Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought
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John Morrow
claim that the development of men’s moral and intellectual faculties was
the yardstick of all social and political arrangements and condemned the
mechanical view of humanity that he ascribed to Adam Smith. Smith’s
philosophy was indifferent to the ‘immortal destinies’ of humankind, and
focused exclusively upon the ‘quantum of lucration of which [human beings
could] be made the instrument’ (Southey 1829, ii,pp.408–11, 1832f, p. 112).
Wordsworth, in a similar vein, justified poor relief on the grounds that it was
demanded by those ‘elementary feelings’ that prompted men to exalt human
nature, not to degrade it (Wordsworth 1974d, pp. 242, 246). Since these
feelings were fostered by traditional institutions and practices, Wordsworth
was critical of radical proposals for parliamentary and ecclesiastical
reform.
These criticisms dominated Wordsworth’s post-war politics, but while the
objects of his attention – the Church of England, the unreformed electoral
system, a paternalistic state grounded in a complex of localised systems of
authority and deference – were those of orthodox ‘ultra’ Tories, his defence
of them bore the stamp of his romantic preconceptions. For example, he
defended the Church on the grounds that its teachings militated against
the presumptuous idea that matters of public good could be determined
solely by the ‘specific acts and formal contrivances of human understanding’
(Wordsworth 1974d, p. 250). In an earlier address (prompted by the intrusion
of metropolitan radicals into the electoral preserve of the Westmorland
gentry) Wordsworth made a case for Burke’s ‘cloak of custom’ against
the insubstantial fripperies affected by reforming Whigs. The latter relied
upon splendid oratorical talents and ardent feelings rashly wedded to novel
expectations, when common sense, uninquisitive experience and a modest
reliance on old habits of judgement, when either these, or a philosophical
penetration, were the only qualities that could serve them (Wordsworth
1974f, p. 158).
At times Wordsworth deployed the language of romanticism for critical
and innovative purposes. This facet of Wordsworth’s political thought can
be seen in The Convention of Cintra, written (with some help from Southey)
as part of an unsuccessful campaign to induce the British Parliament to
disown the agreement by which the French withdrew from the Iberian
Peninsula following their defeat at the Battle of Vimeiro in 1808.Like
other English romantics, Wordsworth thought that this agreement was mil-
itarily and politically unnecessary and morally tawdry. It insulted English,
Spanish and Portuguese patriots whose heroism reflected the ‘vigour of the
human soul’ which sprang from ‘without and futurity’. These promptings
44
Romanticism and political thought in the early nineteenth century
of second nature explained the widespread opposition to the Convention in
England:
it exhibited such discordant characteristics of innocent fatuity and enormous guilt, that
it could not without violence be thought of as indicative of a general constitution of
things, either in the country or the government; . . . it was a kind of lusus naturae in
the moral world – a solitary straggled out of the circumference of nature’s laws – a
monster which could not propagate, and had no birthright in futurity. (Wordsworth
1974b, p. 292)
The Convention’s promoters and supporters were dead to the principle of
justice; they neither ‘see nor feel’; they do not understand ‘the rudiments of
nature as studied in the common walks of life’ (Wordsworth 1974b, pp. 281,
306). Wordsworth contrasted this moral blindness with the far-sightedness
of those who looked to natural impulses to furnish an invigorated sense of
human identification and political loyalty. This sense provided an effective
antidote to materialism and a viable basis for politics because the impressions
derived from second nature symbolised fundamental and reassuring truths
about the human condition. Traditional ideas and behaviour made the
present a moment in a seamless, affectively based harmony of past, present
and future:
Enough, if something from our hands have power
To live, and act, and serve the future hour;
And if, as toward the silent tomb we go,
Through love, through hope, and faith’s transcendent dower,
We feel that we are greater than we know.
(Wordsworth 1946, iii, lines 10–14,p.261)
Wordsworth’s condemnation of a code of military etiquette that permitted
a beaten foe to retire from the scene, pointed to a distinction between living
and moribund aspects of tradition. Military and civil elites hid behind the
past rather than using it as the basis for ‘futurity’. Their ‘forms, their imped-
iments, their rotten customs and precedents, their narrow desires, their busy
and purblind fears’ were repugnant both to those who had received uncon-
scious tuition in the school of humanity, and to the philosophic mind which
reflected upon the fruits of human experience (Wordsworth 1974b, p. 300).
