The common good and the metaphysics of citizenship

The Victorian philosopher Thomas Hill Green popularised the term “common good” nearly a decade before Rerum Novarum was published in 1891. An unusual Oxford don, he was elected to the City Council and ran evening classes in the slums of St Clement’s. Here Ralph Norman explores how Green’s metaphysics of citizenship posed a corrective to the materialist and individualist ethics in England in the 1860s, and argues that his legacy speaks to our contemporary sense of crisis around the understanding of state, community and individual. Drawing on Aristotelian ideas of civic friendship and viewing education as a means of enabling the development of moral citizens, Green’s particularly democratic vision of the common good influenced political thinkers such as Asquith, Hobhouse, Beveridge and Tawney.