Samuel Taylor Coleridge's political ideas, just like his best poems, appeal to a wide variety of constituencies precisely because they are so hard to pin down. Just as the New Critics, poststructuralists, and the New Historicists have all surprised themselves by finding in Coleridge's work precedence for their own very different critical procedures, so to the politically aware Coleridge has appeared under various guises as “our” man: a red hero to the New Left, at least for part of his career; a protoliberal to centrists (John Stuart Mill called him one of the “two great seminal minds of England” in the nineteenth century—the other was Jeremy Bentham); and to conservatives he is, with Burke, an undisputed founding father. The reason that used to be given for this wide appeal was the comprehensive drive of Coleridge's mind, his attempt to construct a system in which all would be included. That may be right. But, as Seamus Perry has recently argued, another explanation might be just as compelling, and truer to the facts of the case: namely, the fact that Coleridge was unable ever to make up his mind, while simultaneously being unable to stop himself from speaking it. Hence for every avowal of trinitarian orthodoxy there is, not far away, a conjecture that is plainly panentheist; for every pledge of loyalty to king and country there is a wringing of hands about the incompetence of ministers and the venality of the press; and for every moralizing Ancient Mariner, an enigmatic Geraldine.

I mention this because the question of the variability of Coleridge's ideas necessarily lurks behind any discussion of the ideas themselves and must be dealt with with a certain finesse. Any book on Coleridge must not only interpret key texts, a task that is already difficult enough; it must also explain the inevitable exceptions and contradictions. Pamela Edwards's The Statesman's Science excels in the former regard. The book makes an important and original contribution to our understanding of the constitutional element of Coleridge's political thought. It strengthens the case, which has been gaining currency in this field, for repositioning his thought in relation to the commerce-friendly, skeptical Whig tradition, rather than only to the civic humanist tradition of the Country party, or the paternalism of the “new” Tories of the nineteenth-century. But Edwards's Coleridge is far too decided and her tone too confrontational. Her argument that Coleridge is fundamentally a liberal thinker, committed throughout his career to “moderate, pragmatic constitutionalism” (19; which I find wholly plausible), fails to acknowledge the to-ing and fro-ing so characteristic of Coleridge's political prose and so is exposed to objections from precisely those she is writing to convince.

I will look at the argument first. A consensus has grown up among commentators that Coleridge's mature political thought (let's leave the “radicalism” aside for just a moment) stands in the tradition of Harringtonian republicanism; it is a late “Machiavellian moment,” to borrow J. G. A. Pocock's phrase, in which politics is seen to be grounded in the virtue of the country gentleman, exercised in military and agricultural pursuits, and resolutely opposed to court and commerce. Edwards does not reject this account, but she does correct it. Coleridge's political genius was to combine this essentially agrarian communitarian ideal with a modern appreciation of the benefits that might accrue from commerce—provided, that is, that commerce remained aware of its social and civic responsibilities. Here is where the common-law tradition, as well as the unwritten constitution and its positive institutions, became important for Coleridge. For unlike natural rights theory and classical liberalism, the common law emphasized the duties that accompany rights and so could hold wealth to account while still encouraging its expansion. Coleridge becomes, in this account, an energetic defender of the constitution for modern, commercial Britain, an English Montesquieu for the expanding nineteenth century. Edwards finds ample evidence for this at either end of Coleridge's career: in his 1795 lecture Conciones ad Populum, where he attacks Pitt's Two Acts (against sedition and assembly) on the grounds of the damage they cause to the constitution, and in On the Constitution of Church and State (1829), where Coleridge envisages the constitution as protecting a tension between different estates in the realm (the forces of “progression” and “permanence,” with the clerisy beholden to neither) that is the source of the state's dynamism.

Edward's repositioning of Coleridge in relation to the constitution and to commerce, especially her discussion of similarities with Adam Smith in chapter 8, is a very welcome contribution to Coleridge studies. (Her very sympathetic account of his economic liberalism should perhaps be read alongside Philip Connell's more critical assessment of the same material in his book Romanticism, Economics and the Question of “Culture.”) But there are two shortcomings of the book that need mentioning. One is that Edwards focuses on two texts (the ones I have mentioned) to the exclusion of nearly all others, apart from a number of letters to the Beaumonts, brother George, and J. H. Frere. Texts that ought to figure prominently in a discussion of this sort—The Friend, The Lay Sermon, essays like “Once a Jacobin, Always a Jacobin,” and the political poems—do not get much of a look in (the poems none at all). Coleridge's The Statesman's Manual (which is not a self-descriptor but a reference to the Bible, and a broad hint of the theology behind his politics) is echoed in this book's title but not otherwise referred to. There is also a reluctance to take into account any broader cultural indicators of Coleridge's interest in the constitution. What might we make, for instance, of his experience serving as an advocate in the Court of Vice-Admiralty while in Malta in 1805; his writing on the war and international law in 1809–10; his support of William Hone, famously acquitted on the charge of liable in 1817; or his complicated views on Catholic emancipation? Issues like these just do not come up.

This highly selective use of primary material may lie behind what I think is another shortcoming, the book's insistence that Coleridge was anti-Jacobin throughout his career. No doubt, as Edwards suggests, Coleridge's associates in the 1790s were more radical than he was, and left-leaning literary critics today, like Hazlitt in the 1820s, have had their own political reasons to perpetuate the “myth” of apostasy. Nevertheless, it is difficult to credit the view that Coleridge never changed his mind politically at all. What about his perpetual anxiety about the label “Jacobin”? What about the textual changes to political poems that he made? (One thinks of John Barrell's recent discussion of Coleridge's “Fire, Famine, and Slaughter” in his book on about the law of treason in the 1790s, Imagining the King's Death—not cited by Edwards). One could only defend the view of Coleridge's political consistency through painstaking historical and textual analysis of all the sources, a nearly impossible task. And anyway, what's wrong with someone changing his mind? In my view, the question of apostasy is a distraction from what this book stands to teach us: that the constitution was the loadstone of Coleridge's political thought.