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A Green Revolution? Idealism, Liberalism and the Welfare State

MELVIN Richter's seminal study of 1964 (finally reissued in paperback, but unfortunately at a hardback price), has radically altered the traditional view of Green as the philosopher of the welfare/corporate state. Setting Green in the context of the Victorian age Richter argued that he was essentially a liberal in the 'classical' rather than the 'new liberal' sense. Moreover, this resulted in tensions in his philosophy which were never finally overcome, even by his followers. Bosanquct, Ritchie and Hobhouse, to name the most prominent, all struggled largely unsuccessfully to harmonise the individualist and corporatist elements within Green's brand of Idealism—a difficulty reflected in their divergent political stances. Richter thus endorsed Berlin's famous judgement that 'Green was genuine liberal: but many a tyrant could use [his philosophy] to justify his worst acts of oppression'. In recent years Richter's interpretation has become the new orthodoxy, largely in the absence of any study of comparable scholarship. The new books by Palazzolo and Plant and Vincent finally present a worthy alternative for in both the historical and philosophical theses of Richter's work are, implicitly at least, strongly challenged, and the compatibility and coherence of Green's Idealism with 'new liberalism' argued for. Indeed, that greater interest is currently being shown in British idealism is itself evidence of a more general shift in philosophical opinion, which has made Green's theories rather more congenial than they were in the early sixties. Both liberalism and socialism have been submitted to similar critique in recent years. On the one hand