ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to reconstruct the political theory and context of Pantisocracy by refusing to take as axiomatic the revisionary manoeuvring of the later Coleridge, so anxious publicly to disassociate himself from the radical movement. The principles of Pantisocracy had an enduring significance in the later thought of Coleridge and, by extension, William Wordsworth, and are particularly manifest in the suppressed politics of the 'Preface' to Lyrical Ballads. Samuel Taylor Coleridge retrospective account of Pantisocracy in 1809 was to set the agenda for subsequent accounts of this episode in his radical youth, depicting it as a Utopian venture unconnected either with the main currents of the 1790s political scene or with his later thinking. The starting point of the Pantisocracy scheme seems to have been a competition between two land-agents of similar political convictions to sell off plots of farmland in America to French and English radicals whose position at home was becoming increasingly dangerous.
