This book views Green's philosophical opus through his public life and political commitments. It demonstrates how his main ethical and political conceptions -- his idea of 'self realisation' and his theory of individuality within community -- were informed by evangelical theology, popular Protestantism and an idea of the English national consciousness as formed by religious conflict. While the significance of Kant and Hegel is acknowledged, it is argued that 'indigenous' qualities of Green's teachings resonated with Victorian Liberal values.

This book views Green's philosophical opus through his public life and political commitments. It demonstrates how his main ethical and political conceptions -- his idea of 'self realisation' and his theory of individuality within community -- were informed by evangelical theology, popular Protestantism and an idea of the English national consciousness as formed by religious conflict. While the significance of Kant and Hegel is acknowledged, it is argued that 'indigenous' qualities of Green's teachings resonated with Victorian Liberal values.

In recent years "British" Idealism has been subject to sweeping re-evaluation and rehabilitation. The essays collected here by Will Sweet compare Bernard Bosanquet's ideas and arguments with those of Idealists and non-Idealists alike, and establish that Bosanquet was far more clear-headed and insightful than denunciations of the "Idealist school" by Moore, Russell, C. D. Broad, Harold Prichard, and A. J. Ayer suggest. Sweet observes in his introduction that Bosanquet has long remained in the shadows of T. H. Green and F. (...) H. Bradley, that Bosanquet was a prolific writer who shaped philosophical debates across the English-speaking world for decades, and that estimations of his social theory and political philosophy, and to a lesser extent his metaphysics, have diverted attention from his contributions to logic and aesthetics.Essays by Sandra M. den Otter, Peter Nicholson, and Kevin Sullivan deal directly with Bosanquet's social philosophy. Bosanquet was engaged from the 1880s in work with the Charity Organisation Society, an association that set the tone of late Victorian and Edwardian debates over British poverty. He and his wife served on the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws , against whose majority statement—cautioning against such direct assistance to the poor as. (shrink)

This study of T.H. Green views his philosophical opus through his public life and political commitments, and it uses biography as a lens through which to examine Victorian political culture and its moral climate. The book deals with the political and religious history of Victorian Britain in examining the basis of Green's Liberal partisanship. It demonstrates how his main ethical and political conceptions—his idea of "self-realisation" and his theory of individuality within community—were informed by evangelical theology, popular Protestantism and an (...) idea of the English national consciousness as formed by religious conflict. While the significance of Kantian and Hegelian elements in Green’s thought is acknowledged, it is argued that “indigenous” qualities of Green’s teachings resonated with values shared alike by elite and rank-and-file Liberals during the mid and late Victorian era. In examining Green’s beliefs about the historical evolution of English liberty, his championing of Nonconformity and Nonconformist causes and his approval of religious bases of community, this study analyzes the ripening of a Greenian moment and traces Green’s influence on Liberal, quasi-socialist and Conservative social reform down to the 1920s. The lasting impact of Green’s teachings on British and Western political philosophy, apparent in the current vogue for communitarianism in liberal theory, indicates limitations of the “secularization thesis” still tacitly accepted by historians of Western political thought. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Ohio HegeliansDenys P. LeightonSelected and introduced by James A. Good. The Ohio Hegelians. Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Continuum, 2005. Volume I: Peter Kaufmann, The Temple of Truth (1858). Volume II: Moncure D. Conway, The Earthward Pilgrimage (1870). Volume III: J. B. Stallo, The Concepts and Theories of Modern Physics (2nd ed., 1884).This collection of facsimile reprints prepared by James A. Good is one of the newest contributions to (...) the series 'History of American Thought' published by Thoemmes Continuum. Good has already made significant contributions to study of the history of American philosophy and 'thought' by editing for the same series a reprint edition of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 1867–1893 (22 volumes, 2002) and co-editing, with Michael DeArmey, a selection of writings by the St. Louis Hegelians (3 volumes, 2001). The latter constitutes very nearly a subset of the former. The acknowledged leader of the 'St. Louis Movement' from 1858 until the late 1870s was William Torrey Harris (1835–1909), who edited the Journal of Speculative Philosophy during the entire period of its publication. JSP predated Mind in England by nearly ten years and was the first specialized venue in the [End Page 445] Anglo-American world for serial publication of scholarly writing on philosophical issues. It also featured original writing on arts and literature, education, and theology, as well as some of the first translations into English of works by J. G. Fichte, F. Froebel, F. A. Trendelenburg and K. Rosenkranz. In addition to publishing work by North American and European thinkers who have by now—perhaps predictably—fallen from scholarly view, JSP featured writing by G. Stanley Hall, William James, C. S. Peirce, Josiah Royce, John Watson and John Dewey.There is a general historical rationale for Good's compilation of ostensibly significant writings by men collectively dubbed by Loyd Easton—with genuflection to the better-known St. Louis Idealists—'the Ohio Hegelians'.1 Yet, as I shall elaborate, the criteria of selection of documents for this collection are somewhat puzzling. Easton grouped under the label 'Ohio Hegelians' Peter Kaufmann (1800–1869), August Willich (1810–1878), John Bernhard Stallo (1823–1900) and Moncure Daniel Conway (1832–1907), while nevertheless denying that they formed a distinctive school of Hegelian philosophy. The most obviously Hegelian among them was Willich, a radical democratic journalist and agitator who features prominently in the complex history of 'Left Hegelianism' and early Marxism. However, Good has decided not to include Willich's writings in this collection, reasoning that his journalistic writings and ephemera 'do not lend themselves... readily to a collection of philosophical works' ('Introduction', p. v). Neither were all the items Good selected for the aforementioned collections of a strictly philosophical nature (whatever that might mean), so one wonders why Willich's Hegelian writings were left out here. It is somewhat curious that Good should include here The Earthward Pilgrimage (1870) by Conway, a Virginian by birth, who, after alienating his Unitarian congregation in Washington, DC by his strongly abolitionist sentiments, was appointed in 1856 to a pastorate at the First Congregational Church in Cincinnati. This 'Ohioan' left the state and the country by 1863 and was thereafter more directly associated with English intellectual life. For most of the period 1864–1897 Conway presided over the undenominational South Place Chapel in London (subsequently, the South Place Ethical Society), which literally served as a pulpit for many guest speakers expressing forms of religious and political radicalism (e.g., agnosticism, 'secularism', republicanism, producer and consumer co-operation). There are few direct references in Conway's The Earthward Pilgrimage to his American experiences. Easton's reason for including Conway among these Ohioans was that Conway had interacted closely in Cincinnati with Willich and Stallo after 1856, when all were enthusiastic supporters of the Republican, 'free-soil' candidate for President, John C. Fremont.Of Peter Kaufmann, author of The Temple of Truth (1858), something will be said in due course, but Stallo became the most un-Hegelian of the Ohio Hegelians. In his Preface to the first edition of The Concepts and Theories of Modern Physics (1881)—the second edition is the one included in Good's [End Page 446] compilation... (shrink)