THOMAS HILL GREEN (1836–1882)

Summary

‘Liberal Legislation’ was initially delivered as a lecture to the Leicester Liberal Association in 1880, and published as a pamphlet the following year. A piece d'occasion, it represented the hopes held out by many reformers of the recently elected Gladstone government, having, said Green in his preface, ‘nothing original about it in the way either of information or of theory’. Rather, it contained a popularisation of social doctrines that he had been inculcating into his Oxford students, and which were to receive a more formal philosophical treatment in his Principles of Political Obligation (1883), published posthumously. Fastening upon the common complaint that recent legislation had become increasingly illiberal and paternalistic, Green challenges the identification of a free society with one characterised by governmental non-intervention, in part by reinterpreting conventional conceptions of ‘freedom’ and ‘progress’. Defining ‘freedom’ in the traditional English liberal manner as the possession of rights to do as one wants entailed, for Green, ignoring man's essence as a moral being and legitimating a selfish indifference to the fate of others. Instead, he proposes an alternative definition (pp. 186–7). This ‘positive’ conception of freedom provides the foundation for identifying progress, not with overall material improvement nor with the limitation of public intervention in private rights, but with the broadening of opportunities for the underprivileged and morally inadequate to live a life of personal worth within a community of equal citizenship.