The Greenian Moment: T.H. Green, Religion and Political Argument in Victorian Britain

Abstract

The Greenian Moment: T.H. Green, Religion and Political Argument in Victorian Britain, by DENYS P. LEIGHTON (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2004; pp. 376. £25) IF T.H. GREEN was traditionally identified as an important intellectual figure of the middle and late Victorian period, until relatively recently it was still common for scholars writing about him to apologise for devoting attention to such an outmoded thinker. For despite the increased attention paid to Green after Melvin Richter's pioneering biography, The Politics of Conscience: T.H. Green and his Age was published in 1964, the effect of the positivism of the post-war decades was nevertheless to establish Green's reputation as a rather eccentric philosopher, at best typical of a late nineteenth-century Idealist episode that was out of keeping with the normal empirical and positivist thrust of British philosophical and political thought. So, unlike the sober utilitarianism of his great contemporary and rival, Henry Sidgwick, which anticipated the analytic clarity of G.E. Moore, and which even John Rawls considered worthy of refutation in A Theory of Justice (1971), Green's work became regarded as at best an historical curiosity, and at worst as metaphysical philosophy at its most overblown. In these circumstances, scholarship on Green was usually accompanied by a ritual apology for concentrating on an Idealist thinker, and justified by referring to the great influence he had on contemporaries, both as an Oxford tutor and as a political activist.