Coleridge’s ‘ Aesthetic State’

Abstract

The apparent inability of liberal government to foster the arts was, to Coleridge, particularly grating in Britain since it prided itself on the ancient personal freedoms preserved in the constitution. But that is not to say that ‘despotism’ was any sort of solution. Coleridge’s point is that the liberal market economy deals only in monetary value and so cannot take into its calculations the worth of aesthetic artefacts – with predictably disastrous consequences.