Journal of the History of Philosophy

Although T. H. Green is primarily remembered today as a moral and political philosopher, many of his philosophical concerns owe their origins to the Victorian crisis of faith in which a widespread belief in the literal truth of Scripture confronted seemingly incompatible scientific theories. Green attributed this crisis to the inability of science and religion to find accommodation in the popular version of empiricism widely accepted by educated men and women of his day. In his 371-page introduction to Hume’s Treatise, Green argued that this philosophy was unacceptable, even on its own terms, and that it needed to be replaced with a new philosophy of life, one recognizing that both knowledge and human action are made possible by a nonnatural spiritual principle. Green thus found a resolution for the Victorian crisis of faith in a new metaphysics, one that provided a framework for the moral and political dimensions of human action that Green’s religion of morality demanded.

The aim of Ben Wempe’s book is to interpret Green’s best known contribution to political theory, his conception of positive freedom, against the background of Green’s metaphysical system and to reassess criticisms of positive freedom in light of this interpretation. This is not a straightforward undertaking. Green introduced his conception of positive freedom in a lecture he delivered to a liberal association, and his early death prevented him from incorporating it into his political theory. His metaphysical system was likewise not finished at the time of his death, and the only part of it to appear in print, the opening chapters of Prolegomena to Ethics, contain significant lacunae. Wempe meets these difficulties by relying on Green’s unpublished manuscripts to reconstruct his philosophical development from his youthful enthusiasm for Hegel to his more independent, mature system. In doing so, Wempe relies on a central concept present throughout Green’s work, that of “the self-assertion of reason.” This phrase refers to Hegel’s idea that both theoretical and practical reason progressively determine their own objects. Wempe argues that Green encountered this idea in the only one of Hegel’s works that he translated, the Propädeutik, and that it underpins the overall argument of Green’s major work, Prolegomena to Ethics. Here Green argues that acts of knowing and willing have objects only by virtue of a rational and spiritual principle, and that moral and political duties result from the progressive expression of this principle through acts of willing. This occurs, Green thinks, because over time reason combines objects of desire into coherent wholes. This occurs both on a personal level, as individuals form systematic ideas of their own permanent goods, and on the social level, as their ideas of their individual goods come to include that of a common good. The idea of a common good requires recognizing others as rational beings and respecting their acts of willing as means of reaching the common good. This in turn is made possible by the laws of a state. The freedom that these laws guarantee as conditions for reaching the common good is the basis for rights of restraint or negative freedoms. Once these rights are guaranteed by the state, however, there are still obstacles to achieving the common good, because individuals may lack the minimum conditions of material well-being that would enable them to achieve it. When these conditions are satisfied, individuals have what Green, in his “Lecture on ‘Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract,’” called “positive freedom,” the “power or capacity of doing or enjoying something worth doing or enjoying, … something that we enjoy in common with others” (112). Wempe thus uses the concept of the self-assertion of reason to link Green’s metaphysics with his account of positive freedom. [End Page 538]

On the basis of this reconstruction, Wempe surveys the reception of Green’s view of positive freedom through 1950 and argues that it is more than a persuasive...