These remarks could have prepared the ground for a critical, or at least an
analytical, perspective on inherited institutions and practices, but this option
was not taken up by Wordsworth. Traces of the critical implications of The
Convention can be seen in his post-war support for nation states, but in this
period the language of patriotism was often adopted in opposition to the
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progressive language of citizenship associated with the French Revolution
(Cronin 2002,pp.144–5). Any other reforming impulses that Wordsworth
may have harboured gave way to an all-embracing conservatism (Cobbam
1960,pp.149–51). Wordsworth’s reluctance to allow human agency to
dispense with moribund institutions and practices was indicative of this
tendency. These relics, now portrayed as imaginative, aesthetically valuable
backdrops to human life, were likened to
a stately oak in the last stage of decay, or a magnificent building in ruins. Respect and
admiration are due to both; and we should deem it profaneness to cut down the one, or
demolish the other. But are we, therefore, to be sent to the sapless tree for may-garlands,
or reproached for not making the mouldering ruin our place of abode. . . . Time is gently
carrying what is useless or injurious into the background. (Wordsworth 1974f, p. 173)
Like Wordsworth, Southey claimed that the reforms of the constitution
proposed by radical publicists would damage the fabric of the state. How-
ever, his jeremiads on Catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform
were accompanied by expressions of alarm at the impact of rapid and deep-
seated economic and social changes (Mendilow 1986,pp.69–79). Southey
argued that in the intellectual and moral climate of the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries the rapid growth of manufactures had produced
a population that was economically, intellectually and spiritually impover-
ished. This debasement was an affront to Christian morality and undercut
the basis of a stable body politic. In Southey’s view the state was sustained
through reciprocity, a reciprocity he understood in romantic rather than
rational, contractual terms. Material deprivation undercut the sense of self-
identification upon which the state was based; it also reflected a general
indifference – epitomised for Southey in Malthus’ image of a fully occu-
pied table – to the intellectual, moral and spiritual needs of the population.
The new industrial towns and the neglected villages of rural England were
fetid breeding grounds for active disloyalty to political authority and for
hostility towards society (Southey 1832d, pp. 68–107, 1832e, 1832f).
3
Although Southey emphasised the coercive and protective features of the
state, these were only aspects of a form of social and political organisation
that was ‘patriarchal, that is to say, paternal’ (Southey 1829, i,p.105). In his
excursions into history Southey identified this form of government most
closely with late medieval and early modern England, but the contemporary
relevance of control, protection and human development was underlined
3 See Winch 1996, Part III for a historically focused critique of the romantic response to Malthus’
doctrines.
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Romanticism and political thought in the early nineteenth century
by his obsession with Alexander Bell’s ‘Madras System’ of mass education.
Southey described Bell’s scheme as the ‘fair ideal of a commonwealth’
becauseitwasbasedonprinciplesofprotectiveandregulativehierarchy
(Southey 1829, i,p.105). In Bell’s schools each pupil was under the control
of an older ‘monitor’, while in Southey’s ideal commonwealth, each class
within society was subjected to the benign superintendence of its social
superiors (Southey 1832e, pp. 227–31).
Traditional institutions formed the basis of such a commonwealth, and
Southey insisted that these must be shielded from the corrosive influences
of radical agitators. In his post-war writings Southey appealed to the state to
use its power to curb radical agitation. However, he also wished to undercut
the basis of radical support. One way of doing this was for traditional elites
to seize the initiative. Southey therefore urged the upper classes to resume
responsibility for the welfare of the lower orders by promoting the reg-
ulation of working conditions, the provision of poor relief, opportunities
for secular and religious instruction and internal and external immigration
(Southey 1832c; Eastwood 1989). These measures, and the change in elite
attitudes that was necessary to put them into effect, would ensure that the
lower orders received not just the material necessities of life, but also control
and guidance. Elite superintendence would foster the populace’s intellec-
tual and moral development and attach it to the state. Such attachment was
not merely the basis for a quid pro quo. For Southey, as for other romantic
writers, the benefits that the state produced were not the basis of political
obligation; they were aspects of a complex relationship that was underwrit-
ten by affective and moral qualities. If the state was to be the focus of loyalty
the positive links between political and social authority and the intellectual,
moral and religious culture had to be restored (Southey 1829, i,p.94, ii,
p. 265).
