Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation

Thomas Hill Green

ene 2005 · The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd.

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Reprint of the first edition. Roscoe Pound recommended this book in The Study of American Law for its discussion of legal rights, powers, liberties, privileges and liabilities (38). Green [1836-1882], Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford University, was one of the most influential philosophers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligations is his most important work. Its object is to demonstrate, on the basis of his general moral philosophy, the ethical position of the state, in particular the extent to which moral authority is justifiable and obedience to law morally obligatory. Extracted from Volume II of The Works of Thomas Hill Green (1885), it went on to become a standard textbook on political theory in Great Britain and the United States. A durable work, it is still cited today.

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Born in Birkin, Yorkshire, the son of an Anglican clergyman, Thomas Hill Green entered Balliol College, Oxford, in 1855 and was elected a fellow in 1860. His early efforts at an academic career were unsuccessful, and in 1865--66 he worked on a royal commission investigating the British educational system. He returned to Balliol as a tutor, and when Benjamin Jowett became master in 1870, Green took over many of the college's administrative duties. He was finally elected a professor of moral philosophy in 1878. Throughout his career Green was active in politics as a Liberal, supporting the temperance movement and the local Oxford school system. Green's chief works are his critique of empiricism in his long introduction to his and T. H. Grose's edition of Hume's works (1874) and his Prolegomena to Ethics (published posthumously, 1883). The remainder of his writings, including his lectures on political philosophy, were published in three volumes between 1885 and 1888. Green's interests centered on ethics and political philosophy. He was one of the leading "British idealists," critical of empiricism and naturalism and sympathetic to the metaphysical position of Kant and Hegel (see also Vol. 3).