British idealist engagements with Mazzinianism, 1858 to 1929

ABSTRACT

This article contributes to the scholarship on Giuseppe Mazzini’s impact on British radicalism, through an analysis of British idealist engagements with his life and writings between 1858 and 1929. Section one introduces the topic. Section two sketches a background for the analysis, highlighting Mazzini’s place within the milieu of European exiles living in Britain from the 1840s to the 1870s, ultimately focusing on Mazzini’s engagements at Oxford. Section three explores the ways in which, despite areas of agreement, ultimately the Weltanschauung of the foundational figure in British idealist social and political thought and practice, Thomas Hill Green, differed fundamentally from that of Mazzini. Section four argues that despite these fundamental philosophical differences, Green’s practical political theory drew directly on Mazzini’s writings, although differing over the crucial issue of the proper role of the state in the republic. From this basis, section five analyses the engagements with Mazzini’s writings by the next generation of British idealists, especially John MacCunn. The analysis concludes that although in 1881 Toynbee had reasonable grounds for characterising Mazzini as ‘the true teacher of our age,’ this claim became increasingly unsustainable from the late 1880s onwards, as evolutionary theory came to ground British idealist political thought.

1. Introduction

British idealism exerted a profound influence over both the British ethical socialist tradition and the United Kingdom’s New Liberal governments of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and H.H. Asquith (1905–16).¹ Moreover, it exerted an equally profound influence over key reformers including churchmen such as Henry Scott Holland, William Temple and Charles Gore, economists such as William Beveridge, and social work pioneers such as Helen Bosanquet.² By so doing, British idealism drove the development of ideas regarding the state as an agent for the promotion and protection of individual freedom, with freedom being conceived as the effective power of personal agency and self-realization in practice, rather than a merely formal equality before the law. Throughout this process, the British idealists sought to balance personal self-determination with community coherence, a goal that led them to engage in interesting but now neglected ways with the thought of the Italian radical Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–72).³ Mazzini’s radicalism formed an important part of the milieu in which the British idealists developed their political philosophy and activism. It helped to frame their thought, implying salient questions and indicating a field of possible answers to those questions.

This article contributes to the scholarship on Mazzini’s impact on British radicalism, through an analysis of British idealist engagements with his life and writings between 1858 and 1929. It focuses particularly on the ideological, philosophical and political significance of key similarities and differences between their respective worldviews.⁴ This analysis also helps to locate ideologically the various British idealists studied here. By highlighting the proximity of certain British idealists to Mazzini’s position, the article problematizes the categorization of them as liberals by scholars such as Michael Freeden.⁵ Pace Freeden, it also implicitly reasserts the conception of ideologies as being founded upon Wittgensteinian ‘family resemblances.’⁶ The argument draws on a range of sources, supplementing published writings with newspaper reports relating to Mazzini’s activities and Green’s political speeches.

The argument begins in section two (‘Britain, Mazzini, Jowett and the Old Mortality Society’) by sketching a background for the analysis, highlighting Mazzini’s place within the milieu of displaced European exiles living in Britain from the 1840s to the 1870s. It comes to focus particularly on Mazzini’s engagements at Oxford, especially with Benjamin Jowett and the Old Mortality Society. The argument moves on in Section three (‘Mazzini and Green: History and modernity’) to explore the ways in which, despite areas of agreement, ultimately the Weltanschauung of the foundational figure in British idealist social and political thought and practice, Thomas Hill Green, differed fundamentally from that of Mazzini. The article proceeds to show in section four (‘Republicanism in Practice: Virtue, associations, and the republican state’) that despite these fundamental philosophical differences, Green’s applied political theory drew directly on Mazzini’s writings, even though they differed over the crucial issue of the proper role of the state in the republic. From this basis, section five (‘Mazzini and the later British idealists’) analyses the engagements with the writings of Giuseppe Mazzini by the next generation of British idealists, especially John MacCunn and David George Ritchie. The analysis concludes that although in 1881 Toynbee had reasonable grounds for characterizing Mazzini as ‘the true teacher of our age,’ this claim became increasingly unsustainable from the late 1880s onwards, as evolutionary theory gradually came to ground the political thought of the British idealists.

