The fane of Tescalipoca: S. T. Coleridge on the sacrificial economies of systems in the 1790s.(Critical essay)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-MAR-07

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IN HIS 1795 MORAL AND POLITICAL LECTURE S. T. COLERIDGE SUGGESTS, we should be cautious"



how we indulge even the feelings of virtuous indignation.... Let us beware that we continue not the evils of tyranny, when the monster shall be driven from the earth. Its temple is founded on the ruins of mankind. Like the lane of Tescalipoca the Mexican Deity; it is erected with human skulls and cemented with human blood.... Our object is to destroy pernicious systems not their misguided adherents. Philosophy imputes not the great evil to the corrupted but to the system which presents the temptation to corruption. (1)

Written in the wake of the Reign of Terror, Coleridge proposed that in reforming Britain's old political order his fellow "friends of freedom" must avoid becoming tyrants themselves by attacking despotic systems rather than their adherents. Pernicious systems, he suggested, could be recognized by their demands for forms of bloodletting evocative of the horrific sacrifices of "primitive" religions. Yet recognizing pernicious systems was simply half the task, for they--like the coya, the "envenomed insect of Peru"--could poison the hand that sought to crush them (CW 1:18). One must destroy pernicious systems without replicating their demand for sacrificial victims, and this required accurate discernment, since the need for victims was the result of mistaking a part of the system (the "misguided adherents") for the system itself.

This passage from Coleridge's early political writings reminds us that (in Thomas McFarland's words) "Coleridge's endeavour was always towards system," even if, as McFarland and many others have noted, he was never able to complete the philosophical systems that he sketched out. (2) Yet much of this critical attention to the role of systems in Coleridge's thought has been focused on his later engagement with German philosophy, rather than his early interest in systems in the 1790s. This paper focuses, by contrast, on Coleridge's more youthful reflections, and rather than taking German philosophy as my reference point, I suggest that Adam Smith's reflections on systems and sacrifice in The Theory of Moral Sentiments--and especially the additions that Smith made to that book in 1790--illuminate the political stakes of Romantic-era debates about the virtues of systems in the 1790s. Smith distinguished between two kinds of system-love--on the one hand, a love based on the misrecognition of a part of the system for a whole; on the other, a love for the system as a whole--and he linked each form of system-love to a form of sacrifice. I argue that Coleridge employed a similar schema in early political texts such as "A Moral and Political Lecture" (1795) and Lectures on Revealed Religion (1795), as he sought to distinguish good from "pernicious" systems and sacrifices. Yet by 1798, I suggest, Coleridge had come to question this schema and the very possibility of the "good" system and sacrifice. This doubt was staged in poems such as "The Recantation: An Ode" (later titled "France: An Ode") and "Recantation: The Story of the Mad Ox," which collapsed the distinctions between good and bad systems and sacrifices that Coleridge had established in his earlier political prose. Drawing on the work of political theorist Claude Lefort, I argue that the most "radical" moment of Coleridge's engagement with systems was not, as some have argued, his commitment, in the early 1790s, to progressive or revolutionary systems, but rather this brief period in 1798, when he came to see all political systems and their demands for sacrifice as contingent and questionable.

Both of these claims build upon, even as they partially contest aspects of, recent work on the politics of Romantic era systems. My emphasis on Smith, for example, extends David Simpson's and Clifford Siskin's discussions of a long English and British tradition of reflection on the virtues and vices of systems, and builds on their suggestions that debates about systems in the 1790s helped to focus opposition between conservative critics, such as Edmund Burke, and their moderate opponents, such as Thomas Paine and William Godwin. (3) However, whereas both Simpson and Siskin tend to read "system" as a term aligned with radical politics, I suggest in my first two sections that a more complicated picture emerges when we distinguish between four different eighteenth-century senses of the word. "System" could denote a genre, a morally improving perspective on reality, a discrete set of institutions designed to achieve a particular end, or an overarching set of social institutions that collectively controlled all possibilities for individual action and dissent, and only some of these meanings had "radical" valences. Smith's distinction between different kinds of system-love allow us to discern a conservative tradition of system-love, and to recognize that what divided moderate from conservative critics in the 1790s was less the question of system than that of sacrifice (Burke, for example, may have claimed that the British were "at war with a system," but at the same time he extolled the virtues of the "lovely" British "political system"). (4) My third section brings these distinctions to bear on Coleridge's reflections on systems in the 1790s, and I argue that while he initially worked within Smith's paradigm, by 1797 Coleridge had increasingly come to question the possibility of a good system and sacrifice. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of my claims for our understanding of the radical moment(s) of the trajectory of Coleridge's politics in the 1790s.

