Philosophers From England

"As we learn the existence of our own bodies from seeing and feeling them, and as we see and feel the bodies of others, we have precisely similar grounds for believing in the individuality or identity of other persons, as for believing in our own identity. The ideas expressed by the words mine and thine, as applied to the produce of labour, are simply then an extended form of the ideas of personal identity and individuality."

"But it is quite plain that the sum the weaver will be disposed to give for the thread will depend on his view of its utility."

"The skill and the art of the labourer have been overlooked, and he has been vilified; while the work of his hands has been worshiped."

"The journeymen, however, know their own interest better than it is known to the legislator; and they would be all richer if there were not an idle capitalist in the country."

"It would be better for men to be deprived of education than to receive their education from their masters; for education, in that sense, is no better than the training of cattle that are broken to the yoke… The workers of London must proceed, like those of Glasgow, and found the new institution at their own expense."

"The simple means of making the race frugal is to supply the wants of no man and to leave every man the produce of his own labour."

"The labourers are still more unfortunate in being descended from bondsmen and serfs. Personal slavery or villanage formerly existed in Britain, and all the living labourers still suffer from the bondage of their ancestors."

"In the system of nature, mouths are united with hands and with intelligence; they and not capital are the agents of production; and … however it may have been thwarted by the pretended wisdom of law makers, wherever there is a man there also are the means of creating or producing him subsistence… it must be plain that all those numerous advantages, those benefits to civilisation, those vast improvements in the condition of the human race, which have been in general attributed to capital, are caused in fact by labour, and by knowledge and skill informing and directing labour. Should it be said, then, as perhaps it may, that unless there be profit, and unless there be interest, there will be no motives for accumulation and improvement, I answer that this is a false view, and arises from attributing to capital and saving those effects which result from labour; and that the best means of securing the progressive improvement, both of individuals and of nations, is to do justice, and allow labour to possess and enjoy the whole of its produce."

"[T]he real business of men, what promotes their prosperity, is always better done by themselves than by any few separate and distinct individuals, acting as a government in the name of the whole."

"Men had better be without education… than be educated by their rulers; for then education is but the mere breaking in of the steer to the yoke; the mere discipline of the hunting dog, which, by dint of severity, is made to forego the strongest impulse of his nature, and instead of devouring his prey, to hasten with it to the feet of his master."

"The evil of confinement is not to be remedied by outrage, but it is so great an evil, that it looks like tameness of apathy to be perfectly resigned to it."

"The evils of society cannot be remedied by acts of parliament."

"The British government has hitherto been always so much occupied in devising means to secure its power, that it has been able to pay but little attention to the instruction of the people; nor do we wish that it should. The education of a free people, like their property, will always be directed most beneficially for them when it is in their own hands; when government interferes, it directs its efforts more to make men obedient and docile than wise and happy. It desires to control the thoughts and to fashion even the minds of its subjects…"

"The natural science of wealth relates only to man, and knows nothing of the distinctions between nobles and peasants, kings and slaves, legislators and subjects; and if we are led to conclude at every step of our investigations, that the fundamental principles of political society as well as the administrative acts of most governments are hostile to the principles of this science, must we wilfully suppress our conclusions,—must we turn aside from the light of truth, that the wisdom of our ancestors, or the peculiar wisdom of the few hundred beings in whose hands the different governments of the world are lodged, may remain for ever the only objects of human adoration?"

"Thus, the natural idea of property is a mere extension of that of individuality; and it embraces all the mental as well as all the physical consequences of muscular exertion. As nature gives to labour whatever it produces—as we extend the idea of personal individuality to what is produced by every individual—not merely is a right of property established by nature, we see also that she takes means to make known the existence of that right. It is as impossible for men not to have a notion of a right of property, as it is for them to want the idea of personal identity. When either is totally absent man is insane."

"The power of making laws was long vested in those—and still is vested in their descendants—who followed no trade but war, and knew no handicraft but robbery and plunder."

