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Samuel Taylor Coleridge is known for his poetry and literary criticism in the Biographia Literaria. But he also wrote extensively on politics, history, natural philosophy, wealth, and property. An avid critic of Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Robert Malthus, and the new political economy of the early 19th century, he sought a moral foundation for commercial society.
With the notable exception of William Francis Kennedy’s 1978 work Economist versus Humanist, Coleridge’s contributions to a history of economic thought have mostly been overlooked.
Coleridge’s engagement with Adam Smith was deeply complicated. He derided a Tory fashion of Smithian accounts of the marketplace; and referred to those ministers as men “thoroughly Adam Smithed and Macintoshed.” By the 1820s Coleridge believed that the popular and vulgarized reception of Wealth of Nations had reduced Smith’s laws of supply and demand to a crude and mechanical social theory.
This paper will consider Coleridge’s repackaging of Smith as a counter philosophy to that advanced by the Benthamites. Leaning heavily on TMS, as well as the faculty psychology of Thomas Reid and Dougald Stewart, Coleridge modified Smith’s account of the market. After reading Burke on scarcity and criticizing Malthus’s Essay on Population, Coleridge would contend in 1801 that “men should be weighed and not counted.” In his critique of Bentham’s ‘science of legislation,’ Coleridge advanced his own sympathetic science; a sociological history grounded in empathy and imagination and constituted through culture, narrative and opinion.
| Organization | Independent scholar |
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