While Wordswor th pointed to the traditional constitution as a model of
political and moral rectitude, and Southey wished to buttress this structure
by paternalist conceptions which he discerned in the early modern state,
Coleridge extolled the virtues of the Platonists of the seventeenth century.
He claimed to have found in their writings the distinction between ‘reason’
and ‘understanding’ that was so important in his own political philosophy.
He also identified a group of Platonic statesmen – Harrington, Milton,
Neville and Sidney – who resisted the early stages of materialism in pol-
itics and whose actions were informed by an appreciation of the moral
ends of the state (Coleridge 1976,p.96;Morrow1988). Coleridge’s rev-
erence for these ‘red letter names’ gave a distinctive cast to his political
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theory: while acknowledging the virtues of the traditional constitution of
church and state, his attitude towards it was tinged with the hues of antique
republicanism. He emphasised the moral and religious importance of lib-
erty of conscience, was critical of the Laudian church, and speculated that
Oliver Cromwell could have become the head of a ‘republican Kingdom –
a glorious Commonwealth with a King as the Symbol of its Majesty, and
Key-stone of its Unity!’ (Coleridge 1980–, ii,pp.1200–1).
4
In addition,
Coleridge submitted traditional institutions and practices to the scrutiny
of ‘reason’ in order to ensure that the state played its role in promoting
intellectual and moral perfection. This scrutiny formed part of a theory of
the state which was more critical and sophisticated than that implied by
Southey’s and Wordsworth’s complaisant endorsement of the constitutional
nostrums of early nineteenth-century Toryism.
The most complete account of this theor y was presented in On the Consti-
tution of the Church and State, According to the Idea of Each (1829). In this work
Coleridge discussed the state in relation to the ‘idea’ of the constitution,
that is, in terms of its ‘ultimate aim’, and he identified this with the realisa-
tion of the moral ends that he had outlined in The Friend (Coleridge 1976,
p. 12, 1969, ii,pp.201–2). This approach was impor tant because Coleridge
allowed that historical features of the state may not adequately realise its end.
It could not therefore be claimed, as Southey, Wordsworth and many other
Tories did, that the existing system of government should be preserved in
its entirety (Coleridge 1976,pp.13, 19;Coates1977,p.502;Morrow1990,
pp. 131–2). Coleridge’s analysis of the constitution rested on a distinction
between the ‘constitution of the state’ (the legislative and executive arms
of government and the ‘free powers’ of extra-parliamentary institutions)
and the ‘constitution of the nation’ which embraced both the state and the
national church. The ‘nation’ formed an organic whole that was sustained
through the principle of balance, but this principle was at work also within
the ‘state’. Parliament focused and balanced interests connected to landed
and commercial property. These interests embodied fundamental moral
and social forces (‘progression’ and ‘permanence’) whose interrelationship
allowed society to reap the benefits of commercial activity without abandon-
ing the more stable, ethically directed values which Coleridge and many of
his contemporaries identified with landed proprietor ship (Coleridge 1976,
4 See also Coleridge 1980–, i,pp.250, 358, 805 and ii,p.951 for criticisms of the Laudian church.
Coleridge was at times exasperated by what he saw as the reactionary politics of both Southey
and Wordsworth; see, for example, the letter to William Godwin dating from December 1818 in
Coleridge 1956–71, iv,p.902.
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Romanticism and political thought in the early nineteenth century
pp. 23–5). The socially beneficial balance of these proprietorial interests
was facilitated by the unifying impulses produced by the Crown, and was
augmented by the interaction between Parliament and the invigorating but
potentially destabilising influence of extra-parliamentary forces (Coleridge
1976,pp.41–2;Morrow1990,pp.133–40). ‘Permanence’ and ‘progres-
sion’ were not ‘interests’ in the conventional sense and were not part of a
mechanical balance. Rather, they were aspects, or moments, of an organic
social and political order. They were important because they embodied
complementary states of mind that reflected ‘progressive’ and ‘perma-
nent’ forces within society, not because of their physical mass. Coleridge
used the language of balance as an electro-magnetic, not as a mechanical
metaphor.