1. Eighteenth-Century Systems: Genre, Perspective, Institution, and "The System"

When Burke claimed both that Britain was "at war with a system" and that Britons should embrace the "lovely" British "political system," he was using the same term in two different ways. The British "political system" denoted for Burke a discrete series of institutions--voting mechanisms and legislative fora, for example--designed to achieve a particular (and limited) end. However, when he wrote that the British were "at war with a system," the latter word denoted a set of principles and institutions that aimed at total social control. Burke believed that the system of France was designed to control the entirety of social existence, both in that country and abroad (he described France as "the bank of deposit and the bank of circulation of all the pernicious principles that are forming in every state") (Two Letters v: 344). Thus the French system was not only different in extent, but in kind, from the political system of Britain: where the latter aimed to produce limited effects within a defined field, the former sought to displace all alternative systems, leaving only itself as the system of all systems.

As this example suggests, the same author might often use "system" in several different ways, and these two senses by no means exhausted the ways in which the term might be used. When, for example, Thomas Cooper charged Burke with being a "systematic opponent of every Species of Reform," he referred to the method of Burke's writing, rather an external set of institutions. Thus, expanding on Clifford Siskin's threefold typology of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century meanings of "system," we can outline four leading senses of the term: system as genre, as moralizing perspective, as a series of institutions, and as a totalizing field of control that both enabled and constrained individual choices and actions. (5)

Both David Simpson and Clifford Siskin have reminded us of the importance of the genre of system in the eighteenth century. To write in the genre of system was to commit oneself to the production of knowledge by means of deduction from sound principles, and "systems" were most recognizable when an author began with an outline of principles and employed expository prose (Siskin, "1798: The Year of the System" 13-15). Hundreds, if not thousands, of works were written in this genre in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, ranging from discussions of natural philosophy to theology to moral philosophy to economic theory to oratory. (6) Both Simpson and Siskin have argued that the genre of system tended to have a radical political valence, for conservative authors linked it to extreme forms of Protestant dissent that emerged during the English Civil War. Authors opposed to systems thus favored literary genres that avoided the deductive premises of systems, such as aphorisms or what Simpson calls the "miscellaneous style and diversified style" of Shaftesbury's Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711). (7)

Yet if system could refer to a genre of and its implied premises about writing, it could also denote a moralizing recognition of the nature of reality. Shaftesbury, for example, opted for an anti-systematic style in his Characteristics but he contended in the text itself that the universe was best understood as a set of interlocking and co-dependent "systems." (8) He contended that each individual animal was itself a system, but those systems were part of another, larger, system (the species), which were themselves parts of the system of living things; this system, in turn, was a part of the "systems of a globe or earth," which was itself part of the solar system, and so on. (9) Shaftesbury's description was both a metaphysical claim and a moral-epistemological proscription. That is, his description was supposed to represent accurately the structure of the universe, but, at the same time, it was a moral claim about how one should perceive one's relationship to the reality. One's moral status was dependant upon the ability to conceive of nature as a series of systems, for, he suggested, by recognizing the beauty of systems, one perceived the necessity of sacrifice. Thus, in the section of Characteristics entitled The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody, Philocles argued that "in the several orders of terrestrial forms a resignation is required, a sacrifice and mutual yielding of natures one to another" (245), and this was translated directly into political terms, for it meant that, by nature, some classes were confined to labor and others to...

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