Liberalism and the Idealist Philosophy of Thomas Hill Green

• Author: Kenneth R. Hoover
• DOI: 10.1177/106591297302600311
• Published date: 01 September 1973
• Date: 01 September 1973
• Subject Matter: Articles

LIBERALISM AND THE IDEALIST PHILOSOPHY
OF THOMAS HILL GREEN
KENNETH R. HOOVER
The College of Wooster
HE
&dquo;common good,&dquo; &dquo;the public interest,&dquo; &dquo;positive freedom,&dquo; &dquo;voluntar-
~ ism,&dquo; and &dquo;individual self-development&dquo; are all phrases loosely associated
with liberal political philosophy. The currency given these political symbols
is in part attributable to a nineteenth-century English liberal idealist, Thomas Hill
Green.’ The difficulties of definition and application these terms have encountered
in the twentieth century may in part be traced to Green’s inadequacies as a moral
philosopher and, indeed, to the methodological weaknesses of traditional idealist
moral philosophy. Because such terminology is important to liberalism, it is worth
considering the system of ideas Green developed to link them together. And be-
cause of the demands of our time for a more satisfactory philosophy on the
left, it is worth analyzing the problems which Green’s enterprise leaves unresolved.
T. H. Green (1836-82), tutor and fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, was a
central figure in the intellectual world of high Victorian culture. His philosophical
and administrative patron at Oxford was the great Benjamin Jowett (though he
once dismissed Green’s terminology as &dquo;fuliginous jargon&dquo;). R. L. Nettleship was
his critic and biographer, Bernard Bosanquet and L. T. Hobhouse his intellectual
heirs.2
2
Green’s Lectures on Political Obligation, contained in the three-volume
Collected Works (1889) and reprinted separately, and his Prolegomena to Ethics,
published posthumously in 1890, are his best known political works.
The first task is to establish an understanding of Green’s argument, its origins,
and its difl’iculties. The investigation of these matters requires an examination of
the methodology of T. H. Green as a moral philosopher. The origins of Green’s
formal philosophic critique of empiricism and utilitarianism will be examined.
These preliminaries will permit us to focus on a crucial concept in Green’s work:
consciousness. The delineation of this concept is basic to a reconstruction of Green’s
philosophy of politics. With Green’s framework in mind, we may look for the
flaw which cast doubt on the credibility of Green’s idealism as a justification for
liberal values.
1
I am indebted to Murray Edelman, Booth Fowler, and William Young of the University
of Wisconsin, Donald Hanson of the University of Utah, Lane Davis of the University
of Iowa, David Lorenzen of the Colegio de Mexico, Mulford Sibley of the University of
Minnesota, and Harry Holloway of the University of Oklahoma for their critical com-
ments at various stages. They may be excused for finding the results unrecognizable.
2
The basic biographical source on T. H. Green is by R. L. Nettleship in the form of a
"Memoir" in Vol. III of The Works of T. H. Green (London: Longmans, 1889, pp.
1-clx. Melvin Richter’s study is the most comprehensive: T. H. Green: The Politics of
Conscience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964). Richter explains Green’s
essential orientation in terms of his Christian evangelical convictions (see especially pp.
116-17). Richter’s thesis is disputed by John Rodman in his very useful introduction
to The Political Theory of T. H. Green (New York: Appleton Century-Crofts, 1964),
pp. 1-40. Rodman argues that Green is best seen as an exponent of German idealism
as an answer to the dilemma posed by the discrediting of Christianity and the moral
incapacities of scientific thinking (pp. 21-25).
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551
T. H. GREEN, MORAL PHILOSOPHER
Modem philosophy began with Descartes’ rationalist arguments concerning
the nature of substance. These were aimed in part at supplying science with some
bedrock concept on which all investigations could be built: the development of
defensible ontological theories was thought to be a precondition for the develop-
ment of a natural science of human behavior. This philosophic tradition arose not
from a direct preoccupation with the explanation of human behavior, but rather
from what philosophers thought was a prior enquiry, the basis of human existence
and human knowledge. The classic battles of ontology need not concern us, but the
philosophical method of these battles will. Throughout the modern period philoso-
phy has been an essentially introspective enterprise which developed its own rules,
moves, and strategies much like those of chess. If a general principle was enun-
ciated, the task was to find a few convincing counter-examples. If a deduction was
made from some grand principle, the job was to find a tautology or contradiction
in the meaning of the terms. Another standard strategy for dealing with general
principles was to outflank them through categorization. References to experience
were confined largely to the searching out of counterexamples or to untested gen-
eralizations about what the common sense of the matter seemed to be or what the
mass
of people were supposed to be doing or thinking.
Behavioralism as a strategy of investigation begins, at least in theory, from
the opposite direction. Rather than attempting by precise definition of general
mental concepts to know reality, behavioralism, to put it crudely, begins with the
observable actions of people and tries to find consistencies and discontinuities.
Either consciously or unconsciously, concepts and models are employed in the
analysis of evidence and these conceptual structures are, or should be, constantly
tested against systematic observation and revised accordingly. By replication and
diversification of observation, and by a concentration on refining varieties of
measurement, generalizations of ever greater power might be developed.
In the event, Thomas Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed.,
1970) and Stephen Toulmin (Foresight and Understanding, 1961 ) show us that
the pattern of development is not smooth and that it is attended by illusion and mis-
conception, not to mention prejudice. Nevertheless, as Kuhn and Toulmin also
argue, systematic reality testing, however imperfect, is crucial to such advancement
of knowledge as we may be capable of. While the methodological argument can-
not be extended here, perhaps the foregoing is sufficient to indicate the perspective
of this article.
It is the idealist philosopher’s dream to find that set of categories, axioms, and
corollaries which would explain all of what is observable. The summit of this
aspiration is to be found in the notion of the necessary causal relation -
an abstrac-
tion drawn from overt behavior. The lesser goal was to so characterize and cate-
gorize human ideas that a justification could be developed which would support
prescriptions for political, social, and moral life.
T. H. Green was of this philosophical tradition. He was, in addition, tied
closely in upbringing, temperament, and surroundings to the Christian evangelical
tradition in England. Green wanted to harness the power of philosophic insight to