"What is the law?—Who are the law makers?— The law is a great scheme of rules intended to preserve the power of government, secure the wealth of the landowner, the priest, and the capitalist, but never to secure his produce to the labourer.—The law-maker is never a labourer, and has no natural right to any wealth.—He takes no notice of the natural right of property.—Manifold miseries which result from his appropriating the produce of labour, and from the legal right of property being in opposition to the natural."

"The law, as to preserve life is that of individuals, is a set of rules and practices … intended to appropriate to the law-makers the produce of those who cultivate the soil, prepare clothing, or distribute what is produced among the different classes, and among different communities."

"The natural right of property far from being protected, is systematically violated, and both government and law seem to exist chiefly or solely, in order to protect and organize the most efficacious means of protecting the violation…."

"The persons who thus appropriated the soil of Europe, did so by a right of conquest. They did not lay down the sword the instant they had overrun the land, they kept it drawn in their hand, and engraved with it laws for the conquered. The countries they overran had been previously cultivated by slaves in a rude manner. In appropriating the soil, they appropriated its inhabitants, reduced some to slavery, and continued the slavery of others. Power so acquired, and privileges so established, were the basis of the present political and legal, not social, edifice of Europe. These conquerors were the first legislators. By an almost uninterrupted succession, the power of legislation has continued in the hands of their descendants to the present day."

"It is a not less important question, who is the law-maker, who made, who makes, who enforces obedience to these rules and practices? Can he show a title bestowed upon him by nature, derived from the laws of his organization, and the constitution of the universe, to have and to own, and to appropriate all the wealth that is created? Now it is an important fact, but it is so obvious that one is sneered at for drawing a deduction from it, that the law has always been, and is at present made, by men who are not labourers. It is actually made by those who derive from nature no title whatever to any wealth. But as law in fact is only a general name for the will of the law-maker, being, the expression of his desire to have wealth, and retain power and dominion, it is clear that in making laws for the appropriation of property, he will not, consistently with nature, give to every one what he produces. This object always has been, and now is, so to dispose of the annual produce as will best tend to preserve his power. Nature rewards industry and skill, the legislator be he who he may, is utterly regardless of the connection between industry and plenty."

"[I]t is nevertheless proper to make men aware that the price they pay for attempting to uphold the artificial right of property, is nothing less than the enormous sum of misery inflicted in the name of law and government."

"The first and chief violation of the right of property, which pervades and disturbs all the natural relations of ownership, confusing, and perplexing the ideas of all men as to the source of the right of property, and what is their own, of which so many actions stigmatized by the law as crimes, are the necessary consequences, and the natural corrections,— the parent theft from which flow all other thefts, is that of the legislator, who, not being a labourer, can make no disposition of any property whatever, without appropriating what does not naturally belong to him."

"Among the legislative classes embodied into, and constituting the government, we must place the landed aristocracy. In fact, the landed aristocracy and the government are one—the latter being nothing more than the organized means of preserving the power and privileges of the former."

"Those who make laws, appropriate wealth in order to secure power."

"The radical edge that Hodgskin gave his laissez-faire advocacy confuses people whose thoughts come in prefabricated boxes. Today if someone sympathizes with labor’s plight, he’s bound to be labeled a collectivist, although earlier radical individualists located the source of that plight not in the market but in the halls of government. This was better understood in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the likes of Lysander Spooner, Benjamin Tucker, and Herbert Spencer held the libertarian vanguard."

"Hodgskin, very simply, was a natural-law individualist who thought government should grant no privileges to anyone, particularly capitalists, landowners, and clergy, who in his time were the chief beneficiaries of state appropriation and other interference with peaceful market activity. He embraced the ‘natural right of property’ and opposed the ‘artificial right of property,’ which he attributed to the utilitarians’ belief that legislation, not natural law, was the source rights. In other words, land and other objects acquired through original appropriation and honest, voluntary means were legitimate property. All forced and fraudulent means of acquisition yielded illegitimate, artificial property that could only be sustained by government power. He called for the abolition of all forms of the artificial right of property and full flowering of the natural right."

