coke’s defence of the right of Common Law courts to overturn unreasonable statute, as argued in Bonham’s case, posed some theoretical difficulties for Blackstone. Blackstone’s own belief in the supremacy of Parliament to make law was at odds with Coke’s implication that Common Law courts (guided by intuitions of reason and natural justice) served as a font for judicial review. Yet, as Lieberman has observed, “Blackstone when faced with the challenge of an unreasonable act of parliament reverted to his concept of sovereignty, rather than his natural law precepts.” In this regard, while Blackstone placed the ultimate magisterial power within the workings of a balanced constitution, he considered that the judiciary and the jury had significant capacity to both “find” and “make” law.
22. Coleridge was familiar with the presumptions of this pro–Common Law parliamentarian tradition through his readings of James Burgh’s Political Disquisitions in preparation for the composition of The Plot.
23. Blackstone had presented a famous paradox to his readers involving the sovereignty of Parliament. Blackstone had claimed that in order for the “sovereignty” of Parliament to be meaningful, it had to be undeniable and irresistible by lesser authorities; that courts and citizens and colonies could not be allowed to pick and choose which laws they thought it would please them to obey and which they would rather ignore. This absolute sovereignty raised the moral question of what would happen if Parliament became palpably unjust and began passing laws that everyone agreed were Caligulan in nature.
26. Coleridge’s association of the social and political power of the jury with opinion was one that he developed more completely in The Friend (1809). He believed by then, fourteen years after writing The Plot, that the difficult distinction between vulgar and popular opinion, between liberty of the press and seditious libel, was to be found in the spirit of rational freedom. This spirit he likened to the “universal menstrum sought for by the old alchemists.” This spirit of rational freedom “diffused and bec[a]me national in consequent influence and control of public opinion, and in its most precious organ, the Jury” (TF, 66).
27. Coleridge would expand on this later, in a work on logic, specifically addressing the vacuity of Hartleyan association in BL, vol. 1, chaps. 6 and 7. For a contemporary insight see CN, 1:22.
28. Coleridge emphasized this form of conspiracy again in The Friend (no. 5, 14 September 1809): “Shame fall on that Man, who shall labour to confound what reason and nature have put asunder.… Shame fall on him, and a participation of the infamy of those, who misled an English Jury to the murder of Algernon Sydney!” (TF, 67).
29. Lects. 1795, 116. Coleridge was defending the Mosaic dispensation, but his question was unintentionally applicable to the radical-reform platform.
30. Ibid., 175; my italics.
35. This distinction and its implication for the Natural Law foundations of Common Law is discussed by David Lieberman, The Province of Legislation Determined, 38. Lieberman considers Thomas Wood’s invocation of Coke’s dictum that “nothing that is contrary to Reason is consonant to Law” in Coke, Institutes of the Laws of England (n.p., 1720 ed.), 4.
36. J. L. DeLolme, The Rise and Progress of the English Constitution, ed. A. J. Stephens (London, 1838) see esp. vol. 2, chaps. 3 and 4, 820–835. The evidence for DeLolme’s influence on Coleridge is inconclusive but extremely suggestive. Coleridge never directly mentioned DeLolme by name in any surviving papers or writings, but obviously Coleridge was deeply grounded in the study of European constitutionalist thought in general, and those treatises on the British constitution in particular. DeLolme’s work was widely excerpted and quoted in the reviews and magazines of Coleridge’s youth, and the Swiss theorist was among the commonly read authors that a young man beginning a study of the British polity might have been expected to know. Lewis Patton has not only suggested that Coleridge had read the famous work of DeLolme by the mid-1790s but surmises that Coleridge referred to DeLolme in his praise of the unnamed “Constitutionalists … not without their use” in the Moral and Political Lecture of 1795 (Patton also includes Adam Ferguson and Burke in this; Lects. 1795, 8–9n). DeLolme’s distinction between unwritten law and common law considered separately the historical weight of precedence and the active process of deciding. Decisions, as they were made by judges and juries, created new law.
De Lolme identified the Common Law as a principle governing the “law of descent, different methods of acquiring property, various forms of rendering contract valid” (The Rise and Progress of the English Constitution, 634–636). He believed that in England these agreements had been settled by custom and practice from “time immemorial” and that they were held not to be superseded by the imposition of Roman law in the high Middle Ages. Whether these conventions actually reached back to the laws of Alfred was less important to seventeenth-century common lawyers and eighteenth-century “constitutionalists” than that the conventions had been established, refined, and maintained though the continuity of their practice over time.
37. “The strength and obligation and the formal Nature of a Law, is not upon account that the Danes, or the Saxons, or the Normans brought it in with them, but [that] they became Laws, and binding in this kingdom by virtue of their being received and approved here.” Gerald Postema quotes and discusses Hale’s idea of historical continuity thus: “the principles of Common Law are not themselves validated by reason; but they are the products of a process of reasoning fashioned by the exercise of the special, professional, intellectual skills of the Common lawyers over time[,] refining and coordinating the social habits of a people into a coherent body of rules.” Gerald Postema, Bentham and the Common Law Tradition (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1986), 7, and chap. 1, passim. Common Law judges, such as Coke, attempted to push decisions past the literal terms of particular statute when the law seemed to violate the unwritten law and the principles of the Common Law, which were reflected in statutes taken as a whole.
39. John Morrow argues that Coleridge’s moral view of reform did not distinguish him from the more atheistic radical reformers like Godwin, Paine, and Thewall. While these writers did emphasize the need for education and enlightenment, I would still argue that their more active intentions must be contrasted with Coleridge’s almost obsessive voluntarism, and this among other things does significantly distinguish their views from his. See Morrow, Coleridge’s Political Thought, chaps. 1 and 2.
40. Lects. 1795, “A Moral and Political Lecture,” 9. It is not at all certain, however, to whom Coleridge referred in his use of this invective. The Bollingen editor has hypothesized that it might have been DeLolme, Blackstone, and others like them, but Coleridge himself did not say. Given the balance of Coleridge’s arguments in the essay, a more likely suggestion would be those party flacks and parliamentary adventurers who “trimmed” for the purposes of political self-advancement.
41. Mark Goldie emphasizes the “radical” origins of the True Whig ideology in “The Roots of True Whiggism, 1688–94,” History of Political Thought 1, no. 195 (1980): 195–236. J. G. A. Pocock, however, points to the utility, for out-of-power Tories from 1689 onwards, of True Whig arguments against standing armies, public credit, and executive centralization and privilege. Pocock is also concerned with the ambiguity of late-eighteenth-century transformations and applications of these ideas, most notably in the survival of the “common-law mind” in Edmund Burke’s prescriptivism. See Pocock, “The Ancient Constitution Revisited,” in The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957; updated ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) Disquisitions from the Bristol Library. See George Whalley, “The Bristol Library Borrowings of Southey and Coleridge, 1793–8,” The Library, 5th ser., 5 (September 1949): 114–31.
44. Thelwall’s republicanism, or Paine’s, suggested a more plebeian than patrician res publica; one that valued the contribution of the artisan over the aristocrat. Isaac Kramnick sites a fundamental shift in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century conceptions of work and leisure as contributing to the changing republican ideal. Coleridge entertained a more Aristotelian view of these things. See Isaac Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late-Eighteenth-Century England and America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 2, and on Paine chap. 5, passim.
