The Metaphysics of Self-Realisation and Freedom: Part One of the Liberal Socialism of Thomas Hill Green (review)

Between the 1880s and the 1930s, British Idealism, sometimes called British neo-Hegelianism or Anglo-American Idealism, formed if not the peaks of the Anglo-American philosophical establishment then the middle heights inhabited by most practitioners. This movement has been more subject to swings in intellectual fashion than other ostensibly British philosophical products, such as empiricism, utilitarianism, analytic philosophy, and the philosophy of ordinary language. The preeminent British Idealists, Thomas Hill Green, F. H. Bradley, and Bernard Bosanquet, were all products of mid- and late-Victorian Oxford, though Idealism was implicated in a Scottish nexus and received its distinctive stamp from Romanticism and post-Kantian German philosophy in particular. During the middle third of the twentieth century, Idealism took knocks from such thinkers as Bertrand Russell, H. A. Prichard, Gilbert Ryle, and Isaiah Berlin. The philosophical efforts of Idealists during this period were dismissed as emotive, metaphysical, and senseless. This disdain is echoed in a pronouncement by Geoffrey Warnock (a philosopher and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford) as recently as 1988: Green "had no grasp of what philosophy was about. Repeatedly, when he appears to confront some major issue . . . one encounters, not an argument, but a resounding phrase" ("A Sage for a Time" in the Times Literary Supplement [1988], 3).

Colin Tyler knows Warnock's claim about Green's philosophy to be both inaccurate and beside the point. For in spite of its mixed reception by academic philosophers, Green's thought exercised considerable influence on such worldly realms as public policy, educational theory, and industrial relations. This influence persisted down to the emergence of New Labour in the 1990s, when Roy Hattersley, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party in the United Kingdom, referred to Green as "the only genuine philosopher English social democracy ever possessed" (qtd. in Tyler 3). As Tyler has demonstrated in other writings, Green gave a significant boost to liberal radicalism, helping liberals weather imperial crises like the Irish Home Rule split of 1885 and 1886 by revitalizing democracy and injecting a philosophically (as well as religiously) grounded discourse of social reform to counter the laissez-faire tendencies associated with J. S. Mill and Herbert Spencer. Other writers, including the present reviewer, have shown Green's impact on British socialism, on cross-class labourism, and on conservatism-unionism (both before and following the First World War). The latter in particular absorbed Greenian arguments about rights being anything but natural and rights and duties being justified by the social uses made of them.

Green's influence on Victorian and Edwardian politics—and on social reform currents—receives scant attention in Tyler's book. This is because the book is conceived as the first of two volumes examining Green's philosophical system, and the first volume focuses on Green's "metaphysics of experience," his theory of will and distinctively human action, and his theory of personality and personal judgment (47). The more directly political aspects of Green's thought are to be taken up in a second volume, although Tyler, like some other Green scholars, problematizes a separation between epistemological and ethico-political concerns. As he observes, "the systematic nature of [Green's] philosophy makes it more difficult to consider particular discrete issues and problems" (ix). Tyler's careful and stimulating exposition of interrelated parts of the system means that consideration of Green's teachings specifically in terms of so-called liberal socialism, represented in our own time by Norberto Bobbio and Chantal Mouffe, takes up only a small part of this book, chiefly in its introduction.

Tyler concedes that liberal socialism is a combination of terms never used by Green himself, although Green implied the concept in many of his writings—among others, in the passages in Prolegomena to Ethics (1883) concerning the nature of a free life (in Book Three) and in the shorter essay "On...