METAPHYSICAL ETHICS AS AN UNDERCURRENT
OF GREEN'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
Govt.
Arts and
To
any serious onlooker an assessment of the Victorian age should appear a
difficult task because the glow of its surface tends to conceal its
undercurrent of troubles. On May 1, 1851, a worried Europe woke up to see the
startling of industrial progress of
The
Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 was a glass-case witness to
In
the first half of the 19th century the so-called discord between philosophy and
religion, knowledge and faith, had not grown poignant. In fact, in the early
Victorian age, popular excitement centered round the controversies between the
side-issues of religion, and not between philosophy and religion. The Oxford
Movement, which originated from an unmeaning ecclesiastical scare, silently
brought a religious revival. In the thirties and forties the Tractarian
brochures flooded
Religion
was gradually reduced to an emotion, and philosophy to a mechanical formula,
and so the chasm between the two grew alarmingly wide. It became a fashion of
the time to acclaim man as the “master of things.” But amid the enthusiasm of
this glorification of man, it was forgotten that the greatness of man might be
assured best by the acceptance of a spiritual principle. The real need of the
time was a new kind of philosophy, which could avoid evangelical fads as well
as materialistic scepticism, and emphasise the essential greatness of man in
the context of a religious temperament. Indeed, the spirit of the age was
waiting for a man who could come and say that “philosophy, on its part, is seen
to be the effort towards self-recognition of that spiritual life of the world,
which fulfils itself in many ways but mostly completely in the Christian
religion, and to be thus related to religion as the flower to the leaf.”1
It
was a sincere desire to heal the spiritual crisis of his age that inspired
Thomas Hill Green to start his pen. The philosophy which was roughly sketched
by Coleridge, and which occasionally lulled the imagination of J. S. Mill,
needed a man who, by his consistent thought, would give it a comprehensive
shape. In T. H. Green we exactly find this man. When, in Victorian England, the
spiritual view of life sadly sank down amid the torrents of material
prosperity, Green, a young student at
It
was Green’s conviction that philosophy should build up a theory of the
essential greatness of man by emphasising a higher conception of life. Green
mellowed the English thought with a religious mood, but at the same time
cancelled all worn out theological dogmas. He really came to grips with the
problem of his time. So Green ought to be remembered even today because with
him started a new season in the climate of philosophic thought in Victorian
England.
But
in the field of political philosophy Green was not an innovator as he was in
the sphere of metaphysical and ethical enquiry. If in regard to speculative
thought he was a path-maker whose theory sought to satisfy the crying spiritual
need of his age, in regard to political philosophy he was, indeed, a child of
his time. But, for that reason, it will be unfair to argue that his political philosophy
was of less significance. Green, as Barker says, “addressed himself to
eliciting and explaining the presuppositions implicit in the contemporary life
of the English State.3 It is not a fact that had he not constructed
his political philosophy collectivism would have failed to invade
The
political philosophy of the Utilitarians was firmly yoked to their ethical
theory and a solicitude to maintain this canonic coherence largely moulded
their individualistic creed. It would scarcely be just to say that Green’s
political philosophy was not loyal to his metaphysical ethics. In fact, Green’s
Principles of Political Obligation is an illustrative appendix of his Prolegomena
to Ethics. Yet one should remember that his political philosophy was
influenced less by this theoretician’s concern for a coherence between his
different shades of thought. More important, in this regard, was Green’s
humanitarian outlook. His genuine distress at the sight of the poor, indeed,
contributed largely to the development of his collectivism and so it was
scarcely a dogma. He was a collectivist not because he was a dogmatic
theoretician but because he was a humanitarian and a true Christian who
discovered the moral responsibility of the State in arresting the danger of
social calamity. “He had the warmest interest in, and the strongest sympathy
for, the humbler classes. No man had a truer love for social equality, or a
higher sense of the dignity of simple human nature.”5 It is because
of this Christian love for the oppressed humanity that he felt no contradiction
in being both a collectivist and a liberal. He emphasized State-intervention,
but was not impervious to the basic need of the individual’s right of free
development. It is these things that should impel one to feel at home
with his political ideas.
