Coleridge was also a political thinker. Early in life he was a political radical, and an enthusiast for the French Revolution. However he subsequently developed a more conservative view of society, somewhat in the manner of Edmund Burke.[65] He was critical of the French Constitution of 1799, adopted following the Coup of 18 Brumaire, which he regarded as oligarchic.[66]
Although seen as cowardly treachery by the next generation of Romantic poets,[67] Coleridge's later thought became a fruitful source for the evolving radicalism of J. S. Mill.[68] Mill found three aspects of Coleridge's thought especially illuminating:
- First, there was Coleridge's insistence on what he called "the Idea" behind an institution – its social function, in later terminology – as opposed to the possible flaws in its actual implementation.[69] Coleridge sought to understand meaning from within a social matrix, not outside it, using an imaginative reconstruction of the past (Verstehen) or of unfamiliar systems.[70]
- Secondly, Coleridge explored the necessary conditions for social stability – what he termed Permanence, in counterbalance to Progress, in a polity[71] – stressing the importance of a shared public sense of community, and national education.[72]
- Coleridge also usefully employed the organic metaphor of natural growth to shed light on the historical development of British history, as exemplified in the common law tradition – working his way thereby towards a sociology of jurisprudence.[73]
Coleridge also despised Adam Smith.[74]
