ABSTRACT
The greatest threat to the reputation of British Hegelianism was its own philosophical inadequacy. In political philosophy the British Hegelians had to combat personalism, anarchism, internationalism and other varieties of doctrine directed against the state and some or all of its works. The ideal polity envisaged by T. H. Green was dubbed the “educative state” by Klaus Dockhorn. One of the undoubted success stories of British Hegelianism was organizing adult education and the beginnings of a national system of education which integrated universities, technological institutes and community colleges. In political theory the British Hegelians were resolutely prescriptive, and their goal was to heighten the sense of community purpose in order to more effectively combat entrenched privilege and more confidently drive the engine of social reform. The idealist tradition, with which G. W. F. Hegel is identified, places the moral centre of gravity outside the individual in the social whole, in the social complex of laws, customs and mores.
