The most important works for this part of a study of Coleridge are the Friend, Essays on His Own Times, Lay Sermons, On the Constitution of the Church and State, and the Table Talk. The early periodical the Watchman should not be overlooked. A selection from these and other writings has been usefully brought together in The Political Thought of S. T. Coleridgeby R. S. White.
Coleridge is often remembered as a foolish pantisocrat in his French Revolutionary youth and a regenerate Tory in his old age. Both extremes have been exaggerated in report, and both elements were in him from the beginning to the end, never completely harmonized. His opposition to the Reform Bill of 1832 was no more conservative than socialist; it was not from opposition to the extension of the franchise so much as from a desire to see the standard of living raised instead, and the extension of education first and votes second. He suspected that the vote was a soporofic which would only postpone the real reckoning and lead to the poor laws. On the other hand, he felt that the national culture demanded the maintenance of privileged classes, landed and learned, and a high evaluation of tradition. Society, like the individual, was more than the sum of the parts; it was a living organism, though humanly constructed and to be changed at need. He never fully reconciled, in his social theory, what he recognized to be the claims of expediency on the one side and of the ideal state on the other.