"One of the first objects then of the law, subordinate to the great principle of preserving its unconstrained dominion over our minds and bodies, is to bestow a sufficient revenue on the government. Who can enumerate the statutes imposing and exacting taxes? Who can describe the disgusting servility with which all classes submit to be fleeced by the demands of the tax-gatherer, on all sorts of false pretences, when his demands cannot be fraudulently evaded? Who is acquainted with all the restrictions placed on honest and praiseworthy enterprise; the penalties inflicted on upright and honourable exertions;—what pen is equal to the task of accurately describing all the vexations, and the continual misery, heaped on all the industrious classes of the community, under the pretext that it is necessary to raise a revenue for the government?"

"Hodgkin’s many articles for The Economist made it one of the most interesting and provocative libertarian periodicals of its time. In addition to supporting laissez-faire, voluntary education, and other (classical) liberal causes, Hodgskin also opposed capital punishment and questioned the traditional wisdom about the efficacy of punishment as a deterrent to crime."

"Nature may annihilate, but she never tortures…. Not so the legislator. He has inflicted on mankind for ages the miseries of revenue laws,—greater than those of pestilence and famine, and sometimes producing both these calamities, without our learning the lesson which nature seems to have intended to teach, viz. the means of avoiding this perpetual calamity. Revenue laws meet us at every turn. They embitter our meals, and disturb our sleep. They excite dishonesty, and check enterprise. They impede division of labour, and create division of interest. They sow strife and enmity amongst townsmen and brethren…."

"Thomas Hodgskin argues for a Lockean notion of the right to property (“natural”) and against the Benthamite notion that property rights are created by the state."

"Central to Green's thought, and most important to later new Liberal theorists, was Green's redefinition of freedom. The expansion of the idea of freedom to include economic as well as political rights concerned the later Mill. But it was in the works of Green that a new theoretical definition of freedom was first developed. Green was aware of the economic and social conditions which were leading men to question the traditional Liberal concept of freedom, but his own definition must be understood not only in terms of his reaction to the suffering of the poor and the working class, but more important, in terms of his moral concerns. Green's original interests were basically moral and religious, and his idealist metaphysics was meant to replace Christianity with a kind of undogmatic religion where men found God through service in this world."

"The inspiration for Toynbee, as for a whole generation of social reformers, came from the Oxford philosopher Thomas Hill Green (1836–82). Green's reappraisal of the central tenets of Liberalism makes him the most important figure of this period... [I]n his attempt to revise traditional Liberal theories to meet new situations, Green broke with traditional English empiricism and adopted an idealist metaphysics. His adoption of idealism allowed Green to redefine the Liberal ideas of freedom and society in order to permit state action."

"He was a thoroughgoing Liberal, or what used to be called a Radical, full of faith in the people, an advocate of pretty nearly every measure that tended to democratise English institutions, a friend of peace and of non-intervention."

"Green gave a superficial impression of reserve and even austerity, but no teacher in Oxford gathered around him, as time went on, such a band of wholehearted and enthusiastic disciples. His lectures were not easy to follow: his manner was apt to be jerky; and his style abounded in what Burke calls “nodosities.” It was a familiar gibe of those who looked on from outside the fold, that by the end of the hour he had become so contorted that he had to be untied by friendly hands. It must be admitted that, while he made a deep and indelible impression, not only upon the best intellects of the place, but upon the whole course of philosophic thought in the University then and thereafter, the less well-grounded of his neophytes began to talk a jargon or “patter” which lent itself to the ridicule of the unregenerate. Jowett looked on with a certain mild and mellow scepticism at these new departures, having himself (as I have said elsewhere) in his earlier days “déjà passé par là.” Between 1870 and 1880 Green was undoubtedly the greatest personal force in the real life of Oxford."

