The British Hegelians

Originally published in 1982, this volume examines the sources of British Hegelian thinking, the lines of its development and intellectual relationships among members of the school. The sources in this book include twentieth century Marxians who pioneered the move ‘back to Hegel’ such as Gramsci and Lukacs. It includes brief biographical entries of the principal British Hegelians and of minor figures wo paved the way for Hegel’s entry into British philosophy.

This book offers a reassessment of the political philosophy of the British Idealists, a group of once influential and now neglected nineteenth-century Hegelian philosophers, whose work has been much misunderstood. Peter Nicholson focuses on F. H. Bradley's idea of morality and moral philosophy; T. H. Green's theory of the Common Good, of the social nature of rights, of freedom, and of state interference; and Bernard Bosanquet's notorious theory of the General Will. By examining the arguments offered by the Idealists and by their critics the author is able to penetrate the deep layers of hostile comment laid down by several generations of later writers and to show that these ideas, once properly understood, are not only defensible but interesting and important.

Hegel's Metaphysics is a series of essays analysing the metaphysical ideas and influence of the great German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831). Robert Stern traces the way those ideas were taken up and criticised by the British Idealists and American Pragmatists, and by more contemporary continental philosophers.

British Literature and the Life of Institutions charts a literary prehistory of the welfare state in Britain around 1900, but it also marks a major intervention in current theoretical debates about critique and the dialectical imagination. By placing literary studies in dialogue with politicaltheory, philosophy, and the history of ideas, the book reclaims a substantive reformist language that we have ignored to our own loss. This reformist idiom made it possible to imagine the state as a speculative and aspirational idea--as a fully realized form of life rather than as an uninspiringensemble of administrative procedures and bureaucratic processes. This volume traces the resonances of this idiom from the Victorian period to modernism, ranging from Mary Augusta Ward, George Gissing, and H. G. Wells, to Edward Carpenter and E. M. Forster. Compared to this reformist language, theeconomism that dominates current debates about the welfare state signals an impoverishment that is at once intellectual, cultural, and political. Critiquing the shortcomings of the welfare state comes naturally to us, but we often struggle to offer up convincing defences of its principles and aims.This book intervenes in these debates by urging a richer understanding of critique: speculation, this provocative new study suggests, does not signify the cancellation of critique but an aspirational moment inherent in critique itself. If we want to defend the state, Kohlmann argues, we need tolearn to think about it again.

British philosophy in the last third of the nineteenth and first third of the twentieth centuries.

This is Volume XIV of twenty-two in a series on 20th Century Philosophy. Originally published in 1938. The Library of Philosophy was designed as a contribution to the History of Modern Philosophy under the heads: first of different Schools of Thought-Sensationalist, Realist, Idealist, Intuitivist; secondly of different Subjects—Psychology Ethics, Aesthetics, Political Philosophy, Theology. Dr Rudolf Metz’s book entitled ‘Die philosophischen Stromungen der Gegenwart in Grossbritannien’ of which this volume is a translation, was the first attempt to give a detailed account to his own countrymen of the develop)llent of British philosophy during the last, and the first part of this, century.