T. H. Green 1836–1882 and Arnold Toynbee 1852–1883: ‘Best Selves’

Abstract

The debate over ‘the social question’ and social reform, and the ideas about citizenship that emerged out of it in the later part of the nineteenth century, were heavily influenced by the life and work of T. H. Green. Born the youngest of four children of the rector of Birkin in the West Riding of Yorkshire in 1836, Green spent his adult life writing and teaching in Oxford until his early death in 1882. His interests were not only academic; they extended also to active participation in public life as a local city councillor and as an Assistant Commissioner for the Schools Enquiry Commission of 1868. The conception of citizenship that Green developed was rooted in religious belief, offering a wide-ranging diagnosis of economic and social ills and a philosophical definition of true freedom that carried a powerful and far-reaching prescription for civic behaviour for both government and people. Green’s ideas provided and reflected the stuff of political argument and the inspiration to social action in his own time and for those who came after him, so a study of citizenship over the last two hundred years can properly take his thought as a reference point. This is not to claim that his ideas were new, but they acquired vivid meaning and peculiar import as a response to the economic and social problems of a rapidly changing industrial society, and defined the controversies that were to continue through later years.