2. Britain, Mazzini, Jowett and the Old Mortality Society

The initial British idealist engagements with Mazzini’s writings were part of a broad range of engagements between British intellectuals and foreign radicals in the mid-Victorian period. These engagements were fuelled by Continental repression and exile. In his 1885 essay ‘On the History of the Communist League,’ Friedrich Engels wrote that from the late 1840s onwards, Continental radicals ‘crowded in London to form provisional governments of the future not only for their respective fatherlands but for the whole of Europe.’⁷ The diverse range of Continental socialists and republicans to whom England gave safe haven during this period included Karl Marx, Arnold Ruge, Gottfried Kinkel and Amand Gögg from Germany, Giuseppe Mazzini, Carlo Armellini, Antonio Panizzi, Gabriele Rossetti and Aurelio Saffi from Italy, Alexander Herzen and Mikhail Bakunin from Russia, Alexandre Ledru-Rollin and Louis Blanc from France, and the Hungarians Ferenc Pulszky and Lajos Kossuth.

Many of these displaced European radicals found sympathetic and supportive audiences among mid-Victorian reformers including the British idealists referred to below, and politicians such as Joseph Cowan and James Stansfeld.⁸ Frequently, their connections arose from shared concerns with ‘the Social Problem’ and the chaos of Continental and American revolutions and civil wars. These evils were widely seen as mutually reinforcing in complex ways, with the conditions of the British poor being closely linked to the struggles of the working classes and peasants in Europe and North American slaves, as became prominent in the Lancashire cotton strikes of 1862–63.⁹ Numerous ideological sympathies arose from the friendly relationships and common causes between Continental radicals and many Britons who were active in public life. Each side learnt from the other to varying degrees, not least in relation to the development of their respective ideological commitments, goals, and strategies.

Yet, the exiles’ shared need to escape repressive regimes in their home countries did little to overcome the animosities that had long divided European radicals. Hence, Engels observed that even as early as the 1840s, ‘[t]he official Polish émigrés, as also Mazzini, were, of course, opponents rather than allies [of the communists].’¹⁰ Indeed, Salvo Mastellone reads Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto (1848) as in part a response to the attacks on various Continental radical movements, including communism, that Mazzini had launched in his ‘Thoughts Upon Democracy in Europe’ (1846–47).¹¹ Marx and Engels’ had also thwarted Mazzini’s efforts to exert a significant early influence over the First International.¹² Marx dismissed Mazzini an 1871 interview, as ‘represent[ing] nothing better than the old idea of a middle-class republic … . He has fallen as far to the rear of the modern movement as the German professors, who nevertheless, are still considered in Europe as the apostles of the cultured democratism of the future.’¹³ Mazzini’s middle-class radicalism also repelled Bakunin, who two years after Marx’s interview condemned Mazzini’s ‘malediction’ for being ‘supposedly patriotic and revolutionary but in essence utterly bourgeois and, moreover, theological.’¹⁴

There was an important truth here. While High Tory journals such as John Bull routinely portrayed Mazzini as a violent revolutionary, Engels, Marx and Bakunin were correct when they claimed that Mazzini was regarded as a respectable revolutionary in many British political and intellectual circles. As the Observer newspaper noted in March 1864, ‘Mazzini … has for over thirty years been resident this country, and … mixes in and is received in terms of intimacy by the best society in the land.’¹⁵ This was not a merely private admiration. Many Britons published laudatory pamphlets, newspaper stories and parliamentary speeches throughout Mazzini’s time in Britain.¹⁶ Marcella Pellegrino Sutcliffe has traced this spread of Mazzini’s ideas throughout ‘a socially mixed group, which included enlightened bourgeois in the capital, reforming provincial radical manufacturers, social reforming Oxford Intellectuals as well as Chartist artisans and adult learners.’¹⁷

