¹ Richter, Melvin, The Politics of Conscience: T. H. Green and his Age (London, 1964)Google Scholar; Annan, Noel, Leslie Stephen (London, 1951).Google Scholar

² Said to be Green's fundamental belief by his biographer, R. L. Nettleship; and quoted by Leslie Stephen in his biography of Green for the Diet. Nat. Biog.

³ Thus Green (1836–82) and Sidgwick (1838–99) were almost exact contemporaries on parallel curst honorum. Both were sons of Anglican clergymen (actually Anglican clergymen in Yorkshire); both were educated at Rugby in Arnold's shadow (in the early 1850s); both took firsts in classics (at Balliol and Trinity) berween 1855 and 1859; both were elected to fellowships in 1861 and to chairs within four years of one another (1878 Green, 1882 Sidgwick); both lost their faith in the 'sixties and founded schools of philosophy in the 'seventies. Marshall (1842–1924) was ten years older than Toynbee (1852–83); but succeeded Toynbee in his Balliol tutorship.

⁴ The following paragraphs are based upon Richter, , op. cit.Google Scholar; Annan, , op. cit.Google Scholar; Nettleship, R. L. (ed.), The Worlds of Thomas Hill Green (3 vols., London, 1900)Google Scholar, hereafter Green's Worlds; the memoirs of Arnold Toynbee by Jowert, and Milner, prefacing their editions of his Lectures on the Industrial Revolution of the Eighteenth Century in England (London, 1886 and 1908 respectively), hereafter L1R (Jowett) and LIR (Milner)Google Scholar; Abbott, E. and Campbell, Lewis, Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett (2 vols., London, 1897)Google Scholar; SirFaber, Geoffrey, Jowett: a Portrait with Background (London, 1957)Google Scholar; Nettleship, R. L., Philosophical Lectures and Remains, Bradley, A. C. and Benson, G. R. (eds.) (2 vols., London, 1897)Google Scholar; , A. and Sidgwick, E. M., Henry Sidgwick: A Memoir (London, 1908)Google Scholar; Havard, W. C., Henry Sidgwick and Later Utilitarian Political Philosophy (Gainesville, 1959)Google Scholar; and Keynes, J. M., ‘Alfred Marshall, 1842–1924’, in Pigou, A. C. (ed.), Memorials of Alfred Marshall (London, 1925) hereafter Marshall, Memorials.Google Scholar

⁵ On the climacteric of classical political economy in general and the historicist reaction in particular, see Hutchinson, T. W., A Review of Economic Doctrines, 1870–1939 (Oxford, 1953), pp. 1ff.Google Scholar; Meek, R. L., ‘The Decline of Ricardian Economics in England’, Economica, n.s. 17 (1950), pp. 43–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ingram, J. K., A History of Political Economy (London, 1888)Google Scholar; Coats', A. W. seminal ‘The Historist Reaction in English Political Economy’, Economica, n.s. 21 (1954), pp. 143–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Adelman, Paul, ‘Frederic Harrison and the “Positivist” Attack on Orthodox Political Economy’, History of Political Economy, 3 (1971), pp. 170–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁶ Sidgwick, Henry, The Methods of Ethics (2nd edn., London, 1877), p. 467Google Scholar (hereafter Sidgwick, Ethics). Sidgwick resigned his fellowship (which was held on condition of subscription to the thirty-nine articles) when he lost his faith, and led the subsequent campaign for the abolition of religious tests at Cambridge. Of Marshall's loss of faith, Keynes wrote: ‘there came a crisis in his mental development, of which he often spoke in later years as the turning point in his life …’ (Keynes, J. M., ‘Alfred Marshall’, in the Dict.Nat.Biog.). Cf. Marshall's tribute to Sidgwick, his spiritual guide in this crisis, quoted below.Google Scholar

⁷ ‘Green’ –Professor J. Kemp has written– ‘is one of those moderately competent philosophers whose writings gain a local and temporary influence and reputation beyond their intrinsic merit, because they represent and defend, in however inadequate a way, opinions and beliefs which are widely and sincerely held in the society of which they are members, and which deeply influence the culture and organization of that society.’ Kemp, J., ‘T. H. Green and the Ethics of Self-Relation’, in Reason and Reality, Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures, v, 1970–1971, ed. Vesey, G. N. A. (London, 1972), pp. 222–40.Google Scholar