Green
entered
When
all these factors welded to cramp the philosophical initiative in
Green’s
political philosophy cannot be correctly comprehended unless we go up the rungs
of his metaphysics and ethics and it is herein that one may watch the important
characteristic of Green’s approach. The empiricist philosophers, no doubt, took
pains to write on political principles. But while grappling with problems of
politics they acted more as politicians than as philosophers. Generally in
their writings we do not find any attempt to treat politics as an integral part
of a complete philosophical system. Locke exerted no effort to erect a bridge
between his theory of knowledge and his theory of
Government. Hume was too busy with his metaphysical heresy to
give any primary attention to political questions. It will be wrong, however,
to argue that in Mill too we find no desire to set a connecting thread between
politics and philosophy. His psychical atomism, by implication at least, has
got a clear correspondence with his doctrine of individualism. But in his
political treatises Mill was more interested to combat the practical questions
of politics. It is difficult to discover in life writings any attempt to
develop a comprehensive philosophy of the State.
Judged
in this perspective, Green was the first man in the nineteenth century to
construct a comprehensive philosophy of the State. There is a direct affinity
between his metaphysics and politics, between which his ethics serves as a
necessary interlude. It is this perfect harmony between speculative thought and
practical problems that has conferred upon Green a unique position in the
history of English political thought. “He went straight”, as David Ritchie
relates, “from the declaration of the polls, when he was elected a town
councilor, to lecture on The Critique of Pure Reason.” 8 This
indicates the man who used his metaphysics as a necessary contrivance to come
up to the field of political theory: the man who was both a philosopher and a
practical reformer, both an idealist in philosophy and a liberal in politics.
Green’s
Philosophy of the State, the subject of our main concern, was thus built up on
a very sound and reasonable footing. For all his belief, like Hegel’s, that the
State was the embodiment of the Divine Spirit, he never considered the State an
end in itself. It was a means to an end, and that end was the full moral
development of the individuals who compose it. His ethics made him to believe
passionately with Kant that every man has a worth and dignity which forbids his
exploitation for any purposes whatever. “The life of the nation”, he insisted,
“has no real existence except as the life of the individuals composing it.” “To
speak of any progress or improvement or development of a nation or society or
mankind except as relative to some greater worth of persons,” he wrote, “is to
use words without meaning.” It is in this context that he regarded the
functions of the state as being negative. According to him, the State cannot
teach morality to men. Nor can it make men moral, since morality consists in
“the disinterested performance of self-imposed duties.” It has to remove
obstacles which prevent men becoming moral.
It
is true, of course, that in order to remove obstacles the State must interfere
to such an extent that what appears negativee in form soon seems most positive
in content. “To any Athenian slave, who might be used to gratify a
master’s lust,” he wrote, “it would have been a mockery to speak of the State
as a realisation of freedom; and perhaps it would not be much less to speak of
it as such to an untaught and under-fed denizen of a London yard, with
gin-shops, on the right hand and on the left.” It was for the State to see that
the mental and physical mal-nutrition, together with the gin-shops, were
removed. “To uphold the sanctity of contract,” he said, “is doubtless a prime
business of Government, but it is no less its business to provide against
contracts being made which, from the helplessness of one of the parties to
them, instead of being a security for freedom, become an instrument of
disguised oppression.” In acknowledging that as its business, the State was
assuming no inconsiderable powers of intervention. Green’s indignation at the
moral degradation which for so long society had so easily accepted shines
through his words: “We content ourselves with enacting that no man shall be
used by other men as a means against his will, but we leave it to be pretty
much a matter of chance whether or not he shall be qualified to fulfil any
social function, to contribute anything to the common good, and to do so
freely.” Indeed, he would gladly have echoed Carlyle’s “that no one should die
ignorant who has the capacity for learning; that I call a tragedy, though it
should happen, as by some computations it does, a thousand times a minute.” If
the State was to intervene to prevent that tragedy, to ensure that everyone
should be qualified to contribute something to the common good; its
intervention was likely to be steady, constant, and far-reaching, and its
purpose would clearly be positive.
The
negative role which Green assigns to the State as the remover of obstacles is
nevertheless significant. What is most important in life is a subject which,
according to Green, falls within the province of the individual. And such a
theory defines and limits State actions more than they could ever be defined
and limited by the Utilitarians. The State can do everything which will help,
but it must do nothing which will hinder the free development of moral
personality. The real function of Government being to maintain conditions of
life in which morality shall be possible, and morality consisting in the
disinterested performance of self-imposed duties, paternal Government “does its
best to make it possible by narrowing the room for the self-imposition of
duties and for the play of disinterested motives.” Green, in fact, was never
tired of insisting that institutions exist for men, and not men for
institutions. They are important for the effect they have on their members.