45. The “Whig” Horace Walpole, after all, had hung in his home two great icons of English liberty: the Magna Carta and the death warrant of King Charles I, and one would be mad to suggest that Walpole ever wanted to see the reign of King George ended by the guillotine or that he would have freely given up Strawberry Hill to be used as a part of an agrarian reform scheme to give land to the landless. The “Tory” James Boswell sent Pasquale de Paoli a case of books that included the works of Harrington and other Commonwealthsmen, but in the 1790s also contributed money to a monument to the slain Louis XVI. Boswell’s father Lord Auchinleck boasted to Samuel Johnson that the execution of Charles I in 1649 had “made kings gar [recognize that] they had a lith [a joint] in their necks,” yet was a loyal and indefatigable servant of the Georgian state until his death and a loyal “Hanoverian” Whig.
48. Ibid., 310; my italics.
49. Ibid., 311. Coleridge was likely referring to George Canning, the distinguished Whig hopeful who disappointed his friends and served under Pitt. Canning had won the chancellor’s prize for Latin verse in 1789.
51. Ibid., 261; my italics.
52. Ibid. Coleridge draws from Burgh, Political Disquisitions (London: Dilly, 1774), 3:440–41 (var.), quoting Bolingbroke’s Remarks on the History of England.
53. This is reminiscent of Burke’s pragmatism, as described in Halevy in The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism (London: Faber & Faber, 1934, 1972), 157–58.
4. Liberty and Law
1. This association has been made most recently in Nicholas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1988).
2. Mark Philp points out that Godwin changed his views on forced redistribution, violence, revolution, and so on in the 1796 edition of Political Justice. Defending property rights as a means of preserving the liberty of private judgments required Godwin to reconstruct the redistributive significance of Political Justice, book 4, chap. 8. See Philp, Godwin’s Political Justice (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), 82, 137.
3. Not all advocates of equality argued for state intervention and a political redistribution of land or wealth. But those more “Jacobin” reformers associated (erroneously) with Gracchus Babeuf did argue for the need for redistribution through state reform rather than market forces. For a discussion of Thomas Paine’s use of a redistributive taxation or “ground rent” to the community in Agrarian Justice, see Gregory Claeys, Thomas Paine’s Social and Political Thought (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 197–203. Thomas Spence may be considered the most “aggressive” redistributionist of the British Jacobins. See “Pig’s Meat,” “The Real Rights of Man,” and “The End of Oppression” in The Political Works of Thomas Spence, ed. H. T. Dickinson (Newcastle upon Tyne: Avero, 1982).
4. Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), xliv–l. Berlin identifies Coleridge, in particular, as an exemplar of the “positive” theorists who associate freedom with the “positive” activities of institutional forms of life, growth, and so on.
5. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974), 164. Robert Nozick has argued that liberty is secured most effectively by the recognition of individual entitlements with regard to property, a possessive, individualist theory of justice. Nozick’s theory may be considered representative of a late form of the argument that runs from Locke through Mill to Nozick himself. Nozick’s is largely a “negative” vision of liberty: a freedom from the encroachment of the “nanny” state intervening in the guise of a higher community welfare.
6. John Rawls, in contrast, has considered justice and ultimately liberty to be most effectively secured by equity and fairness, by a distributive egalitarian theory of justice. Rawlsian theory is the late form of the argument from Paine to Marx to Rawls himself. Rawls’s is generally a “positive” vision of liberty: an assertion of the state’s benevolent role as advancer of the goals of equality and community. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971).
7. Coleridge had read Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality in preparation for his political lectures of 1795. Dierdre Coleman has discussed Kant and Rousseau’s influence on Coleridge in some detail in Coleridge and “The Friend,” 1809–1810 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1988). See 146–54 for a discussion of reason, freedom, and The Social Contract. For a further discussion of the political significance of property in Kant and Rousseau see Alan Ryan, Property and Political Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), chaps. 2 and 3.
8. See Alan Ryan’s discussion of “Kant and Possession” in Property and Political Theory, 74–90.
9. The alignment of rights and duties was an idea which can be traced back to Godwin’s Political Justice and was explored by Coleridge in the lectures of 1795.
10. See Emile Durkheim, Montesquieu and Rousseau: Forerunners of Sociology, trans. Ralph Manheim (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), 26.
11. Beginning with Elie Halevy’s The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism (London: Faber & Faber, 1934, 1972), 158; and Crane Brinton’s English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (London: London: Benn, 1933), 74–86, this theme has resurfaced with such frequency as to become a commonplace of romantic historiography. See also G. N. G. Orsini, Coleridge and German Idealism (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969); Raimonda Modiano, “Historicist Readings of the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner,” in Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life, ed. Nicholas Roe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) 271–296; Thomas McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1969); Rene Wellek, Immanual Kant in England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1931); Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1989); Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background, 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); and, most recently, Nigel Leask, The Politics of Imagination in Coleridge’s Critical Thought (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1988); and Coleman, Coleridge and “The Friend.”
12. Coleridge explores this in his own work on logic. His first critic was Alice Snyder, who noted a pervasive polarity of logic in her studies of Coleridge’s Logic. See in particular Snyder, ed. S.T. Coleridge’s Treatise on Method (London: Constable, 1934); and Snyder, The Critical Principle of the Resolution of Opposites as Employed by Coleridge, Contributions to Rhetorical Theory, no. 9 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1918; reprint, Folcroft, Penn.: Folcroft Press, 1970). The most recent consideration of Coleridge’s attempt to reduce all knowledge to one system through a “logosphilosophy” may be found in Mary Anne Perkins, Coleridge’s Philosophy: The Logos as Unifying Principle (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1994).
13. For a discussion of the evolution of rights with respect to changing ideas of faculties, capacities, uses, and possessions, see Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 16–17.
14. While most political thinkers of the eighteenth century addressed the conflict between private rights and public duties, they tended to privilege one “side” or the other of the individual/community rights divide. For Godwin, the emphasis was placed on duties, for Paine on rights, but for Coleridge it was a right/duty bond that he articulated in terms of the language of self-duties/other-duties or, as Mill would later have it, self-regarding and other-regarding rights. It is significant, however, that Coleridge prefers the language of duty to the language of rights. In this regard, his philosophical debt to Godwin was enduring.
15. See Norman Fruman, Damaged Archangel (London; George Allen and Unwin, 1972) for a complete discussion of Coleridge’s plagiarism and alleged deceptions. Fruman argues for the possibility that Coleridge was “cunning and deceitful, at times treacherous, vain and ambitious of literary reputation, dishonest in his personal relations, an exploiter of those who loved him, a liar.” These claims have been countered by Thomas McFarland in Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 4–27.
16. John Stuart Mill, Mill on Bentham and Coleridge, ed. F. R. Leavis (London: Chatto and Wyndis, 1950; reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 77; my italics.
17. Mill rejected the image of Coleridge as a Tory. Sardonically, Mill asked if “any Tories” had “ever attend[ed] [Coleridge’s] Thursday evening sessions,” suggesting that they would have found as many offensive ideas as congenial ones in his speeches; see John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, 4th ed. (London: Longmans, Green, Reader & Dyer, 1874). He reinforced this conjecture in his essay “On Coleridge,” asserting that Coleridge’s “far reaching remarks and tone of general feeling [was] sufficient to make a Tory’s hair stand on end” (Mill on Bentham and Coleridge, 77).
