Green is commonly considered to be the father of modern reform liberalism — the first major theorist to give a philosophical grounding to what became (in England) the Labour Party and (in the United States) the Democratic Party of the New Deal and the Great Society.
Problems with classical liberalism in the 18th and 19th centuries:
Concept: the worth of liberty
Result: Classical liberalism under attack, both intellectually and in practice
Green starts his analysis by distinguishing between positive and negative liberty. As he phrases it, negative liberty is my freedom to do as I like; positive liberty is my freedom to do as I like in pursuit of my doing what I like. In other words, liberty has a higher purpose. We don't pursue unlimited liberty, we don't pursue liberty for its own sake; rather, we pursue liberty because and to the extent that it serves a higher goal, namely, to be able to make the most of ourselves. [This is called the "Aristotelian Principle" by John Rawls: the principle that our goals are our self-development of our individual skills.]
To show us that we seek liberty not for itself Green uses the example of someone who walks the wilderness in perfect solitary freedom, hunting the game he likes, growing the crops he likes, pursuing the avocations that he likes, taking what pleasures he likes. That person has perfect individual liberty, at least as far as social constraint is concerned, but we would not consider him particularly free. As Green says, this person "is not the slave of man, but he is the slave of nature." Being in society, with all of its associated constraints, nevertheless gives this person immensely more freedom that he had in the state of nature. [Recall that Locke also recognized a multiplier effect, but in his case the multiplier is simply that arising from labor, not the multiplier arising from having society and government. Of course, government does help in making me more secure in my property and then protecting my free trade with others, but it does not in itself produce anything.]
Green then moves to the question of whether one person's increased liberty can rightly be purchased at the expense of another person's decreased liberty. No, he says, pointing to our rejection of slave societies, even though the slave-owners might have increased liberty. Note that he is not making a utilitarian argument against slavery; he is not arguing that slavery makes the overall sum of liberty go down, because the slave has to give up so much more than the master gains. Rather, he is arguing simply that it is wrong to take away one person's liberty to increase another's liberty.
Green says that property rights are subordinated to this goal of positive liberty, just like other forms of liberty. He uses this to object to certain claims about property rights — most importantly, that labor cannot be treated as just any other commodity. This is crucial, because we often speak of a labor market in the same terms as we speak of the commodities market. In the latter, we are buying and selling things; in the former, we are buying and selling people's ability to pursue those ends of self-development. Green doesn't deny that labor can be bought and sold; rather, he is arguing that in some circumstances the vagaries of the market might wind up interfering with people's ability to pursue their self-development.
For example, workers should not have to work in unsafe conditions. If they are thereby killed or their health ruined, this is an obvious impairment of their positive liberty. If their work pays so little that they can scarcely eat, then this too impairs their positive liberty. If as children they have no education, their ability to pursue their self-development later is impaired. And so on. You can see the basis here for modern reform liberalism's insistence on a social safety net — free education, free basic health care, free basic housing, etc.
Finally, Green takes up the objection that the laws necessary to implement these programs and protections represent a violation of people's liberty. His basic point is that such laws are not constraints on what we want anyway. Far from taking away my liberty, such laws give me the liberty to think about other things. [It is probably worth pointing out that Green is talking about the provision of fundamental needs. In our next reading, Donald Allen objects to paternalistic laws, where busy-bodies of every stripe seek to enlist the government's help in making you do what they think you ought to — don't smoke, don't drink, don't read erotica, always wear your seat belts, and so on. Green doesn't seem to be talking about such laws but something more fundamental. On the other hand, as Allen will argue, once we get on the slippery slope of deciding what people ought to do and should want, no matter how noble our motives, we will eventually wind up in a moralistic dictatorship.]
You will recall that John Stuart Mill's work justified the liberal state in two distinct ways: through self-interest and through its promotion of "virtue". This represents the beginning of a split in classical liberalism's view of the state: between the state as the protector of certain rights against the intrusion of others, on the one hand, and the state as the promoter of a certain beneficial way of life, on the other. In the first, government is a necessary evil; in the second, government is an essential force for achieving goals.
These two views are both concerned with liberty, and they both see the state as deriving its legitimacy from the individual consent of the governed in their pursuit of certain shared goals. They both see the free market (and the separation of politics and economics) as an important force for liberty. They are thus both part of the classical liberal tradition.
However, their respective understandings of liberty differ between what T.H. Green calls "negative liberty" and "positive liberty". To put the contrast in Green's terms, negative liberty is my freedom to do as I like; positive liberty is my freedom to do as I like as a precondition for doing what I like.
Today, the former tradition appears as "modern conservatism" (including "libertarianism", "conservatism", "neo-conservatism", and "neo-liberalism"); the latter tradition appears as "modern reform liberalism" or "welfare liberalism". [Please note that I am using these names only to denote broad tendencies; people who actually apply these names to themselves might argue vigorously that what I see as small differences between them are in fact crucial differences. I don't agree, at least for the purposes of these notes, but I thought you the reader ought to be aware of the debate.]
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