T. H. Green on Resistance

In one line

Green says the state rests on will and not on force, that a citizen obeys because the state maintains the conditions in which people can live a moral life, and that where a law attacks those conditions the ground of obedience is gone.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: T. H. Green holds that political obligation rests not on force or on a contract but on the common recognition of a common good; that the state exists to maintain the conditions under which its members can realise their moral capacities, which he describes as hindering the hindrances to the good life; that rights are powers recognised by society as necessary to that end; and that a right of resistance therefore exists where the sovereign's command destroys the very conditions the state exists to secure, subject always to the effect of resistance on the social fabric as a whole.

The position Green is arguing from

Green is an idealist, which in this context means something precise: he thinks the state is not an external machine standing over individuals but the arrangement through which individuals become what they are capable of being. Everything in his account follows from that.

"Will, not force, is the basis of the state." This is the heading of section 113, and it is the sentence every Indian textbook attributes to Green without saying where it is. His point is not that states never use force; it is that force cannot explain why they hold together. What holds a state together is the common recognition, by its members, of a common good.

The contract theorists went wrong in the same way as the force theorists. Green's own criticism, in the same section, is that theories explaining political obligation by contract treat sovereign and subject apart, whereas the two are correlative: there is no sovereign without subjects who recognise the sovereign, and no subject except in relation to a recognised sovereign. A contract between two pre-existing parties gets the relation the wrong way round.

But the contract theorists were groping at something true. Green says the theory of contract expresses, in a confused way, the truth that it is only through the common recognition of a common good that political society exists at all. That generosity is characteristic and is worth reproducing in an answer: Green does not simply refute his predecessors, he says what they were reaching for.

Freedom, and why it is not being left alone

This is Green's most influential contribution and it returns at topic 3.1.1.

Freedom is positive. It is not the absence of restraint but the positive power or capacity of doing or enjoying something worth doing or enjoying, and doing it in common with others.