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T H Green's Doubts About Hegel's Political Philosophy1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 June 2015
Abstract
In this paper I look at T H Green's use of Hegel, with specific reference to political philosophy. I try to assess in particular the limits which Green set to his use of Hegel. I begin by considering briefly Green's knowledge of Hegel, and the extent to which Hegel's ideas can be discerned in his writings. Then I discuss a famous passage which is usually cited as expressing a serious reservation about Hegel's view of politics. I conclude that it is by no means clear how Hegelian Green is: and that this is not a question which Green would have thought important.
Green died suddenly, weeks before his forty-sixth birthday. He left no autobiography to help us trace his intellectual debts, and we have to rely on the evidence of his writings together with the recollections of his friends. Consequently it is impossible to be certain how much of any particular author Green read. Writers on philosophy were not then generally expected to support every statement with references. Green himself seldom appends footnotes which reveal his sources. Furthermore, his friend and first biographer Nettleship tells us, Green
never overcame his native repugnance to wide reading. He liked, as he used to say, to ‘browse’ amongst books, and it was by brooding over the great sayings of philosophers rather than by traversing their systems in detail, that he seemed to get most of his intellectual nourishment. His mind was reflective, not accumulative.
- Type
- Hegel and British Idealism
- Information
- Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain , Volume 16 , Issue 1: number 31 , Spring/Summer 1995 , pp. 61 - 72
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Hegel Society of Great Britain 1995
Footnotes
1
Revised version of a paper delivered at the Hegel Society of Great Britain conference on “Hegel and British Idealism”, Pembroke College, Oxford, 8-9 September 1994. I am grateful to the participants for their comments.
References
2 R L Nettleship, “Memoir”, in his edition of Works of Thomas Hill Green: Vol III. Miscellanies and Memoir (London, 1888), pp cxxv–viGoogle Scholar.
3 Nettleship, , “Memoir”, p xvii Google Scholar; see too Richter, Melvin, The Politics of Conscience: T H Green and his Age (London, 1964), pp 74-5 and 84 Google Scholar. Green's subsequent “falling out with Jowett”, apparently over the appropriateness for Balliol undergraduates of Green's manner of teaching philosophy, is discussed by Richter, pp 148-57, and Thomas, Geoffrey, The Moral Philosophy of T H Green (Oxford, 1987), pp 47–9Google Scholar.
4 Geoffrey Faber, (London, 1957), p 178; see pp 177-83 generally. On Jowett and Hegel, see too Abbott, Evelyn and Campbell, Lewis, eds, The Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett, MA (London, 1897), vol i, pp 89-92, 129-30 and 260–1Google Scholar, and vol ii, p 250; Metz, Rudolf, A Hundred Years of British Philosophy (London, 1938), pp 250–3Google Scholar; and Robbins, Peter, The British Hegelians 1875-1925 (New York & London, 1982), pp 29-32 and 43–7Google Scholar (for a qualification see my review, this Bulletin, no 7 [1983], pp 49-50).
5 Faber, , Jowett, p 24 Google Scholar. Faber (pp 181-2) berates Muirhead, in his well-known article on “How Hegel Came to England” (Mind, 1927, reprinted in The Platonic Tradition in Anglo-Saxon Philosophy: Studies in the History of Idealism in England and America [London, 1931]Google Scholar), for neglecting Jowett's role: however, Muirhead acknowledges it in Reflections by a Journeyman in Philosophy: on the Movements of Thought and Practice in his Time (London, 1942), p 40 Google Scholar.
6 Abbott and Campbell, vol i, p 261.
7 Metz, , Hundred Years of British Philosophy, p 269 Google Scholar; Muirhead, , Reflections by a Journeyman in Philosophy, pp 39–40 Google Scholar; Faber, Jowett, p 180; Richter, , Politics of Conscience, p 71 Google Scholar; Wempe, Ben, Beyond Equality: A Study of T H Green's Theory of Positive Freedom (Delft, 1986), p 21 Google Scholar; and Thomas, , Moral Philosophy of Green p 51 Google Scholar. Muirhead saw Green a good deal in 1877-9 (Reflections, pp 41-2).
8 Ben Wempe plausibly dates Green's serious study of Hegel from 1861: Beyond Equality, pp 22-3. Ch 1 is a careful estimate, based on the unpublished manuscripts, of Hegel's influence on the formation of Green's philosophy, judging that “in youth, Green was very much taken with Hegel's philosophy” but “in developing his own mature philosophy Green gradually moved to a more independent position” (p 13).