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552
create a vision of a kind of good life which could be reached by the common person
who would but follow the cues and hints provided in daily intercourse with the
world. That is, he set out to develop a model of human consciousness, an abstract
model consisting of general propositions about people in their social milieu, which
could be seen by inference to relate to the common aspirations of humankind. If
these inferences could be accepted as valid, so also could Green’s prescriptions for
the best modes of political organization and state action. This was Green’s method-
ology.
T. H. Green’s formal philosophic starting point was a critique of the whole
tradition of British empiricism, and the utilitarianism which he felt was its direct
descendant. A
major part of Green’s collected works consists of critiques of Locke,
Berkeley, Hume, Mill, Spencer, and Lewes. It would be tedious and unnecessary
to review all of these critiques. There were two central arguments which Green
deployed against empiricism, utilitarianism, and naturalism (three aspects of the
same persuasion in Green’s view). The first was a critique of hedonistic pleasure-
pain assumptions on the ground that they could not satisfactorily explain important
aspects of human conduct. The second argument was an epistemological attack on
the theory of knowledge which supported empiricism.
In his attack on the pleasure-pain principle, Green asserted that human be-
havior cannot be explained without reference to abstract goals and ends. He notes,
in an analysis of Locke’s definitions of happiness, that reference is made to the
&dquo;greatest sum of pleasure&dquo; and &dquo;pleasure in general,&dquo; both abstractions of a very
high order.3 Green’s contention is that a distinction needs to be made between the
random pursuit of discrete pleasures and the quest for a general state of pleasure.
The former, says Green, is really what utilitarianism is based on and it does not
explain many self-sacrificing acts of human behavior. These acts demonstrate that
the study of human behavior must reveal a pursuit of some abstractly defined gen-
eral good for the self. The self is capable of innovation and can direct its efforts
toward the improvement of itself and others. Out of this, Green goes on to show,
comes
the idea of a highest good defined apart from discrete pleasures.4
4
Furthermore, according to Green, the pursuit of particular pleasures always
winds up in self-defeat occasioned by...