5
The moral significance of landed property was emphasised in Coleridge’s
second ‘Lay Sermon’ of 1817, a work produced in reaction to the hardship
and dislocation that accompanied the peace of 1815. He claimed that the
ends of landed property were identical with those of the state and attributed
many of the ills of post-war Britain to an ‘overbalance of the ‘commercial
spirit’ (Coleridge 1972,p.169). These remarks reflected Coleridge’s concern
that the landed classes’ endorsement of commercial values was undermining
an essential counterpoise within the state. The cupidity and extravagance
of the gentry was given an air of intellectual plausibility by the faddish
‘science’ of political economy, but Coleridge insisted that this discipline
did not adequately specify the duties and responsibilities of statesmen or
the landed gentry (Coleridge 1972,pp.169–70, 210–16; Kennedy 1958;
Morrow 1990,pp.115–21).
At the heart of this critique of political economy and of the gentry’s
seduction by it, was a romantic view of the implications of enlightened
rationalism. Like Southey and Wordsworth, Coleridge believed that the
self-interested practical materialism of the gentry was a consequence of the
5 See, for example, the references to ‘poles’ (Coleridge 1976,p.24 note ∗ and p. 35). John Colmer points
to a parallel between Coleridge’s conception of polarity and those of his German contemporaries;
‘the dynamic unity of nature, of life, and of thought was conceived as arising from a synthesis of
opposing forces’ (Coleridge 1976,p.35 n3). A strong theory of polarity plays an important role in
M
¨
uller’s political thought (see p. 54) but I can find no evidence that Coleridge was aware of his
work. Coleridge’s interest in aspects of German thought has been widely studied (see, for example,
Harding 1986; MacKinnon 1974;Orsini1969), but there is little to suggest a direct link between his
political ideas and those of German romantic writers. Schlegel’s Geschichte der alten und neuen Litteratur
(1815) played an important role in Coleridge’s literary lectures in 1818–19, but apart from this there
are only brief references to Schleiermacher’s writings on prayer in his correspondence and notebooks
and a short, not politically interesting comment on Novalis in his marginalia (Coleridge 1987, ii,
pp. 32, 46, 53–61, 1956–71, vi,pp.543, 545–6, 555, 1980–, ii,p.958).
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philosophical atmosphere of modern society, but his response to this was
highly intellectual. He looked to Christian Platonism to dispel modes of
thought and action that were intellectually shallow, theologically barren
and politically and socially disastrous. Consequently, Coleridge called for a
revival of ‘austerer studies’ – principally philosophy and theology – among
the educated classes, and for the diffusion of the intellectualised religion and
the moralised intellect that he identified with Platonism (Coleridge 1972,
pp. 24, 39, 105–7, 193–5, 199;Morrow1990,pp.121–5).
This proposal for a revitalisation of the moral and intellectual attitudes of
elites related closely to Coleridge’s insistence that the ‘idea of the constitu-
tion’ must include a national church.
6
He claimed that a clear understanding
of the essential features of this institution was particularly important in the
moral and political climate of early nineteenth-century England. Not only
was the country menaced by the overbearing attractions of an unchecked
spirit of commerce, but the institution responsible for correcting this spirit,
the Church of England, was threatened by proposals to remove constraints
upon the political status of Dissenting Protestants and Roman Catholics.
Unlike Southey, Coleridge was not implacably opposed to the repeal of
the Test Acts or to Catholic emancipation, but he insisted that relief mea-
sures should not threaten the ‘national’ status of the Church of England
(Coleridge 1976,pp.11–12, 147–61; cf. Southey 1832b).
Although Coleridge’s treatment of national churches drew heavily upon
his under standing of the history and structure of the Church of England, he
regarded them as necessary features of moral states (Allen 1985,pp.90–1).
