 Samuel Taylor Coleridge is the thinker chiefly responsible for introducing German Idealism to English-speaking readers, though in the person of Kant rather than Hegel. As Townshend comments, “it is quite normal [to] write the history of English conservatism…without reference to Coleridge” (1993: 32), perhaps because the conservative appeal to experience is wrongly taken to be empiricist. Coleridge was an ardent enthusiast for the French Revolution who, disillusioned with its excesses, came to share Burke’s “conservative constitutionalism”. He declared that