9 Faber, Jowett, p 184 and n 2; Quinn, Vincent and Prest, John, eds, Dear Miss Nightingale: A Selection of Benjamin Jowett's Letters to Florence Nightingale 1860-1893 (Oxford, 1987), pp 51 and 147 Google Scholar, and Abbott and Campbell, vol ii, p 250; Abbott and Campbell, vol i, p 91 n 1.
10 Oxford Essays, contributed by Members of the University. 1855 (London, 1855)Google Scholar.
11 Neither Wempe, (Beyond Equality, pp 26-7 and 62–3)Google Scholar nor Thomas, (Moral Philosophy of Green, pp 46–7Google Scholar) is convinced that Green made the translation, though I do not think they prove he did not.
12 For Green's Hegelian reading of Aristotle, see “The Philosophy of Aristotle” (1866), reprinted in Works: Vol. III, pp 92-125, and on it Wempe, , Beyond Equality, pp 64–71 Google Scholar; and on Green's Hegelian reading of Kant, see Metz, , Hundred Years of Philosophy, pp 272–3Google Scholar.
13 Review of Caird's, John Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (1880), in Works: Vol III, p 146 Google Scholar.
14 Edward Caird, Preface to Andrew Seth [Pringle-Pattison] and Haldane, R B, eds, Essays in Philosophical Criticism (London, 1883), p. 5 Google Scholar.
15 “On the Different Senses of ‘Freedom’ as Applied to Will and to the Moral Progress of Man” (lecture delivered 1879), in Harris, Paul and Morrow, John, eds, T H Green: Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation and Other Writings (Cambridge, 1986), pp 228–49Google Scholar.
16 This last expression seems to tie “the Greek philosophers” to Aristotle in particular.
17 ie “state action” generally. Green uses the word in the old sense of the entire government administration and regulation of society, including economic and welfare functions and public works, not just that concerned with law and order. This is of course Hegel's usage.
18 This is confirmed by what he says elsewhere about, and by his concern for, the vulnerability of “the less favoured members of society” Prolegomena to Ethics, ed Bradley, A C [Oxford, 1883], sec. 245)Google Scholar. He thinks especially of the poor and of women.
19 Romans 8 xxi. The comparison with St Paul runs through the entire lecture. See the second paragraph of section 2 for St Paul and the contrast between servitude and sonship.
20 Thomas, , Moral Philosophy of T H Green, pp 51–2Google Scholar. For Thomas's overall comparison of Green and Hegel, see pp 45-54, 192-4 and 286-7.
21 Moral Philosophy of T H Green, pp 52-3. This is repeated onpp 193 and 286-7.
22 The Philosophy of Right, trans Knox, T M (Oxford, 1942)Google Scholar, secs 43R, 57R, 57A, 65, 66, 66R, 66 A, and 67A.
23 Lectures on the Philosophy of History, trans Sibree, J (1858), p 19 (1905 repr)Google Scholar.
24 Philosophy of Right, secs 244-6, 248 and 252-3.
25 Philosophy of Right, pp 10-11.
26 Philosophy of Right, sec 258A.
27 Kirk Willis cites seven periodical articles between 1838 and 1849 depicting Hegel in these terms: “The Introduction and Critical Reception of Hegelian Thought in Britain 1830-1900”, Victorian Studies, 32 (1988–1989), pp. 85-111, at pp 103–4Google Scholar.
28 Hegel, Jowett stated in evidence to the Select Committee of the House of Lords on University Tests, 1871, “was, or believed himself to be, a Conservative both in religion and politics”: Abbott, Evelyn and Campbell, Lewis, eds, Letters of Benjamin Jowett, MA (London, 1899), p 22 Google Scholar.
29 Oxford Essays. 1855, pp 213-15.
30 Hegel (Edinburgh and London, 1883), pp 83 and 90-5. Wallace, William, translator of the Logic (1874)Google Scholar and Philosophy of Mind (1894) from the Encyclopaedia, described the view that the Philosophy of Right was “a philosophy in the interests of Prussian absolutism” as vulgar and partisan: undated lecture, in Caird, Edward, ed, Lectures and Essays on Natural Theology and Ethics by William Wallace (Oxford, 1898), p. 427 Google Scholar.
31 Note too “seemed” in his general verdict on Hegel, text to n 13 above.
32 Prolegomena to Ethics, sec 270.