Coleridge and History: ‘In the Idea, Unevolved’

Details

• Time: 5:30-7:00pm
• Date: Tuesday, 23 March, 2021
• Venue: HS436 and Zoom

Abstract

This paper discusses Coleridge as a historical thinker in On the Constitution of the Church and State, According to the Idea of Each (1829/30). A number of influential recent accounts of the ‘History of the Idea’ in Church and State have emphasized the metaphysical and downplayed the historical dimensions. I show how such accounts miss the extent to which the necessarily inarticulable character of Ideas – as lastingly redefined here by Coleridge – is historiographically crucial, allowing a formal definition of the historical field independent of theology or philosophy. And focusing in on Coleridge’s remarks about latency and dormancy, and the due proportion of potential to actual power, I reveal a historical tendency within the work countermining idealism, folding back upon its own account of the actualization of Ideas in history.

Speaker

Dr Tom Duggett is Associate Professor in Romantic Literature at XJTLU and Honorary Fellow of the Department of English, University of Liverpool. He is the author of a study of Wordsworth and Coleridge and the ancient constitution, Gothic Romanticism: Architecture, Politics, and Literary Form. Tom is contributing a chapter on ‘Coleridge and History’ to the forthcoming New Cambridge Companion to Coleridge, which will be published in time for the 250th anniversary of Coleridge's birthday in 2022.