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March 1, 2005
A review of T.H. Green's Theory of Positive Freedom: From Metaphysics to Political Theory by Ben Wemde in The Guardian. It is a poor review, but Green's ideas are important today, as they provided the springboard to go beyond a laissez-faire or market liberalism. Social moral rights (those that are recognised as contributing to the common good), not the market, should determine the positive freedoms we are able to enjoy in a nation state.
Green is important in Australia as his ideas on positive freedom provided the philosophical backbone for the welfare state for the social democracts in the Labour party. There is a tradition in the ALP that dislikes philosophers, is openly contemptuous of the speculation of political philosophy, and works with a pragmatic 'fair go' for the industrial working class. It is a tradition that turns its back on the philosophical backbone of social liberalism.
Green developed a political philosophy that rejected the atomistic individualism and empiricist assumptions that underpinned classical liberalism and develeoped a political philosophy based around four notions: the common good; a positive view of freedom; equality of opportunity; and an expanded role for the state.
Positive freedom, as the power or capacity of doing something, meant legislation by the ethical state to require employers to take responsibility for protecting their workmen against industrial injuries. This step beyond negative freedom (freedom from) also meant the state providing pension, unemployment benefits and public health and education from the general taxation of the population.
Sick people, as a self-determining agents, do not have the capacity to work. So the state should provide a public system to help people overcome sickness. What makes the state ethical is a concern for the wellbeing (individual self-realization) of its citizens.
The Standford Encyclopedia entry on Green says:
"Green holds that the state should foster and protect the social, political and economic environments in which individuals will have the best chance of acting according to their consciences. ...Yet, the state must be careful when deciding which liberties to curtail and in which ways to curtail them. Over-enthusiastic or clumsy state intervention could easily close down opportunities for conscientious action thereby stiffling the moral development of the individual. The state should intervene only where there was a clear, proven and strong tendency of a liberty to enslave the individual. Even when such a hazard had been identified, Green tended to favour action by the affected community itself rather than national state action itself---local councils and municipal authorities tended to produce measures that were more imaginative and better suited to the daily reality of a social problem. Hence he favoured the 'local option' where local people decided on the issuing of liquor licences in their area, through their town councils."
The national state itself is legitimate for Green to the extent that it upholds a system of rights and obligations that is most likely to foster individual self-realisation.
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