The 'Puritan' Democracy of Thomas Hill Green (review)

In the preface to this distinctive study of T. H. Green's political theory, Alberto de Sanctis identifies his project as a "reconstruction." According to de Sanctis, Green unfortunately failed to "do enough to explain" (10) his innovative thinking, causing his contributions to modern political theorizing, especially about democracy, to remain misunderstood and—presumably—inadequately valued. But reconstructions invite the criticism that they may amount to interpretative reformulations alien to what authors would recognize as their own. Whenever scholars claim to be uncovering previously underappreciated influences and facets of an important philosopher's thought, we should be particularly sensitive to the risk that what is being uncovered may never have been there to begin with.

Notwithstanding such risks, however, de Sanctis is to be commended for drawing attention to influences on Green's political theorizing that other recent interpreters of Green, including this reviewer, have ignored. De Sanctis argues that Puritanism unmistakably informed Green's views about democracy: Green's "main purpose" (3), according to de Sanctis, was to promote democracy, using Puritan pragmatism to temper the formalism of continental idealism. While Green's intentions may not have been so singular, Puritanism seems to have substantially inspired his theory of democracy. Most scholars acknowledge Green's religious temperament, but too few have bothered to explore its sources as de Sanctis has.

De Sanctis's study is also valuable for its recognition that Green did not oppose utilitarianism as vehemently as the received view of him insists. De Sanctis rightly grasps, unlike many scholars, that Green held that Kantianism and utilitarianism were not fundamentally incompatible: from Green's earliest undergraduate essays (several of which de Sanctis includes in an appendix and which have never been previously published) to Prolegomena to Ethics (1883), he never wavered in believing that when both were properly reformulated, utilitarianism could be accommodated with Kantianism. The principle of maximizing happiness was not necessarily inconsistent with Kant's categorical imperative, while the principle of utility did not necessarily permit sacrificing the minority's happiness for the majority's sake.

For Green, as de Sanctis argues, political obligation properly conceived promoted individual moral development or moral self-realization. That is, by protecting moral rights, state intervention fostered moral flourishing indirectly. Moral rights were the "negative realization" of moral flourishing; they did not guarantee that citizens would develop morally but merely insured each citizen's equal opportunity to do so. Hence, promoting moral good was fully compatible with respecting persons as ends, making consequentialism and Kantianism compatible and symbiotic, which is also to say that negative and positive freedom were symbiotically compatible. Negative freedom—security of person and property—promoted the positive freedom of moral self-realization; this in turn promoted both common good, and ultimately, greater respect for negative freedom.

Not only is de Sanctis's account of Green's theory of political obligation fundamentally sound, but he also argues that Green derived much of this theory—and therefore by implication his conviction that utilitarianism and consequentialism were not ineluctably opposed—from Henry Vane's Puritanism. In short, Green's theory of political obligation was Puritan through and through.

For de Sanctis, Green defended a Puritan conception of democracy where the state guaranteed the negative freedom of citizens by vigorously protecting them from external interference. By so vigorously protecting its citizens, the state empowered them by opening up opportunities for moral self-development; it empowered them to become positively free. By encouraging and assisting this development, the state more efficiently and effectively promoted common good, a move not inimical to liberalism, as promoting general happiness did not necessarily entail sacrificing individual integrity and basic moral rights. Thus, while de Sanctis is mainly interested in highlighting how closely Green followed Puritans such as Vane, his study reveals that Green also followed J. S. Mill more closely than most scholars realize.