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T. H. Green and His Audience: Liberalism as a Surrogate Faith

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Melvin Richter
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Extract

Between 1880 and 1914 no other thinker exerted a greater influence upon British thought and public policy than did T. H. Green. Bryce and Asquith have testified that Green's Liberal version of Idealism superseded Utilitarianism as the most prominent philosophical school in Great Britain. And what was more startling, he and his followers proceeded to bring to life the heavy abstractions of the Principles of Political Obligation. For Green converted Idealism, which in Germany had so often served as a rationale of conservatism, into a practical program for the left wing of the Liberal Party. From aristocratic Oxford which Matthew Arnold could still describe as “whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age,” there came a stream of serious young men dedicated to reform in politics, social work, and the civil service, men who would spend their lives in improving the school system, establishing settlement houses, reorganizing charity and the Poor Law, and originating adult education. Green's teaching had an extraordinary effect upon some of the best young men of this generation. A rich literature of memoir and autobiography attests to the great mark he left on the minds and lives of his generation.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 18 , Issue 4 , October 1956 , pp. 444 - 472
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1956

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References

1 Born 1836, died 1882.

2 Bryce, James, Studies in Contemporary Biography (New York, 1903), p. 99Google Scholar. Earl of Oxford and Asquith, , Memories and Reflections (Boston, 1928), pp. 21, 24Google Scholar. Cf. also Hobhouse, L. T., Democracy and Reaction (London, 2nd ed., 1909), p. 79.Google Scholar

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Green's teachings probably had their greatest practical weight during the Liberal governments of Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith when the Cabinet and Commons, the newspapers and reviews, and the universities were all full of men who had been Green's students at Oxford, or who knew his ideas through his books or numerous academic disciples. For example in the 1906 General Election, 31 Balliol graduates were elected to the House of Commons. Of these 23 were Liberals. Four Balliol men were in the Cabinet. Cf. Oxford Magazine, 02 14, 1906.Google Scholar

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