18. Mill, Mill on Bentham and Coleridge, 167: “We do not pretend to have given any sufficient account of Coleridge: but we hope we may have proved to some, not previously aware of it, that there is something both in him, and in the school to which he belongs, not unworthy of their better knowledge. We may have done something to show that a Tory philosopher cannot be wholly a Tory, but must often be a better Liberal than Liberals themselves; while he is in the natural means of rescuing from oblivion truths which Tories have forgotten and which the prevailing schools of Liberalism never knew.”
19. This, of course, is not immediate proof of his not being a radical. Godwin, who was a true radical, also despised groups because he thought they were coercive. Like Godwin, Coleridge considered party affiliation of any kind to be coercive. For Coleridge’s most complete discussion of the problem see, The Friend, essay 5, “On the Errors of Party Spirit or Extremes Meet.” TF, 1:205–22.
20. This is another opinion he shared with Godwin, who also took a dim view of party associations and clubs.
21. Coleridge’s conception of the a priori conditions of the “good will” is again a somewhat Kantian one, in this sense the “moral law” is the law inside the subject that governs conscience. However, the idea that the will is the preeminent part of man’s humanity, and that the will is more than reason or conscience alone, is a more Coleridgian twist to this idea. Conscience and reason, through duty, allow us to live more or less in accordance to the moral law.
22. God’s will and man’s will operate with similar imperatives with respect to questions of freedom and dominium. See a discussion of Jean Gerson on rights theory and theology in Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) 26–31.
23. Coleridge made this distinction clearly in an editorial in The Courier of 29 September 1814, which deprecated “Party Confedericies in any form … [and] all ‘Swearings-in,’ all initiatory pledges and mysteries of membership, as factious and disloyal.” His 1832 manuscript notes expands on this theme: “the assertion of Rights unqualified by and without any reference to Duties, a vague Lust for Power for & counterfeit[ing] the love of Liberty” (EOT, 2:380). Quoting Milton in a poem he continued, “Licence they mean, when they cry Liberty!” (Sonnet 12, line 11).
24. The Plot Discovered or an Attack Against Ministerial Treason first appeared in December of 1795 and is collected in Lects. 1795.
27. “Introductory Address,” in Lects. 1795, 43; my italics.
28. Godwin differed from Hartley, who conceived of benevolence as a principle that was extended through associations of thought and habits of action.
29. Referring to Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and Its Influence Concerning General Virtue and Happieness, 2 vols. (London, 1793), 1:207: “He that begins with an appeal to the people may be suspected to understand little of the true character of the mind.… Human affairs through every link in the chain of necessity are harmonized and admirably adapted to each other. As the people in the last step in the progress of truth, they need least preparation to induce them to assert it.” Coleridge wrote a note: “Political wisdom sewn by the broadcast not dibble.” CN, 1:116.
30. For a discussion of Coleridge’s reliance on Hartley, see Patton’s introduction to Lects. 1795, lix–lxiii. Also, on the weakness of imitable perfections in human beings, see Coleridge’s tacit criticism, in lecture 3, of Hartley’s Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations, 2 vols (London, 1749), 2:169. “How could mean and illiterate persons excel the greatest geniuses, ancient and modern, in drawing a character?” (Lects. 1795, 162). For Smith’s account of association and faculty psychology, see Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (London, 1759), facsimile edition, ed. A. L. Macfie and D. D. Raphael (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).
31. In fact, Godwin was not a great advocate of private societies. Like Coleridge, he considered them destructive of “right reason, conscience and duty.” See Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 3:247. Also see Don Locke, A Fantasy of Reason: The Life and Thought of William Godwin (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), 2–11.
32. Coleridge paraphrasing Godwin, Political Justice, 1:207: “Human affairs through every link in the chain of necessity, are harmonized and admirably adapted to each other. As the people form the last step in the progress of truth, they need least preparation to induce them to assert it.” See Coleridge’s comment cited in note 29, above.
34. J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure, and Political Practice During the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 30.
35. Typically, social thought of the period held that a “pure-thinking” polity would be polluted by religious and political deviants, who were as dangerous to the souls of a nation’s citizens as a plague carrier was to their bodies. The state, advocates of censorship argued, had a compelling interest to quarantine or obliterate carriers of infectious ideas. Indeed, the state was put in danger to such a degree by erratic or heterodox ideas that it was in the state’s interest to seek out such deviants and silence them in order to restore unity of thought and thereby return domestic tranquillity.
5. Morality and Will
1. Coleridge’s dependence on Schelling during this period was striking. Natural philosophy, or the science of nature, was an integrative aesthetic whole for both philosophers. Moral value was assumed to be consonant with this aesthetic and was to be understood in organic terms. The spiritual or religious impulse in man was a manifestation of this natural aesthetic but was not a matter of specific doctrinal religions. See Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, ed. Derwent Coleridge (1825; reprint, London: E. Moxton, 1854), also ed. J. B. Beers, Bollingen Series 9 (London and Princeton, N.J.: Routledge and Kegan Paul and Princeton University Press, 2003), 1–4.
4. Coleridge seems to have had first hand knowledge of Epicurus, having brought home from Malta a list of papyri excavated and unrolled at Herculaneum (now University of Toronto, VCL S MS F 14.15); see CN, 2:410; CS, 82 n. From the papyri at Herculaneum, Johann Conrad Orelli had published fragments of Epicurus, De natura, from books 2 and 11 at Leipzig in 1818 (TT, 1:203.). However, Coleridge relied more heavily upon the writings of Lucretius for his account of the atomistic philosophy of the Epicurean system, while his broader use of “Epicureanism” in lecture 6 of Philosophical Lectures, ed. K. Coburn (London: Pilot Press, 1949), he took from Tenneman.
5. This language of “excommunication” is in itself significant, since it returns us once again to Coleridge’s strong and persistent use of Anglican and Evangelical imagery in his works.
6. Aids to Reflection, 89–90.
7. See James E. Crimmins, Secular Utilitarianism (Oxford: The Claredon Press, 1990), 271: “Bentham was both a moral atheist, who sought to disprove the utility of an immortal soul and in an afterlife of rewards and punishments, and an ontological atheist, who denied the existence of God and of a life beyond the world of material reality.”
8. Aids to Reflection, 90; also see note 1, above.
9. Attention should be drawn to the Kantian flavor of Coleridge’s language in the preceding passages. Deirdre Coleman has argued persuasively for Coleridge’s dependence on Kant, specifically the Metaphysic of Morals, as have G. N. E. Orsini and Rene Wellek. See Dierdre Coleman, Coleridge and “The Friend,” 1809–1810 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1988), 140–43; G. N. G. Orsini, Coleridge and German Idealism (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969); and Rene Wellek, Immanuel Kant in England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971). Wellek argues against the originality of Coleridge’s idealism and contends that Coleridge had plagiarized large portions of Kant, Fichte, Lessing, and Schelling. This theme is expanded by Norman Fruman in Coleridge: The Damaged Archangel (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1972), and discredited by a series of articles by Thomas McFarland.
10. Coleridge considered the “disciples of Locke” to be the animalizing Epicureans of his age. He meant Bentham, Malthus, Ricardo and the new Utilitarian school of political economy. See CL, 2:701, February 1801 to Josiah Wedgewood: “When the fundamental principles of the new Epicuren school were taught by Mr. Locke, and all the doctrines of religion and morality, forced into juxta-position [sic] & apparent combination with them …” See also the Locke letters to Wedgewood for Coleridge’s most complete discussion of Locke’s legacy, CL, 2: nos. 381–85.
