A few months ago I read Peter Nicholson's The Political Philosophy of the British Idealists for the first time. In the index I found more than a hundred references to Hegel and only one to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. However, as many of the latter's writings, published for the first time in recent years, become generally accessible there is an increasing sense that he has been unfairly deprived of his due status as a philosopher. This is partly, no doubt, the syndrome of the prophet in his own country and partly the inevitable consequence of much of his later work remaining unpublished until recent years. Coleridge himself, with what some would take to be confirmation of an over-sensitivity to criticism, felt the neglect of his work went deeper and betrayed an anti-philosophical trait in British character.

Despite his close reading of the work of many of his German contemporaries it seems that he did not read more than sixtyone pages of Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik. His margin notes to this work are, on the whole, negative in their criticism. However, despite significant disagreements, there is much common ground in theme, argument and conclusion between his many drafts of the ‘Logosophia’, his intended magnum opus, and Hegel's system.

Of all the major episodes in Hegel's Rezeptionsgeschichte, British Hegelianism can seem the most foreign and outmoded, to have the least relevance to our current understanding of Hegel's thought. Even today, we are lead back to the Young Hegelians for the problems they pose in reading his work; we can sympathise with the concerns of Peirce, Royce and Dewey that drew them to him, and the interpretative picture they developed; we can take seriously the attempts by Croce and Gentile to bring about their “reforms”, given our contemporary ambivalence to his project; and we can see how in different ways the influence of Hegel on Kojève, Sartre, Lukács and the Frankfurt School have made some of his ideas central to our times. But few feel this sense of identification and illumination on encountering the work of Hegel's British interpreters from the turn of the century; rather, in their writings we seem to find a Hegel that is darker, more distant, more difficult for us to relate to contemporary concerns.

This is not true in every respect, of course. In particular, several recent commentators have stressed how far it is possible to find here a reading and assessment of Hegel's political thought that does connect directly with many current issues, and that in this respect the thought of T H Green, Bernard Bosanquet and Henry Jones is not dead, either as a tradition within political philosophy, or as an interpretative approach to Hegel's theory of the state. Nonetheless, even those who seek to defend the importance of British Hegelianism in this regard clearly recognize that this is a fairly modest claim: for it fails to resurrect and revitalize the more fundamental aspect of the their encounter with Hegel, which was with his metaphysics – on which, as for Hegel, their political theories were based, rather than being primary in themselves. Those concerned with the political thought of the British Hegelians have not tried to take on this wider issue, leaving unchallenged the assumption that in their appropriation of his metaphysics, the British Hegelians have little to offer us either interpretatively or philosophically.

It is generally held that 19th and early 20th century British Idealism was fundamentally Hegelian in character and the term ‘the British Hegelians’ has long been in common usage. Yet, particularly in recent years, it has been argued that some of the most influential British idealists were not Hegelians at all. T H Green may still be an idealist, and F H Bradley an ‘absolute idealist’ but, despite traces of Hegelian vocabulary or principles in their work, several scholars now hold that neither ought to be considered a disciple of Hegel. One might well wonder whether this is also true of Bernard Bosanquet, who has generally been regarded as the most Hegelian of the major idealists.

It is unlikely that Bosanquet would be offended in being called a Hegelian. In his metaphysics, his political philosophy and, particularly, his logic, Bosanquet draws on Hegel's insights and arguments. He saw his work as indebted to Hegel (specifically, to a tradition that traced its roots through Hegel, back to Kant, Rousseau and, ultimately, Plato) and, at the beginning of his philosophical career, Bosanquet criticised F H Bradley's logic for not having respected the principles laid out by Hegel beforehand. It is no surprise, then, that Bosanquet described Hegel as one of the two “great masters who 'sketched the plan’” (the other being Kant).