Green
did not idealize the State as Plato, Hegel and the subsequent English
idealists, Bradley and Bosanquet, did but, on the contrary, he tried to
establish the importance of individual men and women, and it is hardly
surprising to find that, in spite of the aura of mysticism which surrounds his
conception of society, the State, according to him, is not something more than
the sum of the wills of its citizens. He did not find in it, as Rousseau did, Un
moi commun, a common me.
He
believed in the existence of the General Will. It was his belief that General
Will is the real basis of the State. Legal sovereignty, he fully agreed with
John Austin, must reside in the supreme authority within the State, in that
body which recognises no power above itself. But behind this legal sovereign is
the General Will, and this General Will is what really determines the habitual
obedience of a people. Men habitually obey only those institutions which,
perhaps unconsciously, they feel, represent the General Will. It is quite clear
that for him General Will meant the will for the State, not the will of the
State. His General Will, it is almost obvious, is certainly not that in whose name
so many crimes have been committed, which has proved such an excellent stick,
not only with which to beat minorities, as Dean Inge saw, but with which to
bludgeon whole communities into obedience, that it has become the almost
accredited villain of modern political thought.
Although
Green held that Will, not Force, was the true basis of the State, he was fully
conscious that there were States in which Force was predominant. For such
States he had no liking as they could not fulfil their ideal function. Hence
while Green rejected Rousseau’s view that the General Will was entirely in
abeyance in all existing states, he also rejected Hegel’s view that the laws in
all existing states were synonymous with the General Will. The State,
therefore, as it exists, is not necessarily a complete embodiment of the Divine
Spirit more than the individual. Thus Green, unlike Hegel, tried to safeguard
the individual against the monistic State. He also differed from Hegel in his
conception of freedom. For Hegel, freedom is the voluntary identification of
the self with the laws of the state. But according to Green, Freedom
is the right of a man to make the best of himself. This may
mean voluntary identification of the self with the laws of the state. If the
state is a good state, if it is adequately fulfilling its function, it will
mean this. But it might not mean this. It might even mean that the individual,
albeit in fear and trembling, will be compelled to go up against the state–a
possibility which Hegel could never admit but which Green readily admitted.
Green
thus not only tried to limit the authority of the state by the demands of the
individual, but he was also willing to admit the possibility of the state’s
supersession by other and perhaps higher forms of society. “It is easy,” he
wrote, “to conceive a better system than
that of the great States of modern Europe with their national jealousies, rival
armies, and hostile tariffs.” And while acknowledging how far mankind is from realising
“the dream of an international court with authority resting on the consent of
individual states,” he believed, “that there is nothing in the intrinsic nature
of a system of independent states incompatible with it, but that on the
contrary every advance in the organisation of mankind in states in the sense
explained is a step towards it.”
“This
as well as his admission that good government need not always be popular
government, and that a dictatorship also might act according to the General
Will, create some doubts about his individualism. Though his preference for
popular control and participation in government is admitted, it has
nevertheless been claimed that the seeds of authoritarianism are to be detected
in Green’s writings. But in the light of his loud proclamation that the best government
can only be self-government, the doubts about individualism are removed.
Un-Hegelian in his refusal to consider the state an end in itself, as something
other and greater than thee sum of the individuals who are its citizens, as
necessarily a complete embodiment of the Spirit, more than the individual,
un-Hegelian in his insistence that the individual may have the duty to act
against the state, that the state must preserve the rights of the lesser
communities within it and respect the rights of the greater community of which
it is itself part, Green is no less un-Hegelian in this, that for the passive
voluntary identification of the self with an authoritarian state which Hegel
demands, he substitutes an active participation in a democratic state which his
individualism requires. Green, to quote Wayper, “the individualist who judges
State, Society, and General Will, by their worth for the development of
individual morality and individual character; who so notably and so nobly
dedicated himself to social and political service in the City of Oxford
would not have been true to himself had he done less–and would certainly have
made much less of an appeal than he did to Englishmen.” 9
“If
it be individualism to see in every political movement the fate of human beings
and in every controversy over institutions the weal or woe of fellow citizens,
then there are few more declared individualists in political philosophy than T.