11. Lects. 1795, 225; my italics.
12. Aids to Reflection, 90.
14. This seems backwards, as if Coleridge or his printer got the sequence reversed. It seems more likely that Coleridge meant to say that (1) a conscious will was provable by common sense—Descartes’s Cogito, in effect—and that (2) one might through reason deduce a moral law of conscience to govern it. However, I have cited the sentence as it appears in the source.
15. Aids to Reflection, 91.
16. Coleridge added that they were called the “pious” deists “in order to distinguish them from the Infidels [atheists] of the present age, who persuade themselves, (for the thing itself is not possible) that they reject all faith.”
17. Aids to Reflection, 92.
18. It is irrelevant here whether Coleridge was an Unitarian, since that denomination continued to be a professedly “Christian” church, based on professedly “Christian” ideas of the necessity of God’s grace and the validity of personal repentance for sin, long after its schism from the Trinitarian churches. Even though it rejected the Athanasian definition of the Godhead, early-nineteenth-century Unitarianism retained a “Christian” soteriology despite its severance from the Trinitarian mainstream of the Dissenting and Anglican Churches from which it was born.
19. Sir John Walsh, Bart. M.P., Popular Opinions on Parliamentary Reform, 4th ed. (London: James Ridgeway, 1831). Original marginal notes by Coleridge on Walsh, Popular Opinions, 9.
20. For instance, the right to petition the Crown for redress of grievance was matched by the Crown’s publicly acknowledged duty to listen to such petitions. There was, in contrast, no “right” to speak to the king at any hour of the day one pleased, because the Crown had never publicly acknowledged such a “right.” Note that the existence or nonexistence of a “right” for such advocates had less to do with the savoriness of the action than its legal pairing with a duty,
There were many things that were “good to do,” or “good not to have done to one,” that were not encoded in “rights.” The line which separated “good things to have happen or not happen to one” (or “wicked and virtuous deeds”) from “rights” per se was that “rights” always, without exception, existed in dyadic pairings with corresponding duties. One representative rights-duties dyad was the coupling of the right not to be assaulted with the duty not to assault, a duty backed up by the long arm of the law and its “remedies.”
21. For instance, A’s informal and one-time grant to B of a free passage across his property could not be redefined by B as a perpetual “right” of travel across those lands whenever he pleased unless there was a statute or set of cases that suggested that the one-time grant conferred such extended rights.
22. The phrase appeared in William Windham’s speech to the Commons in a debate on the Game Laws on 4 March 1796; see W, 122.
23. There were, however, more careful critics of the concept of rights at either end of the rhetorical spectrum. Godwin had argued for duty, Burke for custom, and Bentham for the positive law.
25. Ibid.; my italics. The full quotation without elision reads, “Can anything appear more equitable than the last proposition, the equality of Rights and Duties?”
26. W, no. 111, 17 March 1796, 122. Coleridge concluded his harangue with a personal barb against Windham. “This Wyndham is a professed imitator of Mr. Burke, whom he resembles as nearly as a stream of melted lead resembles the lava from Mount Vesuvius.” Coleridge’s early admiration for the conservative Whig Burke was not obscured by party affiliation: nor, it would seem, was his contempt for the reformer William Windham. Coleridge’s assessments of politicians tended to be individual rather than ideological, even in that most partisan year of 1796.
27. One exempts utilitarianism as representing a communitarian theory of hedonism; in the cited principle, the greatest good of the greatest number. Note that Coleridge’s vision of the “pursuit of happiness” is atomistic as long as it does not impinge on the rights of the agent himself and of others to be free from harm.
28. TF, essay no. 9, 12 October 1809, 2:130–31.
29. The idea of independent and autonomous spheres of action around each citizen is, of course, anathema to communitarian political thinkers, who have traditionally argued that both action and inaction have palpable effects on the community; there is, for them, no such thing as “minding one’s own business,” since the common good is the business of all.
30. Coleridge conceived of “the state” as incorporating all the institutional functionaries of social and political life. It was in this sense larger than “government,” which pertained to those law creating institutions of Crown, Lords, and Commons. See CS, ch.1.
31. See William Lamont, Godly Rule (London: MacMillan, 1969).
32. TF, essay no. 9, 12 October 1809, 2:130–31.
34. Perhaps a swipe at La Mettrie, author of the extreme materialist book L’homme machine (Man [is] a machine).
36. See Coleridge and Robert Southey, The Fall of Robespierre, book 1 (Cambridge: Banjamin Flower, 1794); also Lects. 1795, 35.
37. On Godwin’s “disinterest” and emotional naivete, see Coleridge to John Thelwall, 13 May 1796, CL, no. 127, 1:215.
38. Coleridge to Robert Southey, 21 October 1794, CL, no. 65, 1:114; Coleridge’s italics.
39. Volney had stated that “the science of government is the science of oppression.” Coleridge used this passage frequently when denouncing the rigidity of abstract French principle in politics. See Lects. 1795, 183; EOT 3:211.
6. Science and Nature
1. E. P. Thompson and David Erdman argue that the significant break in Coleridge’s ideas, his conservative retrenchment, dates from the Morning Post articles, which attacked Napoleon, British isolation, and the peace of Amiens. See David V. Erdman, “Coleridge as Editorial Writer,” in Power and Consciousness, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien and William Dean Vanech (London: University of London Press, 1969), 183–201; and E.P. Thompson, “Disenchantment or Default? A Lay Sermon,” op. cit., 149–81.
2. Hints Towards the Formation of a More Comprehensive Theory of Life was dictated by Coleridge to Dr. James Gilman from 1816. It is likely that this short work was largely completed that year, however it was not published until after the deaths of both Coleridge and Gilman. It was first printed in London with an introduction by a Dr. Seth Watson M.D., by John Churchill Ltd., 1868. Watson’s own prefatory remarks include the observation that “while C considered the ‘unity of human nature’ to include the body and the soul, that ‘Life pertained only to the body.’ But C continued ‘Life’ was not restricted to the body but was a term also applicable to the irreducible basis chemistry and the various forms of crystals” (8). Coleridge’s own remarks suggested that he viewed “Life” as a physical but generative and active force. It was a “power” which acted in three different capacities: “in magnetism it acts as a line,” “in electricity as a surface,” and in “chemistry as a solid” (20). Coleridge’s intention was to more completely define the principles that had been touched upon by Hunter and Abernathy and that contested a narrowly atomistic or corporeal view of the life of the body and, correspondingly, the life of nature.
3. This is not to say that other readers of the time were not capable of critical and independent readings; this was obviously the case. It is simply to suggest that Coleridge read critically to an even greater degree than was common in his era, because he made a fetish of his “independence” from factions, parties, and schools of thought.
4. For a detailed account of Coleridge’s scientific preoccupations, see Levere, “Coleridge, Chemistry, and the Philosophy of Nature”; and Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature. Also see Wylie, Young Coleridge and the Philosophers of Nature.
5. Coleridge had an earlier interest in medicine dating back to his “blue-coat” days at Christ’s Hospital. During his school years he would often slip away to watch anatomy dissections at Guy’s Hospital in London. His brother Luke was a surgeon and would allow Coleridge to accompany him on his hospital rounds in 1788. During this time Coleridge read “all the surgical and medical books he could procure.” See James Dykes Campbell, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London: MacMillan, 1894), 12.
6. Coleridge was particularly indebted to Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) for his conception of “foresight.” Charles DePaolo discusses Coleridge’s theory of history and “futuricity,” or a history of higher purpose directed to some providential and apocalyptic vision in Coleridge: Historian of Ideas (Victoria, B.C.: English Literary Studies, 1992), 20–27.
