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

Abstract

In this paper I look at T H Green's 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 Green's knowledge of Hegel, and the extent to which Hegel's ideas can be discerned in his writings. Then I discuss a famous passage which is usually cited as expressing a serious reservation about Hegel's 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, Greennever 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.