There were three key modes of Anglophone engagement with Mazzini’s thought in particular. Firstly, Mazzini’s activities were widely reported in the press.¹⁸ Secondly, English readers had far easier access to Mazzini’s writings from 1862, following the publication of Emilie Ashurst Venturi’s translation of his major work, The Duties of Man (1858).¹⁹ Venturi’s very widely-read six-volume Life and Writings of Joseph Mazzini was published between 1864 and 1870, with a new edition appearing in 1891.²⁰ This section of the present article focuses on a third mode of engagement; namely, directly through personal contact.

Mazzini spent significant parts of his life in exile in England, during and after the civil wars that led to Italian reunification. From 1837 onwards, Mazzini resided frequently in London, where he met and corresponded with such prominent figures as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Gaskell, William Gladstone, George Grote, Harriett Martineau, David Masson, John Stuart Mill, Francis Newman, and others, many of whom were active members of Mazzini’s Friends of Italy.²¹ Even so, Derek Beales has argued that Mazzini’s schemes for Italian reunification were generally seen in Britain as unrealistic, dangerous and, at times, to some even repellent: ‘Unlike Garibaldi, [Mazzini] won virtually no support among the upper classes, while his appeal to the working class was too intellectual and esoteric to be widely effective. “Red Revolution” alarmed many more Englishmen than it attracted.’²² Yet, Mazzini’s British acquaintances did much to preserve and disseminate his thought and influence by publishing translations, collections of his letters, biographies, articles, speeches, pamphlets, and the like. The most prominent disseminators were Emilie Ashurst Hawkes Venturi (noted above) and Bolton King.²³

In London, Thomas Carlyle defended Mazzini’s character in a fervent letter dated 18 June 1844, to the Editor of The Times, occasioned by a scandal arising from the interception of Mazzini’s correspondence. Carlyle wrote that, knowing Mazzini personally, ‘I can with great freedom testify to all men that he, if I have ever seen one such, is a man of genius and virtue, a man of sterling veracity, humanity, and nobleness of mind, one of those rare men, numerable unfortunately but as units in this world, who are worthy to be called martyr-souls.’²⁴ Mazzini’s reputation survived years of controversy. One finds his character being defended in the House of Commons 28 years later by the Conservative MP Alexander Baillie-Cochrane. Following the interception of documents from the International, Baillie-Cochrane referred to Mazzini as ‘a man whom he believed to be personally irreproachable.’²⁵

In addition to Mazzini’s many London associates, his ideas were discussed at the University of Cambridge by the likes of Edward Carpenter, Frederick Maurice, Henry Myers, Sir John Seeley and Henry Sidgwick.²⁶ However, to understand the early British idealist reactions to Mazzini (especially those of T.H. Green and Edward Caird), one must understand the broader context in which they first encountered his thought at Oxford.²⁷ Italian reunification was a living presence at the University in the person of Aurelio Saffi, a leading activist for the Risorgimento and, sporadically, lecturer in Italian.²⁸ While visiting Oxford, Mazzini became acquainted with James Bryce (Saffi’s pupil who, in 1860, tried to volunteer to serve in Garibaldi’s Thousand) and Goldwin Smith, as well as Benjamin Jowett and many others.²⁹ Jowett was particularly significant as a fellow and, from 1872 to his death in 1893, the Master of Balliol College, Oxford as well as University Vice-Chancellor from 1882 to 1886. Jowett sat at the heart of a network of some of the most important figures in Britain and its Empire.³⁰ He became a great admirer of Mazzini. Writing to a friend in August 1861, Jowett observed that Mazzini ‘seems to be more abused than any other man in this world. I think he must be a great man, though visionary and perhaps dangerous. The present state of Italy is greatly due to him. His defence of Rome raised the Italian character. I don’t suppose that you hear the truth about him in the North of Italy.’³¹ Some years later, Jowett went on to meet and befriend Mazzini, describing him as ‘an enthusiast, a visionary.’³²

