Coleridge, Politics, and the Theory of Life

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s most sustained reflection on the political implications of organic life emerged not in the radical 1790s but in his later political prose. In Theory of Life (1816), Coleridge attempted to reconcile his attraction to proto-evolutionary thinking with his own religious concerns. This careful balancing act reappeared as a central fixture in his later political thought. The discontinuities evident in the analogy he drew between political life and the “sinuous” line of evolution point toward the necessity of developing a nuanced understanding of Coleridge’s organic thought, one that avoids an oversimplified exportation of aesthetic theory into the political realm.