Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-lj6df Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T16:35:51.908Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Melvin Richter
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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 Bryce and Asquith have testified that Green's Liberal version of Idealism superseded Utilitarianism as the most prominent philosophical school in Great Britain.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

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

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

3 Green, T. H., Works, ed. Nettleship, R. L. (London, 1885–1888), 3 vols., Vol. II, pp. 335–533.Google Scholar

4 Among those thinkers Green influenced can be numbered B. Bosanquet, D. G. Ritchie, E. Caird, W. Wallace, Arnold Toynbee, J. MacCunn, J. M. Muirhead, R. L. Nettleship, A. C. Bradley, C. E. Vaughan, H. S. Holland, Bishop Gore, and with certain qualifications, F. H. Bradley, Lord Haldane, E. Barker, and Lord Lindsay.

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

5 Cited in Elliott-Binns, L. E., Religion in the Victorian Era (London, 2nd ed., 1946), p. 59.Google Scholar

6 A letter from Marshall to Henry Sidgwick as paraphrased by Sidgwick. Cf. Arthur, and Sidgwick, E. M., Henry Sidgwick (London, 1906), p. 395.Google Scholar

7 Farnell, Lewis R., An Oxonian Looks Back (London, 1934), pp. 44–45.Google Scholar

8 Muirhead, J. H., Reflections, ed. Harvey, John W. (London, 1942), p. 60.Google Scholar

9 This occurred in 1869. Cf. Taylor, A. E., “F. H. Bradley,” Proceedings of the British Academy (1924), p. 2.Google Scholar

10 Ibid.

11 For Green, cf. the MS letters of W. L. Newman to Mrs. T. H. Green and C. S. Parker to R. L. Nettleship, Green Papers, Balliol College Library, Oxford University. Also Holland, H. S., A Bundle of Memories (London, 1915), p. 146Google Scholar. F. H. and A. C. Bradley were the sons of the Rev. Charles Bradley, a leading preacher of the active Evangelical group known as the Clapham Sect. Cf. Annan, Noel, Leslie Stephen (London, 1951), p. 6Google Scholar. I have been told by Bosanquet's nephew, who visited their home at Rock, that the Rev. Robert William Bosanquet, Bernard's father, was a devout Evangelical who insisted on saying prayers four times a day.

12 Hatévy, Elie, England in 1815 (London, 1949), p. 387.Google Scholar

13 Cited in Bebb, E. Douglas, Wesley: Man with a Concern (London, 1950), p. 124.Google Scholar

14 Webb, Clement C. J., Religious Thought in England from 1850 (Oxford, 1933), p. 9.Google Scholar

15 Holland, Henry Scott, Memoirs and Letters, ed. Paget, Stephen (London, 1921), p. 44Google Scholar, R. L. Nettleship to Holland.

16 Green, , Works, op. cit., III, p. 222.Google Scholar

17 Newman, John Henry Cardinal, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (London, 1886), p. 288.Google Scholar

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid., p. 290.

20 Green, , Works, op. cit., III, p. 223.Google Scholar

21 MrsWard, Humphry, Robert Elsmere (London, 1888).Google Scholar

22 MrsWard, Humphry, A Writer's Recollections (London, 1918), p. 252.Google Scholar

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid., p. 248.

25 Ibid., p. 133.

26 Holland, , Memoirs and Letters, op. cit., pp. 30–31.Google Scholar

27 Ibid., pp. 31–33.

28 Green, , Works, op. cit., III, pp. 230–276.Google Scholar

29 Abbott, E. and Campbell, L., Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett (London, 1897), 2 vols., Vol. II, p. 77.Google Scholar

30 Webb, Beatrice, My Apprenticeship (London, 1926), p. 48.Google Scholar

31 Green, , Works, op. cit., III, p. 223.Google Scholar

32 Ibid., p. 234.

33 Ibid., p. 227.

34 Foster, M. B., The Political Philosophies of Plato and Hegel (Oxford, 1935), p. 74.Google Scholar

35 Green, , Works, op. cit., III, p. 184.Google Scholar

36 Ibid., pp. 270.

37 Ibid., pp. 230–276.

38 Ibid., p. 236.

39 Ibid.

40 Ibid., p. 269.

41 Ibid., pp. 269–270.

42 Ibid., p. 270.

43 Ibid., p. 181.

44 Cf. Weber, Max, “The Social Psychology of the World Religions” and “Religious Rejections of the World” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans, and ed. Gerth, H. and Mills, C. Wright (New York, 1946), pp. 323–362, p. 275.Google Scholar

45 Green, T. H.. The Witness of God and Faith, ed. Toynbee, A. (London, 1884), p. 5.Google Scholar

46 Young, G. M., Victorian England (London, 1936), p. 14.Google Scholar

47 W. L. Newman was a Fellow of Balliol College when Green entered it as a student. He wrote Mrs. Green who was gathering biographical materials after her husband's death, “I gathered that like many other earnest men, he had come from an Evangelical home.” MS letter, Green Papers, Balliol College Library, Oxford University.

48 Green, T. H., Prolegomena to Ethics, ed. Bradley, A. C. (Oxford, 1883).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

49 Eliot, George, Epilogue to Rotnola, quoted in Prolegomena to Ethics, op. cit., p. 404n.Google Scholar

50 Ibid., p. 404

51 Webb, , op. cit., p. 143.Google Scholar

52 Holland, , Memoirs and Letters, op. cit., p. 29.Google Scholar

53 Cf. Dewey, John, Reconstruction in Philosophy (London, 1921)Google Scholar, chaps. 4, 5. Laski, H. J., The State in Theory and Practice (London, 1941)Google Scholar, chap. 1. “The Decline of Liberalism” in Hobhouse Memorial Lectures 1930–40 (London, 1918), p. 2Google Scholar. Hobhouse, L. T., The Metaphysical Theory of the State (London, 1918)Google Scholar; Democracy and Reaction, op. cit.

54 Hobhouse, , The Metaphysical Theory of the State, op. cit., p. 19.Google Scholar

55 Trilling, Lionel, Matthew Arnold (London, 1949), p. 79.Google Scholar

56 Arnold, Matthew, Poems (London, 1877), 2 vols., II, p. 271.Google Scholar

57 Green, , Works, op. cit., III, p. 248.Google Scholar

58 Webb, , op. cit.; p. 98.Google Scholar

59 Lindsay, A. D., Karl Marx's Capital (London, 1925), p. 34.Google Scholar

60 Bosanquet, Helen, Bernard Bosanquet (London, 1924). p. 24.Google Scholar

61 Ibid., p. 37.

62 MrsWard, , A Writer's Recollections, op. cit., pp. 290–92Google Scholar. Trevelyan, Janet P., The Life of Mrs. Humphry Ward (New York, 1923), p. 121.Google Scholar

63 This was Rooper, T. G., cf. Balliol College Register (Oxford, 1934), p. 51.Google Scholar

64 This was Heberden, C. B., cf. Balliol College Register, op. cit., p. 54.Google Scholar

65 Webb, , op. cit., pp. 179–80.Google Scholar

66 Eliot, T. S., The Idea of a Christian Society (New York, 1940), p. 12.Google Scholar

67 Spender, Stephen, World Within World (New York, 1951), pp. 4–5.Google Scholar