Mazzini’s radicalism also found fertile ground at Jowett’s Oxford through the Old Mortality Society, a small essay club created by Algernon Swinburne, John Nichol and others, in the Michaelmas term of 1856, soon after their matriculation at Balliol.³³ Over the course of its relatively short life (1856–66), the Society had many members who went on to become significant figures in Victorian and Edwardian society. In addition to Swinburne and Nichol themselves, members included Albert Venn Dicey, Thomas Hill Green, John Nichol, James Bryce, Edward Caird, Henry Nettleship, Walter Pater, J.A. Symonds, and William Wallace.³⁴ Looking back from 1883, Dicey recalled the society’s radicalism: ‘We all of us were more occupied with politics than with anything else. I can hardly now quite realize myself the intense interest with which we all kept talking day after day about Louis Napoleon, Italy & later the war in America.’³⁵ Quoting Bryce’s biographer H.A.L. Fisher, Christopher Harvie observes that ‘for most of them to learn Italian from Saffi “became part of the ritual of cultured Liberalism in Oxford and an initiation into the spirit of the Risorgimento”.’³⁶ In 1858, Green proposed a now long-forgotten, pro-Mazzinian motion at the Oxford Debating Society, which reflected a common concern within the Old Mortality with the British government’s treatment of foreign radicals. (The motion read: ‘That the country is bound to protest, under the present circumstances, against any alteration of the law relating to refugees and conspiracy’).³⁷

For all of their shared admiration for Mazzini and radical causes, there were tensions within the group. Some of these tensions related to the practical possibilities of Mazzinism, while others related to the Society’s intellectual scope. Regarding practicalities, contrary to Swinburne’s optimism, in the autumn of 1860, while a probationary fellow at Balliol, Green admitted to being ‘very gloomy’ about the situation in Italy. “‘Garibaldi is evidently not strong enough to take at all a high tone,” he wrote to a friend, “and thus I fear the Mazzinian or federal program, which I have no doubt is really the best, will have to give way, for want of public virtue, to Cavour’s. … [O]f course there is no good in attempting plans which there is not enough national spirit to carry out. The southern Italians are clearly a feeble folk.’”³⁸ (Despite this allusion to what Silvana Patriarca has called the ‘ozio (indolence)’ of the southern Italians, Green also spoke in favour of Mazzinianism at an Oxford Union debate on 4 February 1861).³⁹ Similarly, in 1873 Symonds dismissed what he saw as Swinburne and A.C. Bradley’s naivety regarding the possibility for Italian unification.⁴⁰

Intellectually, Humphrey Hare saw the attraction of the Society for Swinburne as lying in its eclecticism: ‘A Romantic Movement – particularly one that could satisfactorily combine Mazzini and Medievalism, painting and poetry, wealth and Workmen’s Colleges – was exactly what he [Swinburne] needed.’⁴¹ Yet, intellectual differences within the Society were indicated when Edmund Gosse reported Green’s great amusement, while presenting a paper on Christian dogma, at seeing Swinburne’s evident incredulity ‘that men whom he respected could take an interest in such a subject.’⁴² Wider tensions existed. Hence, ultimately, the initially warm friendship between Green and Swinburne cooled greatly with the publication of Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads in 1866. This sexually and religiously scandalous collection made Swinburne’s name in literary circles, but led Green to take ‘a very hostile and contemptuous attitude’ towards Swinburne for several years thereafter, even if, in an 1877 address, he acknowledged Swinburne as ‘certainly the representative poet of the modern generation.’⁴³

