This dissertation is a study of the epistemic foundations of English Romantic politics, in particular how Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley understood the truth-value of political propositions like "Republicanism is the ideal form of government" and "The people have a right to insurrection." I argue that the Romantics were not only engaged with ideas of political obligation and contract, reform and revolution, liberty and right, but also with the status of these ideas: the conditions of what Coleridge and Shelley call "political knowledge." In their poetry and political prose, the Romantics moved away from teleological and descriptivist models of epistemic justification by inquiring into the nature of the mind itself.

Coleridge sought justification in the structure of the mind, which he believed determined the validity of political claims. Wordsworth contended that the political problems of his time arose primarily from a lack of knowledge of human nature. But unlike the strict empiricists before him, Wordsworth also believed that political knowledge might be gained from the mind's experience of aesthetic, specifically poetic, pleasure. Shelley premised his idea of reform on the mind's perception of historical change and patterns. The project of Romanticism was to increase the mind's sensitivity to these patterns, including the progress of what they called the "spirit of Liberty." One of their most fundamental justifying principles, the spirit of liberty did not exist entirely in the world, nor was it purely a creation of the mind: it was something known through the mind's willful and active engagement with the world.

The English Romantics emerge from this dissertation a more pragmatic, supple group of political thinkers than previously imagined; the history of their political thought emerges as a continuous investigation of fixed principles, not a complete loss of faith in 1790s radicalism.