The Statesman's Science

History, Nature, and Law in the Political Thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Pamela Edwards

• Éditeur: Columbia University Press
• Année: 2004
• ISBN:
  9780231506526
• Sujet: History
• Sous-sujet: European History

Author of "Kubla Khan" and the epic "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Samuel Taylor Coleridge is remembered principally for his contributions as a romantic poet. This innovative reconsideration of Coleridge's thought and career not only demonstrates his importance as a philosopher but also recovers romanticism as both an aesthetic and a political movement. Pamela Edwards radically departs from classic theories of Coleridge's development and reads his writing within the framework of a constantly shifting political and social landscape.

Drawing on the ideology, rhetoric, and institutional theory at the turn of the late British Enlightenment, Edwards unearths the fundamental continuities in Coleridge's writing during the revolutionary period of 1794 to 1834, paying particular attention to the rhetoric of Coleridge's pamphlet and miscellaneous writings, the journalism of the Napoleonic years, his philosophical and ultimately political treatises within the contexts of his notebooks and letters, and his readings and intellectual friendships. What emerges is a clearer understanding of Coleridge's political philosophy and his contributions to the origins and ideology of British Liberalism.

Coleridge's interest in history, nature, and law as inherently interconnected projects producing an ideal or scientific reading of society reveals a developed progressive social and cultural state theory anchored in individual conscience, moral autonomy, and a civic and participatory human agency. If the Statesman could understand and finally master this scientific view of the world, he would be able not only to adjust political and social institutions to comprehend the historical contingencies of the moment but to see through the problem of the moment to the dynamic of change itself.

CHAPTER 1

Romantic Radicalism

THE PROBLEM IN considering Coleridge’s political trajectory has largely been the consequence of attempting to read his various early works and private utterances as though they were all of one piece. This same error has been replicated with respect to his later writings; however, the superimposition of order has tended to reverse the focus on political questions. That is to say, critics have searched for the radical tones in the early writings and sought out the most conservative aspects of the later work in their search for apostasy, or indeed even consistency, in Coleridge’s life. While I would argue for coherence and continuity in Coleridge’s career, I would resist the impulse to “tidy” Coleridge up. I would also suggest that any assessment of Coleridge’s overarching principles must be made in terms of balance over time and that such a balance depends on a reading of his underlying principles as they pertained to a complex network of ever-changing political realities.

Like most people, Coleridge’s opinions on various subjects tended to present themselves in terms which suggested an ambivalence towards reductionism and the doctrinaire. Human conviction is harder to educe than the simple utterance of a single text. The specific principle or event in light of its consequence, the particular audience for the work, the immediate emotional context of a letter: all of these must be considered in order to judge an individual’s overarching principles as they pertain to any given moment in life. If these various expressions of belief are passionate and contradictory, or fragmentary, the problem is exacerbated. In Coleridge’s case this is unusually true. Nonetheless, there have been numerous efforts to categorize Coleridge’s political sensabilities. “Apostate,” “mime,” “glacier,” and “unconscious man” are the epithets associated with four classic theories of Coleridge’s political development that have attempted to delineate a pattern for his thought from 1794 to 1834.

The crucial years of 1795 and 1802 have often been presented as two possible loci for Coleridge’s “apostasy” away from “radicalism” toward “conservatism.”¹ Many critics suggest that in the early months of 1795, Coleridge’s writings reflected an active support for popular “radicalism.” Coleridge abandoned the “radical” cause, these interpreters contend, when the tide of popular counterrevolutionary fervor and high-handed government muzzling of the “radicals” mounted in the closing months of the year.²

There seem to be four major schools of thought on the issue of the changes, if any, in Coleridge’s political ideas in 1795. The first school is that of “self-conscious apostasy,” as suggested by E. P. Thompson and his acolytes, a quick and Judas-like about-face that took place in either 1795 or 1802. The second school is that of the “mime,” which claims that Coleridge possessed a chameleon-like habit of shifting his opinions to conform to what he perceived to be the beliefs of his audience, in the same way that a weather vane turns to indicate the direction of the fresh winds. Given this propensity, Coleridge appeared to be in constant change and alteration, when in truth all that was changing was the audience to whom he conformed his ideas in search of better rhetorical effect. The third is that of a slow but sure evolution away from “radical” toward “Tory,” a sort of “glacial” change. The fourth and oddest is that Coleridge was not at all political during this segment of his life, the theory being that Coleridge was “inert and unconscious” in his youth and, indeed, throughout his career as to matters of practical politics. Each of these theories—the “apostate,” the “mime,” the “glacier,” and the “unconscious man”—has specific weaknesses; all tend to ignore the fundamental continuities in Coleridge’s work throughout his lifetime.

