Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772–1834)

2. Political philosophy

As a young man, Coleridge was influenced by the political radicalism of friends such as John Thelwall and William Godwin, and by the reforming zeal of Joseph Priestley’s Unitarianism (see Priestley, J.). He agreed with the latter’s view that Jesus was himself a true radical and a free-thinking teacher whose humanity was devalued by the attribution of divinity. By the mid-1790s he had distanced himself from Godwin’s radical atheism and from Thelwall’s view of the irrelevance of Christianity to reform. Soon after, he was to become dissatisfied with Priestley’s materialism. However, his Bristol Lectures (1795) and his journal The Watchman (1796) reflect his continuing admiration for the principles (if not the practical reality) of the French Revolution, his criticism of the established Church, and his critique of property.

Coleridge contributed essays and leaders to newspapers on all aspects of social and political thought: on economics, government, foreign affairs, relations of Church and state, on monarchy, and on representation. He consistently supported the antislavery movement and opposed the bills, acts and political movements that he thought endangered ‘nationalty’ and the principles of true humanity. As his theory of nationhood developed, based on the relation between ‘national church’, monarch and state (On the Constitution of Church and State, 1830) the tone of Coleridge’s political and social criticism changed. His later views are all related to his concept of the state in the widest sense of nation or ‘body politic’. This, in its ideal form, contained the unity of state and national church. In any particular historical representation of the idea, national church and state are opposing poles. Together with the sovereign, they maintain the harmony and balance of the whole.

Coleridge contrasted ‘party-spirit’ and ‘clanship’ to true ‘national spirit’. On this basis, he denounced the ‘false patriotism’ of the Irish movements for independence and Catholic emancipation. While Roman Catholics were not to be excluded from the Christian church, their fealty to Rome amounted to self-exclusion from the national church, and therefore from full citizenship. For this reason, he found that he could not support the 1829 bill for emancipation. Catholics could not, for example, belong to the ‘clerisy’; the leaders who would foster the ideal characteristics of humanity. These would ensure the development of Reason, the religious sense, a philosophical and moral understanding of history, attention to the true meaning of words and a recognition of the state as (potentially) a living unity of Will and Reason rather than a Hobbesian ‘Leviathan’.

‘Nation’, Coleridge agreed with Kant, was not to be identified with ‘people’; he was not a democrat, and did not equate the desires of the aggregate of the people with the interests of the nation. He distrusted the foreshadowings of mass labour movements, as his later notebooks show, declaring them to be the result of bad government which had ignored the moral lessons of history and abandoned the fundamental question of what it is to be human. He vehemently criticized leading politicians and statesmen, such as William Pitt and Charles Grey, for failing to preserve the ‘nationalty’; that is, a reserve for the nation in the form of ‘a wealth not consisting of lands, but yet derivative from the land, and rightfully inseparable from the same’. This was the opposite pole to the division of land into ‘propriety’, or ‘hereditable estates’ among individuals; these were ‘the two constituent factors, the opposite, but correspondent and reciprocally supporting, counter-weights, of the commonwealth’. He rejected the ‘political economy’ of such thinkers as Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus as ‘a science which begins with abstractions, in order to exclude whatever is not subject to a technical calculation’. These ‘abstractions’ it assumes ‘as the whole of human nature’.

Coleridge described the nation as ‘a moral unity, an organic whole’. Its archetype was that of the Jewish people in the time of Moses. Despite his criticism of ‘party-spirit’, he often openly declared the superiority of the English nation; of its constitution, and its development through the creative tension of the opposing principles of ‘progression’ and ‘conservation’. He became increasingly fearful that the nation was under threat of a moral vacuum, but abandoned his earlier political radicalism in favour of philosophical combat against an encroaching ‘mechanism’ that ignored not only the human ideal, but also human nature, need and experience.