In 1866 Green was not alone in worrying about Swinburne’s poetic direction. Jowett and his associates the theatre critic Thomas Purnell and the German radical Karl Blind became increasingly concerned about Swinburne’s literary development and reputation, and turned to Mazzini to save him. Their choice was understandable, given that Swinburne had a more than intellectual admiration for Mazzinianism. Swinburne had wished to meet Mazzini himself since childhood. Gosse records that Swinburne ‘had portraits of Mazzini in his rooms, and declaimed verses to them …; in the spring of 1857 he wrote an “Ode to Mazzini”.’⁴⁴ Swinburne was a man of almost manic enthusiasms and hero-worship, especially for radicals, a socially-alienating combination in which at least one biographer finds echoes of sadomasochism.⁴⁵ His obsession continued over subsequent years, and in 1865, he sent Mazzini a copy of his journal Atalanta.

So, early in 1867 Jowett asked Mazzini to ‘take intellectual charge’ of Swinburne.⁴⁶ Probably for this reason, Mazzini belatedly replied to Swinburne’s 1865 letter, praising the poem enclosed therewith (Ode to Greece), and noting ‘the most admiring and communing impression’ it had produced on him.⁴⁷ For Mazzini, ‘the poet ought to be the apostle of a crusade, his word the watchword of the fighting nations and the dirge of the oppressors.’⁴⁸ By using their poetry in this way, the poet would help in the birth of ‘a new conception of Life, a new Religious Synthesis, a new European World struggling to emerge from the graves of Rome, Athens, Byzantium and Warsaw.’⁴⁹ Until that new civilization arose, there could be no true ‘Love,’ ‘Happiness’ or ‘belief in God.’⁵⁰

Swinburne was euphoric on meeting Mazzini in person for the first time shortly afterwards, on 30 March 1867. The day after their first meeting, Swinburne told his friend George Powell that, ‘I unworthy spent much of last night sitting at my beloved chief’s feet. He was angelically good to me. I read him my Italian poem [A Song of Italy] all through. To-day I am rather exhausted.’⁵¹ The relationship affected Swinburne profoundly, with him describing it ten years later as ‘the highest honour of my life, and one of its greatest and purest pleasures.’⁵² That same year (1867) Mazzini asked Swinburne to compose a book of ‘political and national poems … “for us”,’ a request that led to the publication of Songs before Sunrise four years later.⁵³ In these ways, Mazzini’s radicalism drove Swinburne to turn his back on the idea of Arts for Art’s Sake in favour of poetry that was dedicated to the cause of European liberty and revolution.⁵⁴ This change lasted until Mazzini’s death in 1872, at which point Swinburne seems to have lost his sense of poetic purpose, at least temporarily.⁵⁵ Yet, Swinburne composed poems in memory of Mazzini, including in 1882 ‘Lines on the monument to Giuseppe Mazzini,’ which Saffi translated for distribution in Italy.⁵⁶ Just two years before his own death in 1909, Swinburne named Mazzini as ‘the man whom I had always revered above all other men on earth.’⁵⁷

This history of the relationship between Mazzini and Swinburne outlines the most marked ways in which Mazzinianism galvanized the existing radicalism of the members of the Old Mortality.⁵⁸ It also underlines Sutcliffe’s observation that, on leaving Oxford, radicals such as Swinburne, Green, Nichol, Toynbee and, another of Jowett’s pupils, Bolton King helped to disseminate ‘Mazzini’s vision for Italy and for humanity amongst the wider British audience.’⁵⁹ Caird, Green and Wallace went on to become important British idealists, with Green emerging as the movement’s foundational figure and, in Sutcliffe’s words, ‘a leading light in civic idealism and social work.’⁶⁰ With these thoughts in mind, section three analyses Green’s engagements with Mazzini’s writings and Mazzinianism.