The “mimetic” thesis had an early articulation in Crane Brinton’s 1926 study of The Political Ideas of the English Romanticists.³ Brinton described this chameleon-like behavior as Coleridge’s “obliging way of adapting himself to the views of the person with whom he was dealing.”⁴ The interpretation continued to win adherents as recently as the work of Thomas McFarland in the mid-1980s.⁵ Its value was that it recognized that Coleridge was a complex and rhetorically sophisticated writer who did not speak with one voice and could not be successfully analyzed by those who presumed he did. McFarland believes that the suggestion that Coleridge was a young “Jacobin” is misleading because Coleridge used certain prorevolutionary idioms and locutions in order to reach his audience with a non-Jacobin message. In studying Coleridge, McFarland suggests, one must consider audience and context rather than simply pointing to the use of certain isolated phrases. Both Brinton and McFarland argue that Coleridge, in dealing with a wide diversity of audiences during some of the most politically supercharged decades in British history, used a variety of lexica in an attempt to reach various groups of readers. This suppleness of idiom, they agree, has led to unfair and inaccurate readings of Coleridge as “changing his mind” when all he was “changing” was his rhetorical strategy.

Pocock has contributed to the “glacial” thesis in his location of the romantics. He describes Coleridge as being a “republican” in youth and a “Tory” in his middle and late career, a pattern which Pocock also saw in Wordsworth and Southey.⁶ Pocock has analyzed this change as a major shift in opinions without employing E. P. Thompson’s morally supercharged and fundamentally negative term of “apostasy.”⁷ Pocock’s examination of Coleridge’s career has been shaped by his opinion that the discourse of “classical republicanism,” to which he thinks Coleridge subscribed, was an alternative, communitarian political language of virtu.⁸ This “republican” language, according to Pocock, was the masquerade costume of choice for those “citizens,” from Niccolo Machiavelli to John Thelwall, who aped antique virtues (which they imagined to have existed in the incorrupt and manly polities of the ancient Spartans and late-republican Romans) in the service of moral and political rinovazione. According to Pocock, this language of the stalwart citizen protecting his civically constructed rights through the dutiful exercise of virtú and rinovazione was opposed to and fundamentally incompatible with the rival language asserting God-given claims to individual natural rights (ius). The language of ius was employed by proponents of cosmopolitan and Continentally based jurisprudential theory (Jurieu, Grotius, Pufendorf), a discourse which spoke of the “Universal Rights of Man” rather than the virtues and duties of citizens of a particular realm. The pagan/classical language of citizen-virtue among the republicans was also a contradiction to the Christian/medieval discourse of Tory paternalism, patriarchalism, staunch churchmanship, high monarchism, and noblesse oblige.

A fourth strand of thought contends that not only was Coleridge not an apostate in 1795 or 1802, nor a mime, nor even a glacially paced evolver-away from youthful ideas, but was instead politically “unconscious.” Jonathan Mendalow argues that Coleridge’s ideas during 1795 and, indeed, throughout his career, were aimed predominantly towards “religious and metaphysical speculation” and never turned specifically towards “questions of constitution, law, and practical politics.”⁹ While Mendalow’s thesis may be dismissed as the weakest of the four, it is finally the “apostasy” thesis, with its concomitant model of “disappointed radicalism,” which has continued to dominate literary and historical accounts, both of Coleridge’s political thought and the cultural and political realignment of party politics in the 1790s.¹⁰

Coleridge has long been viewed as one of a group of English romantic poets whose political careers can be conveniently divided into three distinct political stages: “Jacobin radicalism,” “apostasy,” and “Tory conservatism.” In the first stage, the “radical” period, the poets in question are supposed to have uncritically and wholeheartedly embraced the principles of the French Revolution and the cause of parliamentary reform and served with distinction on the polemical barricades of democratic revolt against the old regimes of Europe. In the second stage, the moment of “apostasy,” they are described as having turned tail and deserted the Jacobin cause in the hour of its greatest need, in a series of sudden and traitorous acts of defection. In the third phase, the “Tory conservative” period, they are presumed to have settled into a long and profitable senescence in which they enjoyed the fruits of their apostasy as lackeys of the counterrevolution. In these final years, they are thought to have obsequiously defended the same values of landed hierarchy, titled nobility, and feudal chivalric tradition that they had so recently marked out for destruction.

Like all myths of betrayal from Brutus and Judas through the Duke of Marlborough to Benedict Arnold and Charlotte Corday, the “apostasy” model offers the tempting high drama that is absent from so much political history.¹¹ The dagger blow to a great politician or cause, if it comes from the hand of a recognized enemy, only has the status of a detestable murder. The dagger blow attains the height of the horror and power of tragedy if (and only if) the stab in the back comes instead from the unsuspected hand of a trusted friend: then it partakes of the sin of betrayal as well as the sin of assassination. The anguished cry, “Et tu, Brute? Then fall, Caesar,” is not so far from the style and tenor of the mythicized description, in conventional historiographical accounts of the 1790s and 1800s, of the execrable “apostasy” of the great romantics from their early and admirable devotion to democracy.

Historians such as E. P. Thompson have charged Coleridge, along with Southey and Wordsworth, with a dramatic “apostasy” of this sort against British Jacobinism, the political movement that Thompson saw as having offered Britain a narrowly fumbled opportunity for a true democratic revolution in the 1790s.¹² Thompson and those who followed in his footsteps harnessed the rhetorical power of the myth of betrayal to their equally powerful myth of lost opportunity through which they depicted the English 1790s. Given that Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class was Marxist historiography’s own mythographic Acts of the Apostles, Coleridge and the romantics were ably and dramatically cast in the roles of its Judases.