H. Green,” writes Maccunn.10 Green refuses to accept the Mechanistic
Theory of the state, because he is convinced that will, not force, is the true
basis of the state. He accepts the Organic Theory of the state only with many
qualifications. He regards the state as natural since man is necessarily a
social animal. He regards freedom not as the absence of restraint but as a
process of self-development by freely obeying laws and customs which are seen
to embody a rational scheme of justice within the community. He believes the
state to be essentially good, because it is indispensable to guide and enable
men to understand their own moral obligations and to call out the best in them.
He teaches men to see that faith in their own moral development and faith in
their fellow men matters far more to them than any particular interest they may
have. And in his distinction between outward acts and inward will, between what
is better done even from the wrong motive and what is only valuable because of
its motive, he gives men a far sounder criterion whereby to judge state action
than did Mill with his doctrine of self-and-other-regarding actions. In doing
so, he gives the individual a far more effective protection against the undue
exercise of the state’s power than anything with which utilitarianism could
provide him. Correcting and supplementing both utilitarianism and idealism,
Green gives men a common sense criterion, which they can apply to states. Every
state, he shows them, can be judged by its practical and ideal contents here
and now. It will be a good state if it contains the largest possible number of
happy, moral human beings.
Mill’s
philosophy was dominant in England when the Oxford philosopher began his work;
and though Green consistently avoided polemics; an undercurrent of opposition
to Mill runs through his writings. He respected and admired the man; but in the
Introduction to Hume and in the Prolegomena to Ethics, as well as
in the lectures on Mill’s logic, his dissent from the philosophy is made
manifest. He points out the inadequacy of Mill’s conception of cause; in the Introduction
to Hume he makes a some-what contemptuous reference to the “juggle, which
the modern popular logic performs with the word ‘phenomenon’;” 11
and from the ethical theory of utilitarianism his dissent is absolute and
unqualified. It is true, he generously recognises the practical value of
utilitarianism. This is the theory, he says, which has given the conscientious
citizen in modern Europe “a vantage ground for judging of the competing claims
on his obedience, and enabled him to substitute a critical and intelligent for
a blind and unquestioning. conformity;” 12 and he pronounces that
“there is no doubt that the theory of an ideal good, consisting in the greatest
happiness of the greatest number, as the end by reference to which the claim of
all laws and powers and rules of action on our obedience is to be tested, has
tended to improve human conduct and character.” 13 But nevertheless
he utterly rejects the idea of pleasure being the one true end of moral action,
and instead places the summum bonum for man in “some perfection of human
life, some realisation of human capacities.” 14, The improvement in
conduct and character is sufficient in itself, whether it be accompanied with
pleasure or not. Both in his metaphysics and in his politics Green was
irreconcilably at variance with the Utilitarians. His function was to
substitute for their empiricism an idealistic interpretation both of the
universe and of human life.
To
conclude, Green, with his practical knowledge of the problems of the state and
his faith in political liberalism, tried to make individualism moral and
social, and idealism civilized and safe. If he paved the way for speculative
thinking in the field of metaphysics, he attempted to liberalise the politics
and safeguard the dignity of the self-conscious individual against the
restraining character of the state. In fact, his unshakable faith in man as a
self-conscious and self-moralising entity has a sound metaphysical basis.
1 T.
H. Green: Works Vol. 3. p. 121.
2 T. H. Green, “College
Essay on Loyalty”: Extracted from Nettleship’s Memoir. p.
20.
3
Ernest Barker, Political Thought in England. p. 22.
4 H.
J. Laski, The Leaders of Collectivist Thought, Ideas and Beliefs of the
Victorians. p. 420.
5 James
Bryce, Contemporary Review, May, 1882.
6 D.
Lindsay and E. S. Washington, A Portrait of Britain. chap. 9.
7 R.
L. Nettleship. Memoir. p. 23.
8 D.
G. Ritchie, The Principles of State Interference. Chap. 3, Section 1
9 C.
L. Wayper, Political Thought. Chap. III.
10 Maccunn,
Six Radical Thinkers.
11 Hume’s
Works, p. 202.
12 Prolegomena,
361.
13 Ibid
363.
14 Ibid
390