ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the man who in Britain decisively undermined the position of laissez-faire in political philosophy: Thomas Hill Green. Green’s contribution was the critical one in changing the British outlook. Few, even those critical of it, doubt the importance of Green’s influence on British thought and public policy between 1880 and 1914.9 The socialist Laski credited Green and his fellow Oxford Idealists and disciples with achieving ‘something akin to revolution in the English theory of the State’. ‘Advancing civilization brings with it more and more interference with the liberty of the individual’, Green believed. ‘Freedom in all forms of doing what one will with one’s own’, Green believed to be ‘valuable only as a means to an end. Educational reforms and public health measures, indeed, were prominent in Green’s political programme. Green’s reputation as the first British philosopher to justify collectivism and the Welfare State has been subject to challenge.