3. Mazzini and Green: History and modernity

Green matriculated at Balliol in 1856, eventually becoming a college fellow and, in 1878, Whyte’s Professor of Moral Philosophy. During this time, he attracted a group of admirers, many of whom became known as ‘the British idealists.’ Always in poor health, he died in March 1882. From the time of Green’s arrival at Oxford, Jowett took a great interest in him, as Jowett did in Swinburne. Despite their break in 1866, Green continued to share Swinburne’s admiration for Mazzini, although, as will become clear in the following two sections, in a more nuanced and critical form.

To understand Green’s ideological engagements with Mazzini’s thought, one must first appreciate certain characteristic features of the British idealist movement that he inspired. The most fundamental of these features was that the British idealists were systematic philosophers. That is, they held that philosophy should aim to produce complete, coherent, and fully-articulated networks of judgements, each of whose constituent elements (concepts and relations) were themselves complete, coherent, and fully-articulated.⁶¹ (They recognized that such an aspiration could never be perfectly realized in this life.) Yet, they also understood philosophy to be properly merely one aspect of a wider reality that encompassed all aspects of life. In short, they saw a person’s philosophical position as being part of their particular Weltanschauung or ‘world outlook.’ Roger Scruton characterized this as ‘A general conception of the world, in which beliefs, values and metaphysical presuppositions are all woven together so as to instil the world with significance, and facilitate the transition from thought to action.’⁶² This was a core claim of Green’s first professional publication (‘The Philosophy of Aristotle’, 1866) and was alluded to by his former pupil, biographer and fellow British idealist R.L. Nettleship, when he described Green’s thought as ‘a working theory of life.’⁶³ That one’s Weltanschauung formed a core aspect of the British idealist self-image is evidenced by the frequency with which it was highlighted in their own writings, as well as in the commentaries and obituaries that they wrote regarding other members of the movement.⁶⁴ This was one sense in which they saw philosophy, in Hegel’s words, as ‘its own time comprehended in thoughts.’⁶⁵ Yet, they also insisted that, at their best, the individual was never passive in their reception of the influences around them. What Sir Henry Jones noted about Edward Caird’s approach in this regard holds for every member of the movement: ‘real discipleship is living discipleship, and is never mimetic and repetitive.’⁶⁶ He continued a little later.

[I]n the region of poetry and religion, and of all that is veritably spiritual, all that is built for ever, is for ever building. What is, is in virtue of unremitting self-renewal; the philosophic principles which are permanent are thought over again and lived over again in every age. The great thinker is the organ which expresses, and in whose living experience is realised anew, the ancient wisdom of his world. He attains in virtue of what is not his own but what belongs and is essential to the common life of man; and he attains on its behalf, focusing it anew that it may set forth on fresh adventures. No man can separate the old from the new or the original from the borrowed, because the distinction is transcended. The more original a man, the more heavy the tribute he exacts from the world, and the more intimate his dependence. He cannot go before it: he can only set free its significance.⁶⁷

Each individual incorporated material from the ‘wisdom of his world’ into their Weltanschauung, then. In this spirit, many of the British idealists read widely in the philosophical works of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Fichte, Hegel and Carlyle. Precisely what and how each person took from that world depended upon their particular prior learning and personality. Hence, different people drew out different things, even from the same sources. This was what we could now call an intrinsically perspectival process.

John MacCunn, another British idealist, reinforced the idea of the perspectival development of Green’s Weltanschauung when he observed, in 1907, that Green’s civic philosophy and activism deepened as a result of his active engagements with the writings of Sir Henry Vane, Oliver Cromwell, and John Bright, as well as ‘the heritage of the civic spirit of the ancient world,’ his practical experience at Oxford University, as a local councillor, and through his religious life.⁶⁸ Among the first generation of British idealists, Caird and Green were particular admirers of the moral intensity of Carlyle’s writings, especially the emphasis Carlyle placed on the aesthetic development of individual personality within a spiritually-enriching community, and the moral degradation caused by poverty and oppression. The Fichtean elements of Carlyle’s thought remained with Green in particular throughout his life. They predated and outlasted Hegel’s influence, and melded with the existing Kantian and Aristotelian elements, becoming especially prominent in his later writings.⁶⁹

