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Godwinian Duty and the Positive Notion of Liberty in Coleridge's

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Godwinian Duty and the Positive Notion of Liberty in Coleridge's 日本英文学会第39回新人賞受賞論文 Godwinian Duty and the Positive Notion of Liberty in Coleridge’s Political Thought in Lectures 1795, The Watchman, and Church and State NAKAMURA Yoshiki 1. Introduction When he plunged into the reformist debates among radicals in the mid- 1790s with a series of lectures (1795),1 Samuel Taylor Coleridge was from the outset not so much concerned with particular issues of politics as with the epistemological problem of delineating what reformist stance he should take. At the beginning of the first lecture he advocates for “the necessity of bottoming [the society] on fixed Principles, that so we may not be the unstable Patriots of Passion or Accident” (Lectures 1795 5), and he attempts to distinguish a true patriot from “the misguided men who have enlisted themselves under the banners of Freedom” (11-12). His perceptive response to the potential danger of the contemporary reform ideology becomes especially clear when he attacks the radicals for committing to William Godwin’s all-too-utilitarian and atheist vision of a community made up of rational individuals devoid of any personal sentiment. Coleridge finds such a vision threatens mutual affection as the basis of the social bond, and he feels the need to infuse the vision of “Pantisocracy,” which he and Robert Southey collaboratively worked out from the influence This is a revised version of the paper presented at the 167th meeting of the Kansai Coleridge Society at Doshisha University on 26 September 2015. This research is supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 23720155. 1 Among his works based on those lectures delivered in 1795 are A Moral and Political Lecture, Conciones ad Populum, On Revealed Religion, and The Plot Discovered (all of which are included in Lectures 1795). The Watchman, a miscellaneous periodical including essays, parliamentary reports, poetry, and book reviews, was published in ten successive numbers in 1796. [ 57 ] 58 NAKAMURA Yoshiki of Godwinian community around late 1794, with the Unitarian idea of benevolence as “a thing of Concretion” (Collected Letters 1: 86; hereafter CL). Studies on the early Coleridge’s complex attitude toward Godwin’s An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793; hereafter PJ) have often taken biographical and qualitative approaches.2 Soon after his initial enthusiasm for PJ, Coleridge became skeptical of its inherent atheism, and, as an advocate of Unitarian theology under the influence of Joseph Priestley, turned to the Christian Gospels and David Hartley’s Observations on Man (1749; hereafter OM) for the associative force of altruistic and domestic feelings. Attacking the intemperance of the Dissenters’ claim for rights without founding that claim upon moral responsibility, he insists, “We cannot . inculcate on the minds of each other too often or with too great earnestness the necessity of cultivating benevolent affections” (Lectures 1795 48). Lewis Patton and Peter Mann in their introduction to Lectures 1795 succinctly summarize Coleridge’s estrangement from Godwin: “The doctrine of ‘necessity,’ the perfectibility of man, virtue as a habit, the subordination of individual to public good, ‘disinterestedness,’ vice as the product of circumstances, were all ideas that could be formulated and interpreted in Priestleian terms, a possibility that conveniently relieved Coleridge of any real need to subscribe to them, . in their Godwinian form” (lxiii). In my view, however, despite the apparent antithesis in their philosophical assumptions, Coleridge’s political engagement, particularly in its functional aspects, owes much to Godwin because concepts of justice, duty, and “principle” itself as employed in PJ contributed to the maturation of Coleridge’s epistemological and methodological ideas about social welfare and individual liberty, as we will see through his commitment to the reform movement of the 1790s. This paper argues that Godwin played a seminal role in providing Coleridge with a duty-based citizenship and a “communitarian” model of society,3 2 Trott 44-45; Patton and Mann lxvii-lxxx; Colmer 13. 