The Church incorporated the ‘clerisy’, a body that was responsible for cre-
ating an intellectual and moral climate which encouraged secular elites to
fulfil their true role within the state (Coleridge 1976,pp.42ff.; Knights 1978,
ch. 2). This role was a disinterested one which reflected the universal, moral
purpose of the state (Coleridge 1990, i,pp.187–8; Gilmartin 2007,pp.207–
52;Morrow1990,pp.143–6). The clerisy should identify with communal
rather than sectional interests and in order to facilitate this it was endowed
with property dedicated to national purposes. Utilising conventional claims
concerning the relationship between proprietorship and independence to
6 This institution was quite distinct from the ‘Church of Christ’; it was national rather than universal and
was, as Coleridge put it, independent of ‘theological dogmata’ (Coleridge 1976,pp.133ff.; Morrow
1990,p.149). For an account of the importance of this distinction see Morrow 1990,pp.152–4.
Coleridge’s ascription of a moralising and educational role to the Church and his insistence that it
must be free from political interference, is very similar to the conception of the church found in
some of Schlegel’s earlier writings (Schlegel 1964,pp.169–70), but this view underwent significant
modifications; see below.
50
Romanticism and political thought in the early nineteenth century
defend ecclesiastical property, Coleridge argued that the material endow-
ment of the Church insulated the clerisy from the misuses of political power.
He signalled the special status of Church property by a terminological dis-
tinction; it formed the ‘Nationality’ while private properties were part of
the ‘Propriety’. Taken together, they were the ‘two constituent factors, the
opposite, but correspondent and reciprocally supporting counter-weights,
of the commonwealth, the existence of the one being the condition, and the
perfecting of the other’ (Coleridge 1976,p.35).
The ‘Nationality’ provided the means for counteracting the intellec-
tual and moral sources of the abuse of personal property. For Coleridge,
therefore, endowed national churches had a crucial role to play in early
nineteenth-century Europe where commercial expansion reinforced exist-
ing inequalities and generated new ones. Even in the absence of such
inequality, however, national churches were an essential feature of his roman-
tic conception of the state. This was so because, while Coleridge stressed
the clerisy’s impact on elites, he also justified its existence and its privileges
by reference to its general educational role. The clerisy was charged with
the ‘cultivation’ of the population, with the ‘harmonious development of
those qualities and faculties that characterise our humanity’(Coleridge1976,
pp. 42–3). Both in its impact on the elite mind and in their role as ‘cultiva-
tors’, the clerisy nurtured the intellectual, moral and religious values which
lay at the heart of Coleridge’s image of a just and social political condition.
After about 1800 leading German romantics took a path that was similar
in some respects to that of their English contemporaries. That is, they devel-
oped political statements that repudiated the destructive political radicalism
that they identified with the French Revolution but assumed positions that
were critical of significant aspects of the status quo. German romantics
resisted the narrowly legalistic and mechanical conceptions of government
they associated with eighteenth-century absolutism and with reform initia-
tives launched in response to the failure of German states to contend with
French military strength (Krieger 1972,pp.139ff.; Sheenan 1989,pp.260ff.).
Thus while hostility to the French Revolution and its fruits became a core
theme in German romanticism, the model of monarchy promoted by con-
servative romantics offered a standing rebuke to that prevalent in the eight-
eenth century. This point was put with great force in Novalis’ claim that
monarchy in general had lost its sense of purpose and been stripped of its
legitimacy before 1789: the kings of France and of most other European
states were ‘dethroned’ long before the Revolution (Novalis 1969c, p. 28).
Romantics rejected the absolute state because it was incompatible with their
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ideal of community and could not, because of its divorce from human val-
ues, retain the loyalty of its members. The ‘poetic’ state as Novalis dubbed
it, must satisfy both the heart and the mind (O’Brien 1995,p.174). In
response to this requirement, German romantic writers sought to rehabili-
tate the state by urging their contemporaries to see it as a reflection of the
vital forces which underlay human life, not as the product of a contract or
of the exercise of power (Droz 1963,p.17). They believed that the state
would only satisfy longings which had been reflected in a distorted and
destructive manner in the revolutionary era if it incorporated the aestheti-
cally and emotionally satisfying sense of community which they associated
with the family.
