T. H. Green was a seminal liberal political theorist. The various aspects of his philosophical system--in particular, his conceptions of society, positive freedom, and the common good--remain profound and rich areas for research. Historically, he played a key role in transforming Anglo-American philosophy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: he helped to foster the study of Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in Great Britain and the United States, and his own philosophy exerted a significant influence over such figures as F. H. Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet, Leonard T. Hobhouse, Herbert H. Asquith, Edward Caird, John Dewey, and Josiah Royce. Few philosophers are as challenging--or as misunderstood--as Green.

Thomas Hill Green was born on 7 April 1836 in Birkin, a village near Pontyfract in the West Riding of Yorkshire, the youngest of four children and the second son of the Reverend Valentine Green and his first wife. After...