The British philosopher Thomas Hill Green (1836-1882) founded the school of more or less Hegelian idealists that dominated British philosophy in the late 19th century.

The son of a clergyman, Thomas Hill Green was born on April 7, 1836, in Birkin, Yorkshire. Distantly related to Oliver Cromwell, he resembled him in being sober, conscientious, and practical. In 1855 Green entered Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied under Benjamin Jowett, obtained a first-class honors degree in 1859, and was elected a fellow the following year. He soon concentrated his teaching work on philosophy and, after Jowett became master of the college in 1870, took on much of the responsibility for running the college. In 1865 and 1866 he served on a commission of inquiry into the outdated grammar schools of England. In 1878 he became professor of moral philosophy.

Green expressed himself plainly and often cumbrously and was not a superficially attractive teacher. But his originality, moral seriousness, and reforming zeal had a profound influence. He firmly rejected the native philosophical tradition: its empiricist theory of knowledge, in the massive introduction to his edition of David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature; its hedonistic ethics, in his posthumously published Prolegomena to Ethics (1883). Against empiricism he argued that the mind is active in knowledge; against hedonism, that human action is free, not the causal outcome of natural desires, and that its end should be self-fulfillment, not pleasure. This conception of man's moral agency led him in Principles of Political Obligation (1883) to assign to the state the task of creating the conditions for individuals to pursue their moral perfection freely.

Green was an ardent advocate of temperance and an effective member of the Oxford town council. He was a partisan of the North in the American Civil War and was extremely hostile to the patriotic, imperialist mood inspired by Benjamin Disraeli. Green's disciples dedicated themselves to the education of a responsible, socially reforming elite and were soon active in all spheres of public life.

Further Reading

Memoir of Thomas Hill Green (1906), written by Green's pupil R.L. Nettleship, is an admirable, rather solemn work which concentrates on Green's thought. For details on his life a better source is Melvin Richter, The Politics of Conscience: T. H. Green and His Age (1964), which is also through and discerning on the question of Green's influence. There is a useful essay on Green in James Bryce, Studies in Contemporary Biography (1903). See also Y. L. Chin, The Political Theory of Thomas Hill Green (1920), and J. Charles McKirachan, The Temporal and the Eternal in the Philosophy of Thomas Hill Green (1941).

(1836-1882) Fellow of Balliol College Oxford, 1860-82, and Whyte's Professor of Moral Philosophy, Oxford University, 1878-82. Influenced by Kantian and post-Kantian German philosophy, as well as Aristotle's conception of the polis as a partnership for pursuit of the common good, Green's political philosophy exerted a strong influence on the development of liberalism in Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. His essay ‘Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract’, written as an address to Leicester Liberal association in 1881, argues that freedom should be understood as the power to develop our best selves in common with others: ‘the ideal of true freedom is the maximum power for all members of human society alike to make the best of themselves’. The commercial freedoms defended by classical liberals have value, Green argues, only insofar as they promote freedom in this ‘higher’ sense, and should be restricted by the state if they impair such freedom. His work is thus sometimes seen as providing theoretical foundations for the construction of the British welfare state. But in some important respects, such as the treatment of property rights, his prescriptions do not move much beyond the classical liberal position. His major works, in which his political philosophy is developed in greater depth, were published posthumously. These include Prolegomena to Ethics (1883) and Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation (1895).

— Stuart White

Green, Thomas Hill (1836-82) English absolute idealist. Green was born in Yorkshire, and educated at Oxford. He was a tutor of Balliol College, and in 1878 became professor of moral philosophy at Oxford. His introduction to his edition of Hume's works (produced with T. H. Grose) is a major attack on traditional empiricism, but he is mainly recognized for the Prologomena to Ethics published the year after his death. In this he argues that empiricist ‘passions’ are inadequate springs of action, which are instead provided by the self-conscious pursuit of a good. This is an early example of a line of criticism of Humean and emotive theories of ethics that is still current, but in Green the springs of action rapidly become identified with immersion in a larger whole, produced by an absolute mind that itself enshrines goodness, truth, and beauty. The ‘school of Green’ was an influential element in the philosophical climate of Oxford until after the First World War.

1836–82, English idealist philosopher. Educated at Oxford, he was associated with the university all his life. He was professor of moral philosophy there from 1878 until his death. In his Introduction to Hume's Treatise on Human Nature (1874), Green struck a heavy blow at traditional British empiricism. Rejecting sensationalism, he argued that all reality lies in relations, that relations exist only for a thinking consciousness, and that therefore the world is constituted by mind. In his Prolegomena to Ethics (1883) Green submitted an ethics of self-determination, which he epitomized in the phrase “Rules are made for man and not man for rules.” Self-determination is present when humanity is conscious of its own desires, and freedom occurs when people identify themselves with what they consider morally good. Green's ethics are believed to have influenced, among others, John Dewey and Alfred North Whitehead. Politically, Green was a liberal; he asserted that government must represent the general will and that when it fails to do so it should be changed. See his Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation (1895).

Bibliography

See M. Richter, The Politics of Conscience: T. H. Green and His Age (1983).

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