7. Coleridge to John Thelwall, 13 May 1796, CL, no. 127, 1:212–14.
8. Marginal notes to William Godwin’s Thoughts Occasioned by a Perusal of Dr Parr’s Spital Sermon (London, 1801). Coleridge’s notes likely date from 1802 and are annotations in preparation for Robert Southey’s review; see M, 2:848. Also, see previous note.
9. Godwin had argued that “the safety of the world can no otherwise be maintained, but by a constant and powerful check upon this principle [of unlimited population]. This idea demands at once [the reconsideration of] many maxims which have been long and unsusceptibly received into the vulgar code of morality, such as, that it is the duty of princes to watch for the multiplication of their subjects, and that a man or woman, who passes the term of life in a condition of celibacy, is to be considered as having failed to discharge one of the principle obligations they owe to the community. On the contrary it now appears to be rather the [case that a] man [who] rears a numerous family, that has in some degree transgressed the consideration he owes to public welfare” (Godwin, Thoughts Occasioned, 62).
10. Thomas Malthus, An Essay On the Principle of Population and a View of its Past and Present Effects On Human Happiness (London: J. Johnson, 1803). Coleridge’s marginal note is in the British Library, C.44.g.2 and reprinted in M, 3:11.
12. To William Godwin, 29 March 1811, CL, no. 819, 3:315.
13. Kathleen Coburn observed, in her editions of the notebooks, that “of Adam Smith Coleridge never had a good word to say” (CN, 3:4267n). However, Coleridge’s persistent attack on Smith and “Scotch Philosophers” was largely a way of rebuking political economy and its prudential moral calculus. There is much of Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiments to be found in Coleridge’s account of commercial society and the value of “progression.”
14. For a discussion of “practical moralism” and the idea of propriety, see Nicholas Phillipson, “Adam Smith as Civic Moralist,” in Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1983), 179–202. Coleridge rejected Paley’s “prudentialism” but was always looking for the “kernel to the shell” in moral philosophy or, as he framed it, “Legality precedes Morality.”
15. Coleridge frequently identified this phrase with the philosophy of Locke and his eighteenth-century followers.
16. Coleridge to James Gooden, 14 January 1820, CL, no. 1223, 5:13.
17. The most complete characterization of Coleridge’s philosophical synthesis may be G. N. G. Orsini’s who emphasizes Coleridge’s debt to Kant and the neo-Platonists in Coleridge and German Idealism (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), 266–68 and passim.
18. Coleridge to James Gooden, 14 January 1820.
19. Ibid., and CN, 2:2784.
20. It is often forgotten that Jonathan Swift had made a stern and satirical use of the term “sweetness and light” in the comparison of the spider and the bee in the relatively obscure Battle of the Books before Matthew Arnold’s better-known borrowing (and maudlin abuse) of the term in Arnold’s far more influential Culture and Anarchy. Culture and Anarchy was directly influenced by Coleridge as well as by “Coleridgeans” such as F. D. Maurice.
21. Coleridge’s acquaintance with the Kantian system, it should be stressed, was not slapdash or secondhand. He had read most of Kant’s major works in the original German. Coleridge argued from the time of his first contacts with Kant that Kant’s philosophy, taken as a whole, was virtually a complete system. He began his studies with the Groundwork, moving on afterwards to the Critiques. He recalled himself as having “enquired after the more popular works of Kant” and then “read them with delight.” He “then read the prefaces to several of his systematic works, as the Prolegomena & c.” He continued to be impressed: “here too [in these prefaces] every part, I understood, & that nearly the whole, was replete with sound and plain tho’ bold and novel truths to me.” He described his method of approaching Kant as “follow[ing] Socrates[‘s] Adage respecting Heraclitus—All I understand [of Heraclitus’s philosophy] is excellent; and I am bound to presume the rest is at least worth the trouble of trying whether it be not equally so.” While he was able to recommend Kant almost without qualification to a friend, he added that he did not extend this carte blanche to lesser authors. He “by no means recommend[ed] … an extension of [James Gooden’s] philosophical researches beyond Kant” (Coleridge to James Gooden, 14 January 1820; my italics).
22. Deirdre Coleman, Coleridge and “The Friend,” 1809–1810 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1988), 132–63.
23. See the introduction to this volume.
24. One cannot help wondering if Coleridge’s suggestion that Kant’s writings might provide his friend Gooden with a simple and comprehensive introduction to a doctrine of life was some sort of elaborate practical joke. Kant is still celebrated for his comprehensive address of most important questions, but he has never had a reputation as an easy road into philosophy. One longs to discover the degree of frustration and perplexity into which Gooden may have been plunged by his friend’s advice to read all of Kant.
25. It is again useful to remind oneself of Coleridge’s distinction between Ideas and concepts. Ideas were pure forms and structured reason; concepts existed in the understanding and were sensible renderings of Ideas rather than the things themselves. See CS, 12–13.
26. Coleridge to James Gooden, 14 January 1820, 13; my italics.
29. This is similar to Kant’s argument that the ding an sich could not be directly experienced as noumena.
30. The psychological implications of Kantian metaphysics are discussed at length by Gary Hatfield in “Empirical, Rational, and Transcendental Psychology: Psychology as Science and as Philosophy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 200–227. See also J. Michael Young, “Functions of Thought and the Synthesis of Intuitions,” in Guyer, op. cit., 101–22.
31. Coleridge does acknowledge that Platonism is inherent in some of Aristotle’s own writings. Where teleology, poetics, and ethics are considered in light of some ultimate good, Coleridge was sympathetic. But he rejected uses of Aristotle’s philosophy that over-emphasized man’s animal nature in a manner that was narrowly materialistic or Epicurean. See Coleridge, Philosophical Lectures, ed. K. Coburn (London: Pilot Press, 1949) 176–78.
32. See Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and The Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), for an excellent discussion of how natural philosophers such as Hobbes decried the rise of experimental science among Boyle and the Royal Society men.
33. In general, the entirety of Leibniz’s published correspondence with Samuel Clarke, which critiqued Newtonian philosophy, is one of the best and most reasonable discussions of this problem in the sciences.
35. Henry Crabb Robinson, Reminiscences and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, ed. Thomas Stadler, 3 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1869), 1:163; my italics. Robinson’s additional comments on Locke, though not germane to the central argument of this chapter, are of interest. He noted that Coleridge “praised[Bishop] Stillingfleet as Locke’s opponent[; ] he ascribed Locke’s popularity to [Locke’s] political character[,] being the advocate of the new [Williamite/Hanoverian dynasty] against the old [Stuart] dynasty, to his religious character as a Christian [believer in Jesus as the Messiah/Savior], though but an Arian—for both parties, the Christian against the skeptics and the liberally-minded [Arians and Socinians] against the orthodox [Trinitarians], were glad to raise his reputation.…” Stillingfleet had, of course, entered into a lengthy debate with Locke on certain subjects broached in Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding. Much of Stillingfleet’s ire was directed at the fact that Locke’s materialism seemed to undermine arguments for the existence of the Holy Trinity. One might consider him in the long scientific realist tradition from Hobbes to Leibnitz to Coleridge.
37. Coleridge’s sympathies for Berkeley stemmed from his defense of the Existence and, in this regard, his extreme idealism. Coleridge was less impressed with reductive phenomenalism as a metaphysical system.
