LYMAN TOWER SARGENT GREEN, T.H. (1836–82)

LYMAN TOWER SARGENT GREEN, T.H. (1836–82)

Thomas Hill Green was born on 7 April 1836 in Birkin, Yorkshire, and died in Oxford on

26 March 1882. He attended Rugby School from 1850 to 1855 and then entered Balliol College, Oxford. Green was elected to a fellowship at Balliol College in 1860 and to the Whyte’s Professorship of Moral Philosophy in the University of Oxford in 1878. He promoted the reform of university education, its extension to provisional centres and access by women, and was also active in movements to promote popular education and reform of educational provision for the middle classes, serving as an Assistant Commissioner on the Taunton Commission on Secondary Education and later on the Oxford School Board. His service on these bodies, together with his active role in temperance at both the local and national levels, demonstrated Green’s principled commitment to practical politics and to an ethic of universal citizenship. He identified with the ‘advanced’ wing of the Liberal Party and was elected in 1876 (as a City rather than University representative) to the Oxford City Council. With the exception of a few articles and pamphlets, and a book-length introduction to the Green and Grosse edition of The Philosophical Works of David Hume, the bulk of Green’s writings appeared posthumously. The most important of these works were the Prolegomena to Ethics and the Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation.

Throughout Green’s career at Oxford, his college was dominated by Benjamin Jowett,

a liberal (on some views a dangerously liberal) figure in Victorian theological controversy, the translator of Plato and Aristotle, and an early admirer of G.W.F.Hegel’s philosophy (see HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM). Like Jowett, Green was committed to liberal Anglican theology and to a strongly positive view of the importance of Ancient Greek political thought and philosophy. But while Jowett later regretted the enthusiasm for Hegel that he had helped foster, this view was not shared either by Green, BERNARD BOSANQUET or F.H.BRADLEY, younger members of what came to be seen as an ‘English’ or ‘British’ school of philosophical Idealism.

Green’s philosophy embraced a characteristically Idealist argument concerning the subject and object in knowledge, which was directed against the sceptical impasse into which empiricist accounts were always driven. For Green, however, human consciousness could be explained only by reference to the ‘eternal consciousness’ (or ‘God’), the source of knowledge of the physical and moral world. This formulation gave philosophical support to Green’s religious views and was welcomed by some of his contemporaries for this very reason. It also provided the basis for a system of ethics in which the end of human conduct was thought to entail the progressive ‘realization’ of a conception of self that has its origin in the ‘eternal consciousness’. But while Green

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placed a premium on self-directed action as the only basis for moral perfection, insisting that the standard of worth must relate to the ‘good of persons’, he stressed that such an idea of the good was shared or ‘common’ and could be realized only within a social context in which individuals were motivated by the desire to further the ‘common good’.

The idea of the ‘common good’ entailed a conception of social life in which the realization of each individual was harmonized with that of others. In advanced stages of moral development realization took place through the freely willed actions of socially conscious beings committed to perfecting themselves in the course of enhancing the range of opportunities for autonomous action available to other members of a given society, and ultimately of humankind. The emphasis on moral self-development, and the consequent stress on free action, connected Green’s political thinking with important currents in mid-Victorian liberalism and, indeed, with the highly moralized liberal nationalism of European figures such as GIUSEPPE MAZZINI. At the same time, however, his understanding of the ‘common good’ as a progressive development of consciousness, the dependence of consciousness upon mutual recognition and his focus on the embodiment of a community’s consciousness of its good in a succession of political and social institutions was reminiscent of parts of Hegel’s political philosophy.

From this perspective, Green can be seen as reformulating core liberal ideas so that liberty was given a positive cast that focused on creating the conditions in which moral autonomy would be more likely. Rights delineated the possibilities of autonomous action, but they did so in relation to claims whose recognition reflected judgments on the historically specific requirements of the common good. These judgements were incorporated in law, the source and guarantor of which was the collective moral sense of the community, more or less imperfectly incorporated in the institutions and actions of the ‘state’. A reconsideration of the character and role of the ‘state’ was central to Green’s project. His stressed that its coercive capacities rested ultimately on the ‘will’ of its members, reflecting their understanding of its moral significance and giving heightened effect to this as it freed itself from class bias and became more participatory and democratic. In this and other respects, Green’s political views were markedly radical. He was a proponent of free trade but insisted that this objective needed to be conditioned by the requirements of a positive view of freedom that, under prevailing conditions, justified the mobilization of the legal powers of the state to promote education, public health, temperance and to eliminate the consequences of historical injustices inflicted by the aristocracy on the lower classes of both Britain and Ireland. In foreign affairs, Green was opposed to militarism and imperialism.

While the obloquy attracted by Bosanquet’s political philosophy in the early twentieth century did not extend to Green, his ethical and meta-physical theories were subjected to severe criticism in the 1930s by H.A.Prichard and J.P.Plamenatz. Since the appearance of Melvin Richter’s intellectual biography in 1964, however, Green’s political and ethical philosophy have become the focus of extensive and generally sympathetic scholarly treatment.