Coleridge and the Conservative Imagination

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Mercer University Press, 2003 - 286 Seiten
Why should anyone bother with Coleridge either as a theologian or a political theorist? At first in desperation, but now quite deliberately, Alan Gregory convincingly suggests that one should bother because Coleridge mounted an imporant critique of reductionist explanations of human society and moral agency, and because Coleridge has much regarding that important enterprise to teach us still. While Gregory also offers a perceptive outline of early British conservatism, his main concern is with Coleridge's attack on reductionism, including his defense of the will against associationism, his criticisms of Enlightenment historiography, his discussions of the inadequacies of political economy, and the Trinitarian arguments against monism. There is, Gregory remarks, no grasping the range or inner dynamic of Coleridge's thought without appreciating his religious vision, his theology. Indeed, Coleridge himself affirmed that should we try to conceive a man without the ideas of God, eternity, freedom, will, absolute truth, of the good, the true, the beautiful, the infinite...the man will have vanished.

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Inhalt

Coleridge among the Conservatives
1
Among the Conservatives
10
The Later Political Writings
27
Philosophical Psychology and Conservative Politics
39
Identification and the Goals of Rhetoric
42
Imagination and the Renewal of the Mind
51
Imagination and the Wisdom of History
71
History as Prophecy
96
Stifling the Imagination
179
The Conservative Imagination Culture Nature and Grace
197
Church State and the Higher Reason
208
The Ordering of Nature and Culture
233
The Worlds Befriending Opposite
241
The Imagination
255
Conclusion
259
Bibliography
267

Social Conflict and the Balance of the Mind
119
Reason and the Critique of Commerce
143
Social Criticism and the Religious Imagination
167

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Seite 12 - The science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming it, is like every other experimental science, not to be taught a priori. Nor is it a short experience that can instruct us in that practical science ; because the real effects of moral causes are not always immediate ; but that which in the first instance is prejudicial may be excellent in its remoter operation ; and its excellence may arise even from the ill effects it produces in the beginning. The reverse also happens ;...
Seite 13 - ... the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, molding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole, at one time, is never old, or middle-aged, or young, but, in a condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through the varied tenor of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression.
Seite 14 - ... we have consecrated the state, that no man should approach to look into its defects or corruptions but with due caution ; that he should never dream of beginning its reformation by its subversion; that he should approach to the faults of the state as to the wounds of a father, with pious awe and trembling solicitude.
Seite 22 - Besides the ideas, with their annexed pains and pleasures, which are presented by the sense; the mind of man possesses a sort of creative power of its own; either in representing at pleasure the images of things in the order and manner in which they were received by the senses, or in combining those images in a new manner, and according to a different order.

Autoren-Profil (2003)

Alan P. R. Gregory is associate professor of Church History, Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest (Austin).

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