38. Robinson, Reminiscences and Correspondence, 1:163.
39. Coleridge, in describing the “Idea” in Church and State, wrote, “that which, contemplated objectively (i.e. as existing externally to the mind), we call a LAW; the same contemplated subjectively (i.e. as existing in a subject or mind), is an idea. Hence Plato often names ideas laws; and Lord Bacon, the British Plato, describes the Laws of the material universe as the Ideas in nature. Quod in natura naturata LEX, in natura naturante IDEA dicitur” (CS, 5) The reference to Bacon is: “These are the true marks of the Creator on his creation, as they are impressed and defined in matter, by true and exquisite lines” (Novum Organum, 1:124. Quoted in the original Latin by Hartley Nelson Coleridge: “that which in created nature is called a law, in creative nature is called an idea.” Natura naturata denotes the world of phenomena, of materialized form, apprehended, according to Coleridge, by the understanding; naturata naturans denotes nature as the essence, the creative idea of the world, grasped only by reason. For Coleridge’s discussion of Plato and Bacon, see TF, 2:467–68; also see Alice D. Snyder, ed. S.T. Coleridge’s Treatise on Method (London: Constable, 1934), 37–51. As early as June 1803, Coleridge planned to show that the “Verulamian Logic” was “bona fide” to the same degree as the Platonic. See Coleridge to William Godwin, 4 June 1803, CL, no. 504, 2:947; and Alice D. Snyder, Coleridge On Logic and Learning (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1929; reprint, Folcroft, Penn.: Folcroft Library Editions, 1973), 65–66.
7. History and Life
1. Coleridge to C. A. Tulk, 12 January 1818, CL, no. 804, 4:1096. Coleridge attempted to distil this “philosophy” in his own Theory of Life, which he had substantially written or dictated by November 1816. In it he engaged with the dispute between William Lawrence and John Abernathy (see CL, 1186). In 1814 Abernathy had published An Enquiry into the Probability and Rationality of Mr. Hunter’s Theory of Life. This interpretation of the writings of John Hunter was attacked by Lawrence in his course of lectures at the Royal College of Surgeons in 1815 and published as An Introduction to Comparative Anatomy and Physiology in the following year. For a complete discussion of the controversy see Alice D. Snyder, Coleridge On Logic and Learning: With Selections from the Unpublished Manuscripts (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1929; reprint, Folcroft, Penn.: Folcroft Library Editions, 1973), 16–25, 31–32. Kathleen Coburn has considered Coleridge’s preoccupation with his “Theory of Life” in her edition of The Philosophical Lectures (1949). See lecture 12 and two “Monologues” that Coleridge dictated to his philosophical class in 1822, published posthumously in Fraser’s Magazine in November and December 1835. See also J. H. Muirhead, Coleridge as Philosopher (London: Allen & Unwin, 1930), 118–36; and Craig W. Miller, “Coleridge’s Concept of Nature,” Journal of the History of Ideas 25, no. 1 (January–March 1964): 77–96.
2. Coleridge to J. H. Green, 25 May 1820, CL, no. 1235, 5:47.
3. Coleridge criticized the “political economists” (LS, 211), the “doctrine of utility” (TF, 1:425), and the “catechistic Bentham” (EOT, 3:261) with consistent vitriol. Whether he did justice to Bentham’s actual ideas is less significant than the extent to which Coleridge considered the “mechanists, utilitarians, Benthamites, and modern Jacobins” as carriers of a common disease: like Malthus they were the purveyors of a “dreadful popular sophism” (M, 6).
4. Coleridge to Green, 5:47.
5. Trevor Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature: S.T. Coleridge and Early-Nineteenth-Century Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Levere’s primary interest is on the significance of the medicophilosophical writings for Coleridge’s theories of chemistry.
6. Coleridge to John Hookham Frere, 6 June 1826, CL, no. 1532, 6:583.
7. Coleridge to Edward Coleridge, 15 July 1825, CL, no. 1476, 5:; my italics.
8. Coleridge to Green, 5:47.
9. Coleridge to Frere, 6:583.
11. Coleridge to John Hookham Frere, 6 June 1826, CL, no. 1532, 6:583.
12. Marginal note in the preface of Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, or, A View of its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness (London: J. Johnson, 1803), vii.
13. Marginal note in ibid.
14. Marginal note in ibid., 6.
15. Marginal note in ibid., 11.
17. I here employ the term “authentic” in the sense in which it has been used in twentieth-century existentialist ethics.
19. Coleridge to Green, 5:47.
22. Edward Smith Stanley, later thirteenth Earl of Derby, M.P. for Lancashire, argued that the bill would interfere with the natural law of labor supply. It passed as An Act for the Regulation of Cotton Mills, 59 Geo. III, c. 66, in 1819.
23. Coleridge to Henry Crabb Robinson, 3 May 1818.
24. Coleridge to Henry Crabb Robinson, 3 May 1818. “Remarks on the Objections which have been urged Against the Principles of Sir Robert Peel’s Bill,” in Two Addresses on Sir Robert Peel’s Bill (London: April 1818; reprinted for private circulation, ed. and intro. Edmund Gosse (Hampstead: T. J. Wise, 1913), 17. Also, Coleridge to Henry Crabb Robinson, 3 May 1818.
27. When Coleridge described France, he referred of course not to the restored Bourbon monarchy and its aristocratic Catholic and ultraroyaliste revanchism. He referred rather to the darkest and most bloody of the years of the French Revolution and to the principles of the Jacobins and the mechanistic philosophes. Given the atmosphere of renewed British repression of “Jacobin” and “radical” activity in the United Kingdom in the years 1817 through 1819, this insult was doubly affronting to the factory owners. It was no great pleasure for a manufacturer to be lumped in with the Jacobins at any time; it must have been doubly humiliating in 1818.
28. “Remarks on the Objections,” 19.
29. One of the traits which separates Coleridge’s liberalism from Mill’s is the latter’s higher intolerance for self-inflicted harm. Coleridge suggested that the state might intervene to prevent self-damage.
30. “Remarks on the Objections,” 19.
31. Ibid. Note that Coleridge’s espousal of contra bonus mores reasoning in law, because it licensed the government to define what is in the best interest of public morals, seems to contradict his typical timidity about allowing the government any power to intrude into individual beliefs that affect no one else. The principle that he cites could have been used as handily, perhaps more handily, to justify either censorship of the sort exercised in 1795 or strict laws demanding adherence to the Anglican Church.
33. “Remarks on the Objections,” 25; my italics.
8. Defending the Church
1. The Gordon Riots of 1780 were an anti-Catholic agitation. See I. R. Christie, Wars and Revolutions: Britain, 1760–1815 (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 40. Coleridge would have been more directly familiar with more recent Church and King Riots at Birmingham in 1791.
2. Examples from the 1780s and 1790s include Samuel Horsley and George Horne, but the most eloquent defense of the powers and prerogatives of the Church would come from the Tractarian debates of the 1830s, Keble’s 1833 “Sermon on National Apostasy” being the most influential. Also see Jonathan Clark, English Society, 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure, and Political Practice During the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); rev. ed.. English Society, 1660–1832: Religion, Ideology, and Politics During the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 382.
3. John Wade’s The Black Book: or Corruption Unmasked (1820) was critically important in exposing the corrupt distribution of livings in the Anglican Church during the eighteenth century.
