A central charge against T. H. Green’s conception of positive freedom is that it confuses freedom and social justice. Rather than illuminating and elucidating the meaning of liberty, Green, so the criticism goes, under the disguise of a definition, recommends social ideals and principles such as social justice. The validity of such arguments is not the focus of my concern. I argue, instead, that contemporary efforts to defend social legislation, the welfare state, and socialism from the claims of negative freedom overlook the important interplay between context, conceptual mutability, and conceptual relationality in the construction of normative political arguments. Green’s conceptualization of positive freedom unveils just such interplay. To reclaim the vital conceptual-normative role of positive freedom in the tradition of liberalism and its contemporary discourse is the task of this paper.

Chapter 3 further establishes the significance of Aristotelian virtue theory within the landscape of British moral philosophy, where it has been almost entirely neglected. It begins with the 1874 publication of Henry Sidgwick’s The Methods of Ethics, which was a significant literary event because it identified virtue ethics with “aesthetic” modes of reasoning. An Aristotelian conception of stylistic character subsequently flourished in the philosophical writings of J.S. Mill, John Grote, T.H. Green, and Bernard Bosanquet, all of whom rejected the dissociation of ethics from aesthetics and imagined character as an aesthetic realization of the self. In this way, philosophers in the Aristotelian tradition provided an ethical justification for aesthetic autonomy and the character-based formalism of Victorian stylistic criticism.