⁸ Quoted, in Richter, , op. cit. p. 318.Google Scholar

⁹ Foxwell, H. S., ‘The Economic Movement in England’, Quarterly Journal of Economics (1887), p. 93.Google Scholar Cf. SirClark, George, The Idea of the Industrial Revolution (Glasgow, 1953), pp. 16–17Google Scholar: ‘No one has ever claimed for it (Toynbee's Industrial Revolution) that it is a great book, or that, even in the comparatively immature conditions of English economic history when it was written, it was a very good book. Yet it was reprinted many times; it continued to circulate for about sixty years; and was … influential from the time of its first issue down to some point in the 1920s. Many critics have thought…that it succeeded because it was a symbol, a relic, of Toynbee's ardent, sincere and burning personality … he died at the age of thirty. The young men whom he inspired lived to be old, and his inspiration lived on in them.’

¹⁰ Marshall, , Memorials, p. 7.Google Scholar Cf. Maitland's tribute: he remembered ‘a supremely great teacher … the admirable patience which could never be outworn by stupidity, and which nothing but pretentiousness could disturb … the sympathetic kindly endeavour to overcome our shyness, to make us talk and make us think.’ Quoted, in Havard, , op. cit. pp. 20–1.Google Scholar

¹¹ There are details of the idealist sets in LIR (Jowett) and LIR (Milner).

¹² What follows is heavily dependent on the more sophisticated explanation of Marshall's hegemony brilliantly advanced in Coats, A. W., ‘Sociological Aspects of British Economic Thought, c. 1880–1930’, Journal of Political Economy (1967), pp. 706ff.Google Scholar

¹³ Marshall, , Memorials, pp. 46–7.Google Scholar For Marshall's desire for reconciliation, see ‘The Old Generation of Economists and the New’ (1897), Memorials, pp. 115–35.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Perhaps the most lucid exposition of the classical concept of the market is Meek's, R. L.The Rise and Fall of the Concept of the Economic Machine (Leicester, 1965).Google Scholar Cf. Robbins, Lord, The Theory of Economic Policy in English Classical Political Economy (London, 1952), pp. 11–19, 169–207.Google Scholar

¹⁵ ‘The bitter argument between economists and human beings has ended in the conversion of the economists. But it was not by the fierce denunciations of moralists, nor by the mute visible suffering of degraded men, that this conversion was effected. What the passionate protests of Past and Present and the grave official revelations of government reports could not do, the chill breath of intellectual criticism has done’. LIR (Jowett), p. 1.

¹⁶ Bradley, F. M., Ethical Studies (2nd edn., London, 1927), p. 163.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Ibid. pp. 166–7, 174.

¹⁸ Sidgwick, H., The Development of European Polity (3rd edn., London, 1920), p. 210.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Sidgwick, H., The Methods of Ethics (2nd edn., London, 1877), p. 461.Google Scholar

²⁰ Ibid. pp. 160–1.

²¹ Ibid. p. 175.

²² Ibid. p. 176.

²³ Ibid. pp. 352–3.

²⁴ Ibid. p. 469.

²⁵ Sidgwick, H., The Elements of Politics (4th edn., London, 1919), p. 82.Google Scholar

²⁶ Green, T. H., ‘Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract’, Green, , Works, vol. III, p. 370.Google Scholar ‘The true ground of objection to paternal government’, Green explained, ‘is not that it violates the “laissez faire” principle and conceives that its office is to make people good, to produce morality, but that it rests on a wrong conception of morality. The real function of Government being to maintain conditions of life in which morality shall be possible, and morality consisting in the disinterested performance of self-imposed duties, paternal Government does its best to make it impossible by narrowing the room for the self-imposition of duties, and for the play of disinterested motives.’ Ibid. p. 132.

²⁷ Cf. Toynbee: ‘High wages are not an end in themselves. No one wants high wages in order that working men may indulge in mere sensual gratification. We want higher wages in order that improved material conditions, with less anxiety and less uncertainty as to the future, may enable the working man to enter a purer and more worthy life.’ Quoted, in Richter, , op. cit. p. 324.Google Scholar

²⁸ Sidgwick, H., The Elements of Politics, op. cit. p. 82.Google Scholar

²⁹ Sidgwick, H., The Principles of Political Economy (3rd edn., London, 1901), passim.Google Scholar

³⁰ The clearest statement of Marshall's attitude to private enterprise and State intervention occurs in his ‘Social Possibilities of Economic Chivalry’ (1907), reprinted in Marshall, , Memorials, pp. 323–46–Google Scholar

³¹ Ibid. p. 332.