Still, it is hard to say what, precisely, is it that makes an author a ‘Hegelian’. Is it the use of Hegel's categories and terminology? Is it that the author is explicitly indebted to Hegel? Is it that the author's work shows an allegiance to Hegel's conclusions and that he sees himself as, at most, completing and extending what Hegel did? One might also ask, what type of Hegelian we have in mind – there are ‘left Hegelians’, ‘right Hegelians’ and so on. Of course, in attempting to trace such an intellectual debt, one must, as far as possible, try to distinguish what is distinctively Hegelian from what is to be found in earlier authors, but taken up by Hegel.

In this paper I look at T H Green's use of Hegel, with specific reference to political philosophy. I try to assess in particular the limits which Green set to his use of Hegel. I begin by considering briefly Green's knowledge of Hegel, and the extent to which Hegel's ideas can be discerned in his writings. Then I discuss a famous passage which is usually cited as expressing a serious reservation about Hegel's view of politics. I conclude that it is by no means clear how Hegelian Green is: and that this is not a question which Green would have thought important.

Green died suddenly, weeks before his forty-sixth birthday. He left no autobiography to help us trace his intellectual debts, and we have to rely on the evidence of his writings together with the recollections of his friends. Consequently it is impossible to be certain how much of any particular author Green read. Writers on philosophy were not then generally expected to support every statement with references. Green himself seldom appends footnotes which reveal his sources. Furthermore, his friend and first biographer Nettleship tells us, Green

International relations theorists have long complained about the paucity of rigorous political philosophy in their discipline, and especially bemoan the lack of classic texts to guide them. It is suggested that with the exception of Thucydides, there is little exclusively concerned with International Relations, and nothing that international relations theorists have constructed to resemble the received canon comparable with its sister subject of political theory. Yet all of the major political theorists accommodate international relations in some way, and are invoked by contemporary international relations theorists as having something important to say. Contemporary international relations theory, however, is immersed in its own sense of self-importance, seeing the value of everything in utilitarian or practical terms. The desire to change the world, and not merely to understand it, predisposes the discipline to scale the obligatory heights of Machiavelli, Grotius, Kant, Hegel and Marx in order to pillage what is useful, and to ignore the attempts of philosophers more immediately at the root of modern international relations theory who addressed many of the questions currently thought important and which pointed the way to some of the contemporary answers. Hegel's ill-deserved, but not wholly unfounded, reputation as a brutal realist, and the association of Bosanquet and the rest of the British Idealists with German or Prussian philosophy during and between the two world wars in popular and learned journals, newspapers, and the publications of leading philosophers, including Hobhouse, Hobson, Dewey, Santayana, Laski, Delise Burns, Cole and Joad, have served to bury almost without trace a wealth of literature that applied what are now fashionably called communitarian principles to international questions. Even Chris Brown, who relates Hegel, Green and Bosanquet to the communitarian approach to international relations, ignores the fact that British idealists addressed the key issues of the possibility of extending the community to the international sphere and the establishment of supranational institutions.

The relation between Collingwood and Hegel has been mentioned very often but so far it has seldom been the subject of a thorough inquiry. Collingwood himself is for a large part responsible for this situation because he never expressed his debts to Hegel's philosophy. In the Idea of Nature and in the Idea of History, both published posthumously, Collingwood confines himself to a critical account of Hegel's philosophy of nature and history. The quality of Collingwood's interpretations in both works however, leads one to suspect that Collingwood had a very profound knowledge of Hegel's philosophy. This suspicion is confirmed by Collingwood's manuscripts in the Bodleian Library which show clearly that Collingwood studied Hegel much more thoroughly and continuously than his interpreters have assumed so far. In the manuscripts we find long and profound commentaries on Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, on his Science of Logic and on all parts of the Encyclopedia. The material in the Bodleian is so abundant that a whole book would be needed to interpret it satisfactorily. In this paper, however, I will restrict myself to the kernel of the Hegel's and Collingwood's philosophies which is the dialectic.

It needs no comment that Hegel's system is thoroughly dialectical. About the dialectical character of Collingwood's philosophy, however, many interpreters have their doubts and even when they admit, always after long discussion, that some parts of Collingwood's thought are dialectical, they immediately claim that these parts are not the best.