Like their contemporaries in England, romantic writers in Germany
traced the shortcomings of the eighteenth-century mind to the limita-
tions of Enlightenment epistemology, but they were also critical of the
jurisprudential conception of the state which they associated with abso-
lutism. Romantic attitudes towards the first of these issues were captured
by Novalis’ remark that while Enlightenment thinker s were fascinated by
the refraction of light, they ignored the ‘play of its colours’ (Novalis 1969b,
pp. 508–9). These ‘mysterious’ and ‘wonderful’ forces could only be appre-
ciated through the intuitions of the poetic intelligence; they could not be
grasped by reason alone. M
¨
uller, whose attitude towards rationalism was
markedly more hostile than that of other political romantics, credited this
intuitive faculty with the capacity to for m ‘ideas’, that is, conceptions of
things in relation to processes of development and as parts of more complete
‘organic’ wholes. The image of the world conveyed by ‘ideas’ was far more
complete than that produced by ‘concepts’ that merely arranged data and
could not capture the complexities of natural or human phenomena. This
distinction could be applied in a variety of contexts. For example, M
¨
uller
praised the rhetorical practices of the English House of Commons as expres-
sions of ‘the spirit of the living word’, and condemned both speech-reading
and ‘science’ for their failure to convey or discover the spirit of life (M
¨
uller
1978,p.185;Reiss1955,p.156). These failures were not trivial because
M
¨
uller believed that the destructive features of revolutionary activity were a
consequence of misguided attempts to reconstruct politics upon principles
that were antithetical to the spiritual dimensions of human life (Reiss 1955,
p. 153).
Romantic critiques of the political fruits of the Enlightenment cen-
tred on the shortcomings of legal conceptions of the state. In particu-
lar, they refused to accept the claim (common both to the defenders of
52
Romanticism and political thought in the early nineteenth century
eighteenth-century absolutism and to revolutionaries) that the state was a
product of a contractual arrangement entered into by bearers of natural
rights. They argued that the state must appeal to the affections of its sub-
jects and not merely to their individual interests (Beiser 1992,pp.236–9;
Berdahl 1988,pp.99–103; Krieger 1972,pp.53ff.; Scheuner 1980,pp.23–
5). Novalis’ warning of the dangers facing a state which attempted to ‘square
the circle’ of self-interest was elaborated upon by Schlegel in a series of lec-
tures delivered in 1804–5 (Novalis 1969c, No. 36). In these lectures Schlegel
forged a sharp distinction between ‘rational’ and ‘natural’ law and dissoci-
ated the latter from individualism by making it the seed-bed of an organic
state.
Schlegel claimed that while rational law deified liberty, it failed to explain
why it was sacrosanct. Moreover, since it treated collective entities – the
family, community or the state – as infringements upon liberty, rational
law produced dissolution and discord, not harmony and unity. By contrast,
natural law grew out of a unitary social entity, the patriarchal family. This
institution was based on a system of authority that sprang from love and
loyalty; it thus fostered the moral rather than purely natural relationships that
were epitomised in the status of patriarchs. These figures were not merely
heads of families; they were also symbols of God who represented the just
possibilities of a natural condition (Schlegel 1964,pp.104–6, 1966,p.549).
However, these possibilities were limited by the family’s restricted scope
and by the conflicts which resulted from its unilateral exercise of the natural
right of revenge (Schlegel 1964,p.123). Although these tensions were
eliminated by the state, Schlegel regarded its regulatory role as of secondary
importance. The most significant feature of the state was its embodiment
of ‘the idea of morality’, that is, ‘the moral education and perfection of
humanity’ (Schlegel 1964,pp.111, 122;cf.Beiser1992,pp.255–60). This
goal echoed the cosmopolitan visions of early romanticism, but after 1800
Schlegel associated it with the enlarged and unified form of community
made possible by the state. The state’s role in human advancement made
it a moral necessity; this was recognised by its subjects and underlay their
attachment to it.
The romantics’ insistence that the relationship between the state and
its subjects was a consequence of belief, not contract or fear, was a key
element in their attempt to replace a legalistic conception of the state with
one that relied upon the creation of a sense of communal identity. The state
as community was based on affective, other-regarding values such as love,
not on legal arrangements that were designed to protect individual interest.
53