This book contains the political writing of T. H. Green and selections from those of his ethical writings which bear on his political philosophy. Green's best known work, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, is included in full, as are the essay on freedom and the lecture 'Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract'. There are also extracts from Green's lectures on the English Revolution and from the Prolegomena to Ethics, and a number of previously unpublished essays and notes. All (...) the texts have been corrected against Green's manuscripts, held in Balliol College. The editors have provided a list of variants, full notes and an introductory essay on the importance of Green's form of revitalised liberalism. The volume will be a valuable sourcebook for students of Green's thought and the history of nineteenth-century liberalism. (shrink)

Carlyle regarded the Reformation as a seminal event in the history of modern Europe, the starting point of an ongoing stage in human development. Reformation Protestantism gave birth to a more general and pervasive spirit of ‘reformation’ that Carlyle identified with the moral destiny of all individuals and communities. These qualities were epitomized by heroic figures such as Luther and Cromwell but they were also embedded in cultures that responded productively to the ongoing challenge of reformation. Having traced the history (...) of the ethos of reformation through English Puritanism and in the commitment to transformative action or ‘work’ that gave rise to Britains emergence as a leading industrial and imperial power, Carlyle brought this reinvention of the Reformation to bear in his critique of the counter-reforming tendencies in early Victorian society that he saw as posing a profound threat to it. (shrink)