4. Coleridge returned with great regularity and attention to Hooker’s Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie (1593). For a complete discussion, see Dierdre Coleman on Coleridge’s use of Hooker, Burke, and “the Conservative Tradition” in Coleridge and “The Friend,” 1809–1810 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1988), 108–17. With regard to Coleridge’s use of “the old divines,” notably Robert Leighton, upon whom Coleridge based his Aids to Reflection, see Roberta Brinkley, ed., Coleridge on the Seventeenth Century (Durham N. C.: Duke University Press, 1955), 125–375 passim.
5. For a complete discussion, see G. V. Bennett, “Conflict in the Church,” in Essays in Modern Church History, ed. G. V. Bennett and J. D. Walsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 155–74. Also see Roger Thomas, “Comprehension and Indulgence” in From Uniformity to Unity, 1662–1962, ed. Geoffrey F. Nuttal and Owen Chadwick (London: SPCK, 1962), 189–254.
6. Benjamin Hoadly, attempting to secure church loyalty to the Crown and block Jacobin resistance in his 1715 sermon “On the Kingdom of Christ,” had, according to John Hunt, virtually delivered the church “bound and Gagged” to the state. Ironically, the attempt of the High Churchmen to censure, discipline, and silence Hoadly led to the infamous “Bangorian Controversy,” a dispute so loud that it had caused George I to suspend the Convocation. Thus, in an attempt to flex the muscle of the church’s Parliament, the High Church party accidentally led to the amputation of its legislative arm, the Convocation. For a detailed account of the Hoadly controversy, see John Hunt, Religious Thought in England, vol. 3 (London: Strahan and Co., 1873), 30–47.
7. Coleridge’s admiration for Richard Watson, Bishop of Llandaff, as an exemplar of this “Low Church” party, can be traced back to 1796. He contemplated an arrangement of Watson’s arguments in An Apology for the Bible; in a series of letters addressed to T. Paine, Author of the Age of Reason, Part the Second, being an investigation of true and fabulous theology (1796) in facing columns against Paine’s own. See Coleridge to Rev. John Edwards, 20 March 1796, CL, no. 112, 1:193.
8. The use of the terms high-clerical and Puritan as synonyms may seem jarring. But, after all, the great Scottish Presbyterian theologian Andrew Melville had as great a concept of the powers of churchmen over kings as did the Anglican William Laud. What mattered was that both papists and Puritans in Hooker’s time claimed a “higher power” than the state, an authority which would allow them as churchmen to obey or disobey the Crown and Parliament as they felt God wanted them to do rather than as the monarch demanded.
9. See A. W. Evans, Warburton and the Warburtonians (London: Oxford University Press, 1932; reprint, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972) for a discussion of a group of thinkers whose relationship to Warburton was more truly that of disciples.
10. John Colmer, in his introduction to the Bollingen edition of Church and State, assesses Coleridge’s view of Warburtonian alliance thus: “It epitomized the spirit of bland eighteenth century equipoise and enabled the Church to retain its popularity as a compromise between the two extremes of Popery and Puritanism. So mechanical and utilitarian a concept of the constitutional balance made little appeal to Coleridge” (CS, xxxiv).
11. The Right Rev. George Horne considered himself a Tory, wrote a sermon on the “Christian King,” and “ascended the ladder of Oxford patronage” to become Chaplain in Ordinary to George III and, under Pitt’s patronage, Bishop of Norwich. See James J. Sack, From Jacobite to Conservative: Reaction and Orthodoxy in Britain, c. 1760–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 115–17. Also see George Horne, The Works of George Horne: To which are prefixed Memoirs of his Life, Studies and Writings by William Jones, ed. William Jones (London, 1809).
12. Samuel Horsley, Bishop of Rochester, spoke out in favor of abolition, defending it against charges of Jacobinism. See Horsley, Speeches in Parliament of Samuel Horsley, Late Bishop of St. Asaph (London: C. J. & G. Rivington, 1830), 196–97. James Sack identifies Horsley as one of a group of “High Churchmen” who actively worked for abolition and the “reformation of principles” that Wilberforce’s antivice campaign championed. Horsley’s career, like Coleridge’s, is suggestive of the broadness and the political and doctrinal complexity of the High Church party in the late eighteenth century. Horsley, who was attacked by his enemies as the Laud of the eighteenth century, preached for the comprehension of Calvinists and Arminians. See Horsley, The Theological Works of Samuel Horsley (London: Rees, Orme, Brown, Green & Longman, 1830), 6:124–25.
13. For example, Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968).
14. Notably James Bradley, “Whigs and Non-Conformists: ‘Slumbering Radicalism’ in English Politics, 1739–89,” Eighteenth Century Studies 9 (1975): 1–27; and Robert Hole, Puplits, Politics, and Public Order in England, 1760–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
15. See Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 544.
16. In chapter 9 of Church and State, Coleridge refers to the state as the “NATION dynamically considered … (in power according to the spirit, i.e. as an ideal, but not the less actual and abiding, unity)” (CS, 77).
17. See Claire Cross, “The Church in England, 1646–1660,” in The Interregnum: The Quest for Settlement 1646–1660, ed. G. E. Aylmer (London: MacMillan, 1982), 99–120.
18. See Coleridge, “The Idea of The Christian Church,” in CS, 113–28. N.B.: “The Christian Church is not a KINGDOM, REALM, (royaume), or STATE, (sensu latiori) of the WORLD” (114). This vision of a Christian church whose doctrinal kingdom is not of this world may owe something to Hoadly’s thoughts on the same topic in the 1710s.
19. For a discussion of the liberal dimensions of Coleridge’s conception of a national church and its subsequent impact on Arnold, Hare, Carlyle and F. D. Maurice, see C. R. Sanders, Coleridge and the Broad Church Movement (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1942), 56–71.
20. Ovid, Epistulae ex Ponto, 2.2.6.
21. John Morrow, in Coleridge’s Political Thought: Property, Morality, and the Limits of Traditional Discourse (London: MacMillan, 1990), 64–65, has recently argued both for traditions of civic humanism and country-party ideology in Coleridge’s political thought, particularly in the period from 1799 through 1802. He points out “that Coleridge had read Toland’s edition of Harrington’s Works which included The Art of Law Giving, but [that] there is nothing of this period to indicate Coleridge’s response to Harrington’s defense of national churches.” Also see Morrow, Coleridge’s Political Thought, 67–72.
22. Coleridge’s account of progress must be distinguished from the Florentine civic-humanist model as advanced by Hans Barone and others in its account of the moral consequences of commercial freedom.
23. Coleridge did not give much thought to the exceptions to this rule in drained fens and polders, which in a sense were newly “created” lands. At any rate, except in the Netherlands, such “new” lands were inconsequential in comparison to the fixed sum of extant dry land. He also appears to have ignored colonialism and empire building as a means of expanding the available land on which a nation could establish permanence, although he could hardly have failed to consider this in regard to Ireland and the Irish peers after the Union of 1801.
24. An image that William Hogarth had used to criticize the nascent stock market during the Bubble crisis. Despite the fact that a farmer could be as easily wiped out and forced to sell his land by a series of bad harvests as a merchant could be bankrupted by a series of sunken ships, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century society held on to its prejudice which viewed land as “stable” and commerce as “volatile,” in the face of much evidence to the contrary.
25. Compare this to economic models that stressed the complete and total replacement of “feudal” economies and values by “bourgeois” economies and values. On balance, Coleridge’s theory better accounts for what Arno Mayer and others have described as the “Persistence of the Old Regime” in nineteenth-century Europe than does Marx’s.
