This is it, folks -- the point at which classical and modern liberalism began to diverge. Everybody in either camp is indebted, in one way or another, to the great Thomas Hill Green. And sooner or later, everybody in either camp will have to come to terms with him.

Now, in my own not entirely humble opinion, Green's criticisms of other liberal theorists are well-founded and he himself has gotten the philosophical foundations just about exactly right. Basically, his claim is that (my paraphrase) the source of our rights against one another, as well as the source of the state itself, is our possession of an ideal common end in which the well-being of each of us is coherently included.

He develops this account very painstakingly, and one of the joys of reading it is watching him make sense of Rousseau's tortured notion of the "general will." By the time Green is through rescuing this doctrine from Rousseau, it becomes something altogether respectable: that (my paraphrase again) there is an overarching ideal end at which our actions aim, and it is that end which we _would_ have if all of our present aims were thoroughly modified and informed by reflective reason.

I say "_would_ have" with some reservations, since for Green (as for Bosanquet and Blanshard, who followed him here) there is a clear sense in which we _really_ have this ideal end. But this point takes us afield into Green's metaphysics, which are better covered in his _Prolegomena to Ethics_.

As I said, this volume marks the watershed between classical and modern liberalism. Green is often associated with the "modern" side of the divide, but today's reader will be surprised to see just how "classical liberal" Green was (in, e.g., his opposition to paternalistic government and in a good many other respects). Why, heck, there are passages that could have been lifted from David Conway's _Classical Liberalism: The Unvanquished Ideal_.

It does seem, though, that in allowing a positive role for the governmental institutions of a geographically-demarcated State, he has started down the slippery slope to the modern welfare-warfare state. Like Hegel before him and like Bosanquet after him, Green usually means by "state," not the bureaucratic machinery of a territorial government, but the whole of society including _all_ of its "institutions of governance." But -- also like Hegel and Bosanquet -- he does not always keep these two things firmly distinguished, and at times he is clearly thinking specifically of the governmental institutions of a territorial nation-state rather than what some of us would call the "market."

He is also a bit unclear on the ground of "rights." W.D. Ross rightly takes him to task for this in _The Right and the Good_: Green writes on one page that we have _no_ rights until these are recognized by society, and then turns around and writes as though "society" is recognizing rights we _already_ have. To my mind Ross clearly has the better of the argument here, though the problem is not, I think, terribly hard to fix.

On the whole, then, it is probably no wonder that Green and his crowd set into motion -- whether inadvertently or otherwise -- a stream of "liberalism" that would eventually find a far, far larger role for the State than any that Green himself would have approved. But to my mind, these difficulties are removable excrescences, not the heart of his theory. (And it is also worth bearing in mind that Green provides moral grounds for _resisting_ the State: he acknowledges that no actual State is really ideal and, insofar as it falls short of the ideal, should be brought firmly into the service of our common end.)

The theory itself seems to me to be sound. In fact, despite the aforementioned disagreements and several others, I would nominate this volume as perhaps _the_ single greatest work on liberal political theory.

Again, at some point every "liberal" of any stripe will have to come to terms with Green's ideas (perhaps in highly mutated form). And if, with minor tweezing, Green's basic outlook is sound, it also -- suitably adjusted -- forms the proper basis for the classical-liberal commonwealth.

It therefore behooves classical liberals and libertarians to get the word directly from Green himself. Those other "liberals" aren't _entirely_ wrong.

Thomas Hill Green died of blood poisoning in 1882, and his arguably greatest work -- _Prolegomena to Ethics_, which he hadn't quite finished -- was published a year later under the editorship of A.C. Bradley. While certainly not setting out a complete system of ethics, this great work supplies both a refutation of "empiricism" and a metaphysical foundation for ethics in rationalistic Idealism.

It is Green's conviction, supported here by massive argumentation, that the world in which we live cannot possibly be pieced together out of the sensations and feelings upon which such earlier British philosophers as Locke had tried to rely. On the contrary, our absolute presupposition in the possession of anything deserving to be called "knowledge" is that the world in which we live is an interconnected system, a whole bound together by relations neither the existence nor the apprehension of which can be accounted for in "empiricist" terms.

This world must, Green argues, be the activity of a single Mind the activity of which we reconstruct in some manner as we develop our own knowledge. And the activity of this single Mind, he contends, is also the ground of our moral life. This doctrine he applied to great effect in his _Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation_, in which he salvaged Rousseau's flawed doctrine of the "general will."

His reformulation of this doctrine was influential on both Bernard Bosanquet and Brand Blanshard, and in general his writings on ethics and political obligation mark a watershed in the history of liberal political thought. Specifically, his departure from Mill and Spencer marks the precise point at which liberalism began to allow an increasingly active positive role for the State -- an issue, by the way, on which I continue to disagree with him.

(For the record, I would contend that the ideal "evenly rotating economy" of the Austrian school of economics is a better expression of the "general will" or "rational will," at least as regards exchangeable goods, than any State activity will ever be. However, I think Green's metaphysics are basically sound and do in fact provide the proper foundation for the liberal commonwealth. In any case, any critics of modern liberalism will have to come to terms with Green at some point, and in my view they will find much in his thought that is worth retaining.)

Green has been criticized for failing to keep clear between two allegedly different views: the view, on the one hand, that reality is _known_ through intelligence, and the view, on the other, that real relations are _constituted_ by the activity of intelligence. I do not think this criticism is well-founded, but at any rate it is in this volume that Green offers his fullest defense of the thesis in question. The reader will have to judge.

Book was very factual. I do not recall the road to the "On Time" ferry having a 90 degree turn to the dock. It was more like an arc. The bridge road was at 100-115 degree right turn. The DA, my next door neighbor, needs further examination. The author should not assume she drowned. An autopsy would have painted a far different picture. Money buys many things.

Since the only other review of this book doesn't make any sense, I thought it necessary to write a coherent one. This book is truly incredible. It proves Ted Kennedy's guilt with clarity and integrity. The facts are simply undeniable - if it weren't for Ted, Mary Jo would be alive today. The Kennedy family has long been America's sweethearts. It is high time that they are revealed as murders, philanderers, cheaters, liars and losers. Sorry, but this is coming from an Irish Catholic who is ashamed to admit that the Kennedys claim some ties to the land of her origin! They are all bad but Ted Kennedy is the worst. He should be behind bars- this book will tell you why. Read it - it's a well done piece of detective work and it will hold your interest. It may also make your blood boil - but that's not the authors' fault! DOWN WITH THE KENNEDYS!