Literary critics such as Meyer H. Abrams added to this myth of treason against the cause a biological and sociological explanation based on another myth, that of “idealistic youth” and “cynical old age.” The romantic poets’ process of disenchantment and retreat from their youthful idealism, argued Abrams, represented the universal experiences of maturation, encroaching cynicism, and despair.¹³ Coleridge’s experience, Abrams believed, reflected a common human process, the disillusionment attendant to age and experience. Simply put, young men are radical and old men are conservative.¹⁴

One naturally begins to ask when reading these works on Coleridge’s “apostasy,” whose radical? whose Tory? whose apostasy? One also begins to suspect that the apparent retrograde movement of “apostasy” was merely the optical illusion produced by Coleridge remaining constant in his principles even as his associates moved rapidly forwards into even more (contextually) “radical” positions than those he could support.¹⁵ If one is interested in seeing Coleridge as more than the stock villain in the tragedy of the death of the British Revolution, one must question this myth of “apostasy” and see how far it corresponds to facts. For one begins after any extended study of Coleridge and other thinkers of this era to question the value of these terms—“radical,” “conservative,” “Jacobin,” “Tory”—as they are so often uncritically and polemically applied to the politics of the 1790s. Obviously, in order to judge sensibly whether Coleridge was once a “radical” and then became a “Tory,” it is necessary to understand the meaning of those terms as they have traditionally been used in studies of Coleridge and his time. Beyond the observation that a radical/Tory dichotomy comprises a mixed metaphor of ideological category and party political label, the question of change must be addressed not only to Coleridge but also to the meaning of those terms. Radical or conservative, the problem of using nineteenth-century political vocabulary in analysis of the 1790s (or indeed the entire eighteenth century) remains confused by the failure to use either ideological or party political labels with any degree of consistency or with any establishment of relative benchmarks.

During the last decade, considerable debate has addressed the nature, vocabulary, and taxonomy of the political ideology of “radicalism” during the 1790s. Discussion of 1790s “radicalism,” generally speaking, tends to divide scholars into three camps. The first one is that of the reconstructors. The second is that of the debunkers. The third and final position is that of the pantheon builders. Much of the misunderstanding and rancor that characterizes scholarly debate on this era is due to the incompatibility of these three approaches.

Obviously, the divergent goals of these groups—to reconstruct mentalities, to debunk cant, or to find one’s political ancestors—result in different approaches to the problem of “radicalism” in the 1790s. Although few scholars are pure examples of any of these three “types,” most researchers into the marginal political movements of the 1790s do tend to undertake study of the “radical” movement either by seeking to discover how that term was used in the 1790s or by rejecting the lexicon of the period and evaluating “radicalism” by political deeds rather than by words or by presuming a “radical tradition” and looking for its earliest members.

The first group is that of the “reconstructors” of the political discourse of the 1790s. Their work owes much to the Annales school of the histoire des mentalités, as well as to the works of Michel Foucault on the archaeology of knowledge. The historiography of reconstruction is based on the theory that a given society’s political lexicon constructs and bounds the perception of what is “possible” in that society. It follows from this contention that the political vocabulary used by that society to describe itself will more accurately mirror the “real world” of that day than terms borrowed from later eras with different mentalités. This style of historiography, therefore, focuses its efforts on discovering what sorts of terms people living in that period used to describe their political parties and political actions. It tends to discredit and condemn all interpretations of a period that use concepts that were nonexistent in the lexicon of that period (such as “Puritan” in the 1550s, “middle class” in the 1640s, “petite bourgeoisie” in the 1750s, “Tory” in the 1770s, or “radical” in the 1790s) as “anachronistic” and therefore wrong. Therefore, if scholars are to be strictly “chronistic” in their use of political vocabulary appropriate to this age, they must eschew the term “radical,” however much they may like it. They must choose other terms to describe the movement.¹⁶

Jonathan Clark has found himself in the position of attacking the historiography of “radicalism” in the 1790s on reconstructionist grounds. Clark argues that if we are ever to understand the politics of the 1790s, we must cease applying anachronistic terminology to them. Although “radical” developed recognized meanings by the 1790s, he argues that radicalism emerged in the 1810s and 1820s, its component parts from earlier and limited uses assembled “in novel and unexpected ways.” He concludes that only if we can reconstruct or “date and analyze” that “conceptual innovation” can radicalism be “recovered as a valid term of historical analysis.”¹⁷

The second approach is that of “unmasking” a given political lexicon, the approach of the “debunkers.” This second variety of work is based on an assumption that people use language generally to conceal rather than to communicate reality. Knowing that political labels and party rhetoric consist mostly of what Lewis Namier famously described as “names and cant,” such historians act in sharp contrast to the lexicon reconstructors. Where the reconstructors tend to accept and embrace the lexica of the past as valid, the debunkers almost always end up rejecting the political language of the past as failed models of...