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A Modern ColeridgeRe-reading Culture and Addiction

A Modern Coleridge: Re-reading Culture and Addiction [In the Church and State, Coleridge outlines the antagonism between what he sees as the principles of ‘permanence’ and the principles of ‘progression’. The former is represented by the aristocracy or the ‘landed interest’, while the latter is connected to the mercantile, the manufacturing, the distributive, and the professional classes. The idea of the nation presupposes both ‘permanence’ and ‘progression’. By progression, Coleridge means ‘the progression of the state, in the arts and comforts of life, in the diffusion of the information and knowledge […], in short, all advances of civilisation, and the rights and privileges of citizens’ (25, italics added). However, civilisation, taken in itself, is a ‘mixed good’, a pharmakon: a remedy that can poison and a poison that can remedy:1[C]ivilisation is itself but a mixed good, if not far more a corrupting influence, the hectic of disease, not the bloom of health, and a nation so distinguished can more fitly be called a varnished than a polished people; where this civilisation is not grounded in cultivation: the harmonious development of those qualities and faculties that characterise our humanity’. (Ch & St, 42)] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

A Modern ColeridgeRe-reading Culture and Addiction

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Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan UK
Copyright
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2015
ISBN
978-1-349-70884-0
Pages
61 –77
DOI
10.1057/9781137531469_6
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[In the Church and State, Coleridge outlines the antagonism between what he sees as the principles of ‘permanence’ and the principles of ‘progression’. The former is represented by the aristocracy or the ‘landed interest’, while the latter is connected to the mercantile, the manufacturing, the distributive, and the professional classes. The idea of the nation presupposes both ‘permanence’ and ‘progression’. By progression, Coleridge means ‘the progression of the state, in the arts and comforts of life, in the diffusion of the information and knowledge […], in short, all advances of civilisation, and the rights and privileges of citizens’ (25, italics added). However, civilisation, taken in itself, is a ‘mixed good’, a pharmakon: a remedy that can poison and a poison that can remedy:1[C]ivilisation is itself but a mixed good, if not far more a corrupting influence, the hectic of disease, not the bloom of health, and a nation so distinguished can more fitly be called a varnished than a polished people; where this civilisation is not grounded in cultivation: the harmonious development of those qualities and faculties that characterise our humanity’. (Ch & St, 42)]

Published: Dec 21, 2015

Keywords: Active Virtue; Professional Class; Harmonious Development; Lyric Poetry; Nationalist Discourse

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