Abstract
Mill and Coleridge make for odd bedfellows. Not only were they at opposites ends of the political spectrum, Mill a liberal if not a socialist, and Coleridge a staunch conservative after a jejeune brush with the Jacobites, but they also drank from two different philosophical streams, Mill from British empiricism and Coleridge from German idealism. Mill endorsed the forward march of Newtonian physics, and argued that economics was a science in the same manner. Coleridge, a Romantic, found the reductionist appeal to atomism and the deductive theory of Ricardo almost repulsive. Mill was respectful of Christian belief but kept his economics entirely secular. Coleridge was deeply religious and built his economics on a duty to care for the poor and destitute. For some forty years, Coleridge wrote extensively on the political and economic debates of his day, both as a journalist and as an essayist. While there is nothing that approximates the theoretical depth offered by Mill’s economics, I will argue that there is nonetheless evidence of Coleridge’s imprint, for example the fostering of individual freedom, strong dislike of the “commercial spirit” and romantic appeals to the end of economic growth.
On the whole, there is more food for thought—and the best kind of thought—in Coleridge than in all other contemporary writers (Mill, letter to John P. Nichol, 1834; Mill 1963, 12:221)
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Mill 1973 (1872).
- 3.
Mill 1965 (1871).
- 4.
See De Marchi 1974.
- 5.
- 6.
Mill 1967 (1836), 4:322.
- 7.
See Hausman 1981.
- 8.
Mill 1967 (1836), 4:331.
- 9.
- 10.
See Schabas 2005.
- 11.
See Schabas 2015.
- 12.
See Turk 1988.
- 13.
See Snyder 2006.
- 14.
- 15.
Coleridge, however, had strong antipathy to Malthus for his pessimistic predictions. On the early stages of Christian economics, see Waterman 1991. Kennedy also claims that Coleridge can fit into a movement he calls humanistic economics, to which Carlyle, Dickens, Ruskin, Morris, Shaw and H.G. Wells belong as well as some of the Christians like Kingsley. Literature and economic thought were often conjoined in this period. See Ryan 1981; Connell 2001; Gallagher 2006; and Bronk 2009. Kennedy positioned Coleridge in a movement he calls humanistic. See Kennedy 1978, 43–48.
- 16.
Mill 1963, 12:221.
- 17.
- 18.
Mill 1969 (1840), 10:120.
- 19.
Mill 1969 (1840), 10:122.
- 20.
Mill 1969 (1840), 10:155.
- 21.
Quoted in Kennedy 1978, 24.
- 22.
See Henderson 2013.
- 23.
According to Kennedy (18), “Coleridge, in the main, agreed with the theorist of laissez faire on the given free scope to self-interest in commerce.” Mill, however, took Coleridge to be an opponent.
- 24.
Coleridge 1972, 15–16.
- 25.
See Collini et al. 1983.
- 26.
Alexander Dick (2013) offers a thorough account of Coleridge on currency and monetary reform.
- 27.
Quoted in Kennedy 1978, 24.
- 28.
Economics had remarkably high standing at the time, at least in Britain. The leading scientists, William Whewell, John Herschel, and Charles Babbage, all recognized economics a science, and in prominent publications, including Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse on a Study of Natural Philosophy (1831). They also helped to highlight its representation in Section F of the BAAS (see Snyder 2006).
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Acknowledgement
I would like to acknowledge the contributions of Alexander Dick, Larry Stewart, C. Tyler DesRoches, and Christopher Mole in preparing this essay, as well as funding from SSHRC. I also benefitted from presenting this paper to the UKHET conference in Shanghai (September 2016).
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Schabas, M. (2017). More Food for Thought: Mill, Coleridge and the Dismal Science of Economics. In: Buchwald, J., Stewart, L. (eds) The Romance of Science: Essays in Honour of Trevor H. Levere. Archimedes, vol 52. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58436-2_9
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