³² Ibid. p. 334; Sidgwick, H., The Principles of Political Economy, op. cit. pp. 419ff.Google Scholar Sidgwick acknowledged Mill's influence: see, for example, A., and Sidgwick, E. M., Henry Sidgwick: A Memoir (London, 1906), pp. 37–40.Google Scholar

³³ LIR (Milner, ), p. xxvii.Google Scholar

³⁴ Marshall, Alfred, ‘Cooperation’ (1889)Google Scholar, reprinted in Marshall, , Memorials, pp. 227–8. Cf. ‘Some Aspects of Cooperation’ (1890), also reprinted in Memorials.Google Scholar

³⁵ Sidgwick, H., Elements of Politics (1st edn., London, 1891), pp. 551–2Google Scholar; quoted in Petrella, Frank, ‘Individual, Group, or Government? Smith, Mill and Sidgwick’, History of Political Economy, 2 (1970), pp. 152–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁶ So called by Checkland, G. S., ‘Economic Opinion in England as Jevons Found It’, Manchester School, 1951.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁷ See White, R. J., ‘John Stuart Mill’, Cambridge Journal, v (1951–1952), 86–96Google Scholar, for Mill's inconsistency; and for examples Mill, J. S., Principles oj Political Economy, in Collected Works, Priestley, F. E. L. (ed.) (Toronto and London, 1965), pp. 239–40, 265, 936ff.Google Scholar

³⁸ Mill, J. S., Principles of Political Economy, op. cit. p. 205.Google Scholar

³⁹ Quoted, in Havard, W. C., Henry Sidgwick and Later Utilitarian Political Philosophy (Gainesville, 1959), p. 8.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Sidgwick himself treated utilitarianism as a historical study in ‘Bentham and Benthamism in Politics and Ethics’, Fortnightly Review, 21 (1877), pp. 627–52: ‘In his most characteristic merits, as well as his most salient defects, Bentham is eminently a representative of this stirring and vehement age; in his unreserved devotion to the grandest and most comprehensive aims, his high and sustained confidence in their attainability, and the buoyant, indefatigable industry with which he sought the means for their attainment, no less than in his exaggerated reliance on his own method, his ignorant contempt for the past … his intolerant misinterpretation of all that opposed him in the present… (and) his eager receptivity for abstract theory which is often found in powerful but imperfectly trained intellects, even after the fullest acquisition of all that experience can teach’ (pp. 628–9).Google Scholar

⁴¹ Marshall, , Memorials, p. 285.Google Scholar

⁴² The controversy is prolonged and inconclusive; the literature large. References to the debate on the nineteenth century can be found in Coats, A. W. (ed.), The Classical Economists and Economic Policy (London, 1971)Google Scholar, or Taylor, A. J., Laissez Faire and State Intervention in Nineteenth Century Britain (London, 1972).CrossRefGoogle Scholar To these might be added Finer's, S. E. masterly ‘The Transmission of Benthamite Ideas, 1820–50’, in Studies in the Growth of Nineteenth Century Government, G. Sutherland, S. (ed.) (London, 1972), pp. 11–32.Google Scholar

⁴³ It may be that the influence of both the idealist and the rationalist reactions on policyformation was greater in India than England. A large proportion of the Indian civil service (a mandarinate chosen for their intellectual ability, with great freedom of action in India) was educated by idealists or revisionists after 1877; and the transformation of Indian agrarian policy between 1880 and 1910 corresponds with idealist-revisionist policy prescriptions. See Dewey, C. J., ‘The Education of a Ruling Caste: the Indian Civil Service in the Era of Competitive Examination’, English Historical Review, LXXXVIH (1973), pp. 262–85Google Scholar; and ‘The Official Mind and the Problem of Agrarian Indebtedness in India‘ (Cambridge Ph.D. thesis, 1972). For a parallel study of the influence of the historicist reaction on agrarian policy, see C. J. Dewey, ‘Celtic Agrarian Legislation and the Celtic Revival: Historicist Implications of Gladstone's Irish and Scottish Land Acts’, Past and Present, forthcoming.Google Scholar