When Marilyn Butler's Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries was published in 1981, I had to rewrite my own work on Coleridge to make it intellectually respectable. Her astute sense of the politics behind Coleridge's philosophical addresses to his reading public made it impossible to write about him purely in the manner of a history of ideas. Suddenly a practice deriving from Lovejoy and Wellek appeared inadequate, or at least grievously incomplete. In addition to the ability to read the code of historical commentary embedded in ostensibly pure philosophical speculation, Butler reasonably asked for an acknowledgement in Coleridge scholarship of the European context in which Coleridge consciously wrote. The furore caused by the French Revolution was only the start of Coleridgean involvement; he had an equally complex stance towards the religious revival supporting the Bourbon restoration and the reconceiving of the role of the intellectual in the wake of accusations, from Napoleon onwards, of an earlier trahison des clercs. Chateaubriand might help in deciphering the pattern of his conservatism as much as Schelling helped uncover his philosophical techniques. Above all, while always insisting on the significance of ‘coterie’ for interpretation, Butler argued that, in the words of one of her reviews, we should not ‘keep it in the family’ where either Coleridge or Wordsworth were concerned. The question, then, that this chapter tries to answer affirmatively is: can Coleridge's philosophy be profitably placed in a European context that restores credibility to his philosophical activities?