"T. H. Green taught philosophy from his base at Balliol College in Oxford and his work resulted in lifting much of the honey from the Christian hive and securing it in a public ideology to which Christians and non-Christians could subscribe. He recognised that a literal belief in the New Testament miracles had become the tripwire into disbelief for all too many people. Green successfully divorced Christian morality from dogma and English Idealism was born. For a century our country's hymn sheet was based on Green's work. Most people were probably unaware of their debt to this obscure Oxford don but that did not stop them gustily singing the same songs as everyone else."

"The young were taught in sixth form and university all the fallacies in John Stuart Mill's Essay on Liberty and were encouraged to believe that T. H. Green's definition of positive freedom was superior. Gladstonian liberals declared that socialist plans to nationalize industry and control production infringed personal freedom. But Green argued that so far from diminishing freedom such measures could increase it. A few people's freedom would be curtailed but vastly more people would now be made free to do things that hitherto they had been unable to do. The sum of freedom would increase. "Freedom for an Oxford don," it was said, "is a very different freedom for an Egyptian peasant.""

"[I]t is quite certain that only through the equal presence to successive feeling of a subject other than they, which holds them together, and thus held together regards them as its object, are there related things or relations at all. It is not that first there are relations then they are conceived. Every relation is constituted by an act of conception. This is not to be understood as meaning that there is 'nothing but the soul and its feelings,' or that realities are feelings, even feelings as determined by thought. It is through feeling as determined by thought that for us there comes to be reality, but the reality is not to be identified with the process by which we, as thinking animals, arrive at it. Even simple facts of feeling (e.g. the fact that a certain sweet smell accompanies the sight of a rose) are not feelings as felt: more clearly, the conditions of such facts are not feelings, even as determined by thought. A 'feeling determined by thought' would probably mean a feeling which but for thought I should not have, e.g. emotion at the spectacle of a tragedy. Objective facts are not of this sort, not feelings determined by thought, though but for the determination of feeling by thought they would not exist for our consciousness."

"Green, profoundly dissatisfied with these meagre and arid dietaries, turned away from them, and gradually found that for which he was in quest—the basis of a spiritual philosophy—in the speculations of Kant and his successors, and in particular of Hegel. He was commonly called a Hegelian, but while he was steeped and even saturated in the dialectic of that illustrious teacher, he never lost his intellectual self-mastery, and his presentation of the Hegelian doctrine was always coloured, both in substance and in expression, by his own robust and independent personality. He had, indeed, another side to his life and activities. He was a man of affairs, a member for some time of the Oxford City Council, an ardent Liberal politician, and an energetic worker in causes, such for instance as that of temperance, in which he thought he could discern the germs of social progress. He was a layman, and could have passed none of the common tests of orthodoxy, but he had a profoundly religious mind. His lectures on St. Paul's Epistles were the best I ever heard."

"Green's brilliance was not confined to what many people saw as a secular faith. He also had the clearest idea of how this faith was to be spread. Balliol became a powerhouse for teaching Britain's elite a set of beliefs that would shape their own lives while becoming the prism through which public policy was refracted. The last prime minister to have known that he was an Idealist was Clement Attlee and Attlee's adherence to the hymn sheet was probably typical of most."

"At Oxford a leading mind between 1860 and 1880 was T. H. Green, a man remarkable both in mental power and influence. He first gave a shake to Mill's supremacy as logician and metaphysician. But, notwithstanding Mill's conviction that false philosophy is the support of bad institutions, his critic's intuitionist philosophy did not prevent Green from being an ardent reformer, with Cobden and Bright for idols. In 1858 he ventured on a motion at the Union in approval of Bright. "It was frantically opposed," he said, "and after two days' discussion I found myself in a minority of two. I am almost ashamed to belong to a university which is in such a state of darkness.""

