Peter Nicholson

T H Green's Doubts About Hegel's Political Philosophy

In this paper I look at T H Greens use of Hegel, with specific reference to political philosophy. I try to assess in particular the limits which Green set to his use of Hegel. I begin by considering briefly Greens knowledge of Hegel, and the extent to which Hegels ideas can be discerned in his writings. Then I discuss a famous passage which is usually cited as expressing a serious reservation about Hegels view of politics. I conclude that it is by no means clear how Hegelian Green is: and that this is not a question which Green would have thought important. Green died suddenly, weeks before his forty-sixth birthday. He left no autobiography to help us trace his intellectual debts, and we have to rely on the evidence of his writings together with the recollections of his friends. Consequently it is impossible to be certain how much of any particular author Green read. Writers on philosophy were not then generally expected to support every statement with references. Green himself seldom appends footnotes which reveal his sources. Furthermore, his friend and first biographer Nettleship tells us, Green never overcame his native repugnance to wide reading. He liked, as he used to say, to ‘browse’ amongst books, and it was by brooding over the great sayings of philosophers rather than by traversing their systems in detail, that he seemed to get most of his intellectual nourishment. His mind was reflective, not accumulative.

A Moral View of Politics: T. H. Green and the British Idealists

Perhaps it is too soon to agree how important a political philosopher Green is. Sometimes he has been rated very high, Sabine describing him as ‘the most original and the most constructive political philosopher of nineteenth-century England’, and Rodman (in 1964) as ‘the last political theorist of anything like classic stature’.’ His Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation Blanshard calls ‘the weightiest work in English on political theory’, while Lemos ranks it as ‘one of the ten or twelve greatest works in the entire history of political philosophy’.2 Others regard such judgements as highly contentious or exaggerated. However, they are not absurd. If one were listing the dozen greatest works of political philosophy ever written, the Lectures, with its amalgam of hard philosophical thinking, political insight, and moral fervour, would have a reasonable claim to a place towards the bottom of the list-albeit in competition with many other contenders. Certainly, Green figures in many textbook histories of political thought, and his views on such topics as freedom are alluded to in many places. It is upon the Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation that Green’s reputation as a political philosopher must chiefly rest. I t is fitting that 1986, the centenary of its posthumous publication in the second volume of Green’s Works, saw its appearance in a new critical edition. Paul Harris and John Morrow have checked the version which R. L. Nettleship produced for the Works, and which all subsequent printings have reproduced, against Green’s manuscript. They have restored Green’s words where they think there was a significant misreading or unjustifiable alteration, noting Nettleship’s version in a list of variants. In addition, where the manuscript contains alternatives,

RECENT STUDIES IN ENGLISH OF KANT'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY*

K ANT’S reputation as a philosopher, despite some fluctuations, is as established and as high as that of any major philosopher. It is not the same with his reputation as a political philosopher, in the English-speaking world at least. On the one hand, his writings on politics, law, and history have often been dismissed as confused and wrong-headed, a mixture of inconsistency and servile, illiberal, and undemocratic ideas. His Metaphysical Elements of Justice, in particular, has been written off as a tragic lapse explicable only in terms of aging and failing intellect. On the other hand, Kant has sometimes been hailed as a great liberal and constitutionalist (by Popper among others), a friend of freedom and peace, and ranked with the foremost political philosophers; and The A4etaphysical Elements of Justice rated as a leading contribution to legal philosophy. The authors of the books under review subscribe to the latter position. This is a useful corrective, because most standard textbooks on the history of political thought hold versions of the former position. Many such books ignore Kant. For example, he is in neither the Masters of Political Thought nor Hearnshaw’s Social and Political Ideas o f . . . series; he is omitted from Hacker’s Political Theory and MacDonald’s Western Political Theory; and there are only scattered passages on him in Gettell’s History ofPolitical Thought and Sabine’s A History ofPolitical Theory. Neither Wolin in Politics and Vision nor Plamenatz in Man and Society aims at a comprehensive history, but even so it is significant that they feel able to leave out Kant. Other textbooks include Kant, but deal with him quickly and roughly. Dunning, for instance, depicts him as both unoriginal and rather pitiably confused, taking logically incompatible ideas from Rousseau and Montesquieu and trying to blend them ( A History of Political Theories, Vol. iii, pp. 130-6). It is worth considering why a low estimation of Kant’s political philosophy has been so frequent. because this may help to identify certain obstacles to understanding Kant. Many of his moral and political writings were soon translated into English. Kant’s Essuys and Treatises on Moral, Political and carious philosophical subjects appeared in two volumes in 1798-9, and contained a fuller selection of such pieces than has ever been made since. The Metaphysical EIementsofJustice followed in 1799. Reports of the quality of these translations, anonymous but attributed to A. F. M. Willich, vary. However, Kant’s political philosophy was accessible: yet it does not seem to have been taken up, except by a very few, such as de Quincey. The translations became rare books; in 1836 another translator, J. W. Semple, reported he could locate only one copy of the Essays and Treatises. Why this lack of interest? An obvious explanation is the hold of Utilitarian ideas over social and political thinking in Britain. Possibly, the Kantian and Utilitarian philosophies were too opposed at too many fundamental points in epistemology and ethics, for the first to make much impression where the second already had a grip. I do not know whether Bentham ever wrote about Kant: though nothing is indexed in Bowring’s edition. J. S. Mill speaks with respect of Kant’s moral philosophy, but finds it useless, and has no doubt it is radically defective (e.g. Utilitarianism, Collected Works, Vol. X, pp. 207, 249). John Austin damns The Metaphysical Elements of Justice with faint praise, casting aside its most Kantian

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN POLITICAL THEORY AND POLITICAL PRACTICE

RECENTLY, some philosophers have shown an increasing concern with issues of current moral and political debate, such as abortion, the morality of war, racism, the obligation to future generations, reform versus revolution, military service, and civil disobedience; and they have sometimes provided moral evaluation and recommendation as well as critical analysis.’ In both respects, this is a significant shift of interest. For the last three or four decades, most political philosophers have not written about such issues, regarding it as ‘moralising’ or ‘ideology’ and not philosophy to do so, but confined themselves to morally neutral clarification of concepts like Justice or Sovereignty.’ So problems of political practice are beginning to be discussed after having been widely shunned. One philosophically important question here is, regardless of whether at any particular time philosophers happen to discuss issues of the day or not, what is the relationship between political theory and political practice? And it is disturbing that the recent upsurge of interest in practical matters has not been accompanied by any thorough examination of its philosophical legitimacy: it has been a silent shift of interest. This article discusses some of the neglected yet philosophically important questions. I interpret the terms of the title as follows. By ‘political theory’ I mean both moral and political philosophy, and ordinary moral and political beliefs; by ‘political practice’ I mean actions in the political sphere; and by ‘relationship’ I mean some kind of logical connection, i.e. a connection which falls within the province of philosophical investigation. This excludes a great many possible questions about theory and p r a ~ t i c e . ~ I raise only two problems. First, is there any logical