3 Despite the general understanding of Godwin as a political anarchist who basically dismisses any institutional or legal system as the basis of society (Godwin 403), here I call his politics a kind of communitarianism in light of his argument for a deliberate development of the community that places public good above individual self-interest (92). See Wolff’s description of Godwin in the category of communitarian anarchism (45). Godwinian Duty and the Positive Notion of Liberty in Coleridge’s Political Thought in Lectures 1795, The Watchman, and Church and State 59 through which the latter worked out a unique conception of “positive” liberty in ways that Godwin and Hartley did not. Positive liberty used here comes from Isaiah Berlin’s famous though polemical dichotomy: liberty in the negative sense refers to an individualistic concern with “warding off interference” (“free from something”) or an a priori condition of every individual as represented in the Lockean theory of natural rights; positive liberty concerns one’s self- control, autonomy, and voluntary decision-making (“free to do something”) as advanced by philosophers in the democratic or Romantic line including Rousseau, Herder, Hegel, and Marx (Berlin 174, 179). From the perspective of positive liberty, Coleridge’s adaptation of the Hartleian associative theory of religious benevolence can be perceived as an “instrument” for a Godwinian ideal of justice, not an alternative model to it. Examining such an assimilative and eclectic pursuit of the principles of society in Coleridge will enable us to see that his early forays into radical politics show a historical transfiguration of the Godwinian duty conceptions into a pragmatic approach to self-realization. However, there is another point to note: Coleridge’s liberal politics, in my view, potentially leads to a kind of paternalistic thought, which is just the danger Berlin perceives in the arguments of the positive liberalists in turning their ideal of self-control into an authoritarian force of the whole society.4 Coleridge’s committed concern for the real plight of those oppressed is sometimes outweighed by his focus on the degraded morality of the “misguided” reformers, so that his egalitarian approach to reform tends to slip into the effort to enlighten the whole society, including the lower class, without ameliorating their current political condition. Interestingly, this latent paternalism ironically resembles the alarming consequence that Coleridge, like Berlin, finds in the French Jacobinism as a totalitarian democracy: Robespierre was to Coleridge “a Caligula with the cap of Liberty on his head” because with “the ardor of undisciplined benevolence, . to prevent tyranny he became a Tyrant” (Lectures 4 According to Berlin’s theoretical view, we cannot aim for our own rational purposes by ourselves insofar as we are empirical beings bound by lower desires, and hence “the ‘true’ self which, by imposing its collective, or ‘organic’, single will upon its recalcitrant ‘members’, achieves its own, and therefore their, ‘higher’ freedom” (as in Rousseau’s “general will” to which the whole nation must consent to surrender their natural rights in return for security and liberty) (179). 60 NAKAMURA Yoshiki 1795 35); to Berlin, Jacobinism was “an eruption of the desire for ‘positive’ freedom of collective self-direction on the part of a large body of Frenchmen who felt liberated as a nation, even though the result was, for a good many of them, a severe restriction of individual freedom” (208). In addition to investigating Coleridge’s liberal modification of the Godwinian society, I will hence examine the limitations of the political scheme in his 1790s arguments. In this regard, it is useful to refer to John Stuart Mill’s characterization of the later Coleridge, now a convert to Anglican conservatism, as “a better Liberal than Liberals” (On Bentham and Coleridge 167). In his analysis of On the Constitution of the Church and State (1829; hereafter CS), Mill says Coleridge saw “beyond the immediate controversy, to the fundamental principles involved in all such controversies” (129) and speculated upon the possibility of the Establishment functioning as a mediatory matrix of society’s dynamism between antithetical forces of progression and permanence. This view will bring to light a modified form of Coleridge’s primary duty-based vision of society, not as a consequence of his potential authoritarian disposition, but as a product of the dynamic construction of the reciprocality between individuals and the nation within a conservative format. Using Mill’s perspective for understanding how Coleridge’s earlier view on liberty is structurally reshaped in CS, I will show the viable nature of Coleridge’s unique engagement with positive liberty.5 2. Coleridge’s Assimilation of PJ and OM To understand Coleridge’s approach to PJ and OM we first need to grasp that his stance toward PJ was a more or less religious reaction to the ideological 5 Pamela Edwards insightfully views Coleridge as playing the central role in “the development of definitions of ‘positive liberty’” through his commitment to the republican/ communitarian tradition of Britain that stresses law, custom, virtue, and history as constitutive of the society (10). Yet, while she asserts that “[a] positive conception of liberty . was certainly the point of origin for all of Coleridge’s political ideas” (10), her argument pays equal attention to a libertarian
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