ABSTRACT
This chapter is to give a brief recollection of the main points of argument that have been discussed in the previous chapters and to indicate how the book establishes an innovative reading of Green’s practical philosophy and enriches our understanding of the multiplicity of modernity. Section one indicates that Green built a systematic philosophy which is composed of three parts: a human ontology, an ethical theory of self-realisation, and a political theory of active citizens, and his intention was to tackle the malign consequences of modernity happened in the nineteenth-century Britain such as the political and social inequalities between the privileged class and the common people, the demise of the communal spirit, the corruption of social morality, and so on. And what he achieved is an ethical conception of modern politics, according to which each individual person should participate in public affairs actively in order to realise and manifest his or her life worth. Following that, section two indicates three findings from the survey of the development of Greenian studies in China and East Asia. First, individualism cannot be a defining feature of the modernity as it cannot be a clear and feasible standard to account for the modernisation in different places. Second, the definition of individualism itself is equivocal. Green’s reconciliatory view of the individual and the community also underscores the value of individual freedom, but it is obviously different from the atomic view of the individual. Third, it is simply a dualistic thinking behind the thought that we can use some defining features of the modernity to indicate the change of a society as there is a rapture between the pre-modern and modern periods. Yet, as Green deemed the modernity as an issue and a series of problems, one of his great legacies is his ethical liberalism, the ethical view of how the individual can manifest its worth and achieve its ultimate freedom by devoting itself to the community willingly. And the migration of this view of the individual has also demonstrated the multiplicity of modernity which we should consider as a set of questions, not a series of phenomena or a conception having conclusive and unequivocal features.
