Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation and Other Writings [Paperback]

Thomas Hill Green (Author), Paul Harris (Editor), John Morrow (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 28, 1986

This book contains the political writing of T. H. Green and selections from those of his ethical writings which bear on his political philosophy. Green's best known work, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, is included in full, as are the essay on freedom and the lecture 'Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract'. There are also extracts from Green's lectures on the English Revolution and from the Prolegomena to Ethics, and a number of previously unpublished essays and notes. All the texts have been corrected against Green's manuscripts, held in Balliol College. The editors have provided a list of variants, full notes and an introductory essay on the importance of Green's form of revitalised liberalism. The volume will be a valuable sourcebook for students of Green's thought and the history of nineteenth-century liberalism.

Editorial Reviews

Book Description

Contains the political writing of T. H. Green as well as selections from his ethical writings that relate to his political philosophy. Also includes extracts from his lectures on the English Revolution, the "Prologomena to Ethics," as well as a number of previously unpublished essays and notes.

Product Details

• Paperback: 396 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (February 28, 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521278104
• ISBN-13: 978-0521278102
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,750,880 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A watershed in the history of political theory, February 6, 2001

By 

John S. Ryan "Scott Ryan" (Cuyahoga Falls, OH) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation and Other Writings (Paperback)

This is it, folks -- the point at which classical and modern liberalism began to diverge. Everybody in either camp is indebted, in one way or another, to the great Thomas Hill Green. And sooner or later, everybody in either camp will have to come to terms with him.

Now, in my own not entirely humble opinion, Green's criticisms of other liberal theorists are well-founded and he himself has gotten the philosophical foundations just about exactly right. Basically, his claim is that (my paraphrase) the source of our rights against one another, as well as the source of the state itself, is our possession of an ideal common end in which the well-being of each of us is coherently included.

He develops this account very painstakingly, and one of the joys of reading it is watching him make sense of Rousseau's tortured notion of the "general will." By the time Green is through rescuing this doctrine from Rousseau, it becomes something altogether respectable: that (my paraphrase again) there is an overarching ideal end at which our actions aim, and it is that end which we _would_ have if all of our present aims were thoroughly modified and informed by reflective reason.

I say "_would_ have" with some reservations, since for Green (as for Bosanquet and Blanshard, who followed him here) there is a clear sense in which we _really_ have this ideal end. But this point takes us afield into Green's metaphysics, which are better covered in his _Prolegomena to Ethics_.

As I said, this volume marks the watershed between classical and modern liberalism. Green is often associated with the "modern" side of the divide, but today's reader will be surprised to see just how "classical liberal" Green was (in, e.g., his opposition to paternalistic government and in a good many other respects). Why, heck, there are passages that could have been lifted from David Conway's _Classical Liberalism: The Unvanquished Ideal_.

It does seem, though, that in allowing a positive role for the governmental institutions of a geographically-demarcated State, he has started down the slippery slope to the modern welfare-warfare state. Like Hegel before him and like Bosanquet after him, Green usually means by "state," not the bureaucratic machinery of a territorial government, but the whole of society including _all_ of its "institutions of governance." But -- also like Hegel and Bosanquet -- he does not always keep these two things firmly distinguished, and at times he is clearly thinking specifically of the governmental institutions of a territorial nation-state rather than what some of us would call the "market."

He is also a bit unclear on the ground of "rights." W.D. Ross rightly takes him to task for this in _The Right and the Good_: Green writes on one page that we have _no_ rights until these are recognized by society, and then turns around and writes as though "society" is recognizing rights we _already_ have. To my mind Ross clearly has the better of the argument here, though the problem is not, I think, terribly hard to fix.

On the whole, then, it is probably no wonder that Green and his crowd set into motion -- whether inadvertently or otherwise -- a stream of "liberalism" that would eventually find a far, far larger role for the State than any that Green himself would have approved. But to my mind, these difficulties are removable excrescences, not the heart of his theory. (And it is also worth bearing in mind that Green provides moral grounds for _resisting_ the State: he acknowledges that no actual State is really ideal and, insofar as it falls short of the ideal, should be brought firmly into the service of our common end.)

The theory itself seems to me to be sound. In fact, despite the aforementioned disagreements and several others, I would nominate this volume as perhaps _the_ single greatest work on liberal political theory.

Again, at some point every "liberal" of any stripe will have to come to terms with Green's ideas (perhaps in highly mutated form). And if, with minor tweezing, Green's basic outlook is sound, it also -- suitably adjusted -- forms the proper basis for the classical-liberal commonwealth.

It therefore behooves classical liberals and libertarians to get the word directly from Green himself. Those other "liberals" aren't _entirely_ wrong.