Coalgebras provide a unifying semantic framework for a wide variety of modal logics. It has previously been shown that the
class of coalgebras for an endofunctor can always be axiomatised in rank 1. Here we establish the converse, i.e. every rank 1
modal logic has a sound and strongly complete coalgebraic semantics. As a consequence, recent results on coalgebraic modal logic, in particular generic decision
procedures and upper complexity bounds, become applicable to arbitrary rank 1 modal logics, without regard to their semantic
status; we thus obtain purely syntactic versions of these results. As an extended example, we apply our framework to recently
defined deontic logics.