26. While Miller states the case in the extreme, Morrow is more measured in his account of “the country Coleridge.” Arguing that “Country Party language retained a lasting place in Coleridge’s political theory,” he concludes that Coleridge argued in Church and State that there was an inevitable tendency “for the spirit of commercialism to infiltrate and erode the paternalistic and aristocratic ethos associated with landed property,” and that “Coleridge was impressed mainly by the political benefits of commerce; he did not accept claims about its wider moral significance” (Coleridge’s Political Thought, 157).
27. Isaac Kramnick identified this yearning for the good old days of agricultural and aristocratic hegemony in the works of Lord Bolingbroke and the first Tory party and its Country allies. See Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle. To Kramnick’s credit, he noted that Bolingbroke and other Country Party thinkers admired trade on an “Elizabethan” model of ships and goods but were most suspicious of the new economy of stocks and credit and debt that had sprung up in King William III’s reign.
29. Bolingbroke’s philo-Elizabethanism is dealt with admirably in Kramnick’s Bolingbroke and his Circle. Bolingbroke contended that the Elizabethan commercial classes had kept to producing solid, visible manufactured goods, engaged in “blue-water” trading instead of engaging in stocks and speculation, and—best of all—had refrained from the social climbing and estate buying which were the sport of the eighteenth-century “moneyed men.”
31. See, among others, Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Lawrence Stone, “Social Mobility in England 1500–1700,” Past and Present 33 (1966): 45–48; E. P. Thompson, “Eighteenth-Century Society: Class Struggle Without Class,” Social History 3 (1978): 133–65; and Thompson, “Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture,” Journal of Social History 7 (1974): 382–485.
34. See Ross J. S. Hoffman and Paul Levack, eds., Burke’s Politics: Selected Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke on Reform, Revolution, and War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949; reprint, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), 526.
40. It is perhaps not too speculative to suggest that Coleridge’s choice of words here may have meant to dig at Burke’s defense of aristocratic “prejudice” and “prescription” in his writings.
41. J. G. A. Pocock, “The Varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform,” in Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1985), 292: “A Tory in the post-Burkean sense might be one who sternly maintained that an established clergy was needed to preserve both moral and cultural discipline, but he would have to believe in the conjunction of the clergy with the landed aristocracy and gentry in order to qualify as a conservative. If he did not, he might remain a Tory, but would tend to become a radical.”
42. “What solemn humbug this modern Political Economy is!” (9 March 1833, TT, 1:348). “I have attentively read not only Sir James Steurt & Adam Smith; but Malthus and Riccardo—and found (i.e. I believe myself to have found) a multitude of sophisms but not a single just and important result which might [not] far more conveniently be deduced from the simplest principles of morality and commonsense.” Coleridge to J. T. Coleridge, 8 May 1825, CL, 5:442. Coleridge was particularly critical of Malthus and Ricardo and drafted a note against Ricardo; see CN, 4:5330.
43. For a detailed account of the association of commerce, culture, and freedom, see Nicholas Phillipson, “Adam Smith as Civic Moralist,” in Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 196.
45. Reed Browning, Political and Constitutional Ideas of The Court Whigs, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982).
46. Donald Winch, “The Burke-Smith Problem and Late-Eighteenth-Century Political and Economic Thought,” Historical Journal 28, no. 1 (1985): 231–47.
47. Lects. 1795, 289. For a discussion of Coleridge’s view of the “sudden breezes” of public opinion, see chapter one of this volume.
49. Kevin Sharpe describes a growing concern as to the uncertainty produced by juridical innovation in late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century England. See “History, English Law, and the Renaissance,” in Politics and Ideas in Early Stuart England (London: Pinter Publishers Ltd., 1989), 174–181, esp. 179 for a discussion of the importance of feudal tenure for English law.
50. For a discussion of Hale’s view with respect to the Common Law, convention, and compliance, see the chapter “Law, Social Union, and Collective Rationality,” in Gerald Postema, Bentham and the Common Law Tradition (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1986), 77–80.
51. Coleridge had admitted in a notebook entry of May 1810 that Common Law rights connected to property were of greater authority than statute. They existed as a foundation for law—“an undoubted principle of the common-law of England which I most cheerfully admit to be of far higher authority than any particular Statute can be, and so constitutional” (CN, 3: no. 3836 18.240). This follows on a note with regard to Locke’s extrapolation of a natural right to property through the conjoinment of labor with nature. Coleridge found the assertion of a natural right by virtue of this fact “ridiculous.” But he did think there was an important argument to be made on moral grounds as a corollary of Locke’s argument: “Truly ridiculous as Locke’s notion of founding a right of Property on the sweat of a man’s brow being mixed with the soil, yet taking it as a mere metaphor … it is both true & Important.… Closely connected with this argument but of far greater and more undoubted authority, is the necessity of individual action to moral agency, of an individual sphere to individual scheme of action, and of property to this—That without which a necessary end cannot be realized, is itself necessary—therefore, lawful” (CN, 3: no. 3835 18.239).
52. Again, from Coleridge’s extended note on Locke: “That a man who by an act of his mind followed by the fact of bodily usufructure has impropertied an object, a spot of land for instance, has combined it with many parts of his being—his knowledge, memory, affections, a sense of right, above all—and that this field is not to him what it is to any other man” (CN, 3: no. 3835 18.239).
53. For a discussion of ius as facultas and dominium, see Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 24–27.
54. See chapter four for Coleridge’s conception of rights as dependent on duties.
57. 15 June 1833, TT, 1:387. Also in a letter of about the same time, Coleridge wrote, regarding the manumission of slaves, “the true notion of human freedom—viz. that control from without must ever be inversley as the Self-government or control from within” (CL, 6:940).
59. See Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 103, for a discussion of the changing meaning of “polis” and “burg” as loci for citizenship.
60. See Pocock’s introduction to Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), 13–15.
9. Attacking the Doctrine
1. “Tory theory” in this context refers to the hierarchical ancien régime described by Jonathan Clark as “Anglican, aristocratic and monarchial.” Roy Porter describes the Tory order as a world where priests were the nobility’s agents of social control, while H. T. Dickinson emphasizes the doctrine of nonresistance, divine right, and indefeasible inheritance as the distinguishing features of what he describes as the “Tory ideology of order.” See Clark, English Society, 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure, and Political Practice During the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), rev. ed.. English Society, 1660–1832: Religion, Ideology, and Politics During the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 6–7; Roy Porter, England in the Eighteenth Century (London: Allen Lane, 1982), 76–80, Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth Century England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977), 21–24.
30. Ibid., 53; my italics.
41. See ibid. for a discussion of “circulation” and “irrigation” with reference to the blood and water metaphors in Coleridge’s discussion of “Taxes and Taxation.”
52. Terra Japonica is derived from the wood of acacia catecha and is naturally high in astringents. Coleridge’s friend Sir Humphry Davy had analyzed and discovered a tannin content in the Terra Japonica of up to 55 percent.
56. Crawfurd was a Scots physician trained in Edinburgh who became an Army doctor in the Northwest Provinces of India, a noted orientalist, a radical candidate in England, and an author of pamphlets on India and free trade. Crawford produced a number of pamphlets in addition to the History of the Indian Archipelago, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: A. Constable, 1820), including one specifically on “Free Trade and the East India Company” (1819). He advocated a liberalization of the East India Company monopoly and a diversification of colonial interests into the territories that would allow colonists to purchase land and to more closely ally their interests with the Indian people.
Conclusion. Regulating the Body Politic