"One of these innovators—perhaps the most stimulating to his contemporaries, though not the most successful in giving permanent form to his thoughts—was Thomas Hill Green. A sound instinct led him to a systematic, minute study of Hume; in his efforts to gain a sure footing he examined the works of the master of destructive criticism. Green did not construct a system, for one can scarcely term such his "Simplified Kantism"; at the end of his life he was groping in search of larger truths. But if an active, hopeful spirit in philosophy is abroad, he as much as anyone helped to bring it about. Far outside the realm of pure philosophy his influence extended; and many of those who have an idea of a life of "Christian citizenship"—those who hold fast to the doctrine that "only citizenship makes the moral man"—know not that they derive from him their creed."

"Even if we are pessimistic about the chances of changing our political culture to make it more reasoned, we have little choice but to try. In politics, the waters beneath the thin ice of reason are especially rough and icy. The predators that swim in them are opportunistic populists and divisive nationalists, destined to devour the few naïve idealists who are equally blind to the complexities of real politics. Reason might seem to be a meagre defence against such dangers, but it is the only one we’ve got."

"Disenchantment with politics is therefore toxic, and populism can only increase such disenchantment, since it leads to the promise of simple solutions that cannot be delivered, while removing from the public square the more nuanced kind of discourse that is needed to explain why it can’t work."

"Some may be surprised to have found that my defence of reason has been so eager to point out its limitations. With friends like me, you might wonder if reason needs enemies. But reason needs this kind of tough love. It cannot be treated like a child that needs unconditional support. Rather, it needs to be treated like an elite athlete that always needs to be pushed to work harder and improve, because otherwise nothing can be achieved. The most difficult issues we face often require us to go to the edge of reason, stretching its capacities to breaking point. To extend the training analogy, it would be a mistake only to praise it for what it does well almost effortlessly, such as analysing the formal logical validity of arguments or spotting contradictions. It needs also to pay attention to where it is naturally weaker, such as when it has to deal with ambiguity or premises that cannot be proven, and when it requires the careful use of judgement."

"To be truly rational we need to acknowledge the limits of our rationality: nothing is more irrational than an unwarranted faith in reason."

"In this way we can see that political reason is as much – if not more – bottom-up than top-down. Rationality requires attending to objective reasons for belief and many of the most important such reasons are provided by what we observe in the world. Indeed, what we observe is of primary importance: there is no hope of understanding justice, for example, if we attempt to do so purely by examining the concept without any reference at all to what we perceive to be just or unjust in the world."

"There is an irony here. On the one hand, all of these mistakes point to hubris, a belief that human reason is more powerful than it really is. But on the other, all these mistakes implicitly acknowledge how limited the power of reason is, because they require us to simplify our conception of the world in order to make it tractable to reason. It is as though in order to preserve the illusion that human reason is mighty, we have to rig its challenges to make them easier to overcome."

"Our obsession with our differences has created the impression that there is no common domain of rationality within which disagreements can be thrashed out. We just have a multiplicity of discourses and rationalisations to legitimise different interest groups. This is not just a criticism of those currents of thought broadly and loosely labelled postmodern. The enemies of postmodernism have set themselves up as the sole champions of reason – something made easier by their opponents’ willingness to relinquish the labels of rationality and reason. In so doing they too have contributed to the sense in which the intellectual sphere is too fragmented and divided along factional lines for any general dialogue to be possible. By dismissing large sections of the intellectual community as anti-rational, the anti-postmodernists have also contributed to the sense that it is pointless to seek to argue one’s case in the widest possible forum."

"This point is critical. Reason is often assumed to be by definition disinterested. Disinterested reason has its place, of course, in mathematics and science, but sometimes it can legitimately be very interested indeed. Reason needs to be objective, not disinterested, and this means it can recognise the objective existence of needs and desires, good and bad states."