Yet, scholars have underplayed if not largely missed other, very important British idealist intellectual engagements, including those with Mazzini. As indicated above, Mazzini’s writings contributed in distinctive ways to the milieu in which the British idealists developed their social and political thought. Engagements with his writings also stimulated and helped to frame the ways in which the British idealists conceived of social and political problems and the ways in which to address them. This is significant because it is common in the scholarly literature to read the British idealists through a liberal lens, an approach that wrongly marginalizes the republican context of their thought and practice, a point returned to shortly.⁷⁰

The relative scholarly neglect of Green’s engagements with Mazzini might not be surprising, given that Mazzini’s name appeared only sporadically in Green’s writings.⁷¹ However, Green was a non-conformist in religion and, in politics, he invoked key principles of Mazzinian republicanism. Most fundamentally, both Mazzini and Green rejected utilitarianism in favour of an ethical conception of politics based on the idea of the common good; both were driven by religious faith and a democratic concern for the poor; both rejected atomistic individualism in favour of socially-embedded agency.⁷² Hence, what Samuel Moyn observes in relation to Mazzini, is also apposite regarding Green: ‘[Mazzini held that t]he formalistic abstraction of individual entitlement risked prioritizing the hedonistic “pursuit of happiness” over other goods, neglecting both higher aims and the enacted communal fellowship necessary to achieve them.’⁷³ Both Mazzini and Green saw a key moral role for local associations organized and run by conscientious workers and peasants, both male and female.

That is not to say that the two men arrived at their radicalism via the same route. As MacCunn observed, ‘The reasoning sobriety of his [Green’s] thought is in marked contrast to the unrestrained intuitive appeal of Mazzini. But no reader can doubt that upon his own grounds he was in profound sympathy with that watchword of the great political saint of Italy[: “God and the People”].’⁷⁴ Yet, Green’s intellectual engagements with Mazzini were complex. First, there is the question of Green’s republicanism. His thought has notable affinities to contemporary civic republicanism.⁷⁵ Historically, Sutcliffe has observed that, unlike Italian (Mazzinian) republicanism, ‘[m]yth-founding Puritan heroes like Milton and Cromwell could be drawn from the English tradition.’⁷⁶ As noted already, Green was well-known for his life-long admiration of both men, partly for their literary style, but also for their political commitments.⁷⁷ Duncan Kelly has highlighted some ways in which Green’s analysis of English civil war republicanism informed much of his own position.⁷⁸ Central here was Green’s emphasis on the need for the individual conscience to challenge the institutionalized structures of authority, such as the church and state. It was this that underpinned Green’s own radicalism and his antipathy towards Roman Catholicism.⁷⁹ Green found this spirit best expressed in the beliefs and actions of Sir Henry Vane the Younger.⁸⁰ However, he observed that, in programmatic terms, ‘[Henry] Marten alone had some touch of the modern French republican about him.’⁸¹ Green had associated this programme of practical reform with republicans such as Milton and the other ‘commonwealth’s men,’ of whom he identified Marten as a leading member. At its heart stood the abolition of the monarchy and the House of Lords, regicide, ‘ “ … and then to proceed to the establishment of an equal commonwealth, founded upon the consent of the people, and providing for the rights and liberties of all men.”’⁸² Ultimately, Green saw the Historically-progressive elements of English society at this time as being the clashes between the poor on one side and conservative classes on the other. It was through this antagonism that the nation could develop a stable set of free institutions that respected all adults equally before the law, with opportunities to develop the skills and moral self-discipline required to be self-directed, conscientious citizens. This is one sense in which Green was a republican.

Sutcliffe cites Mazzini and Jowett’s shared condemnation of the 1872 Paris Commune as a sign of the moderate nature of their republicanism.⁸³ We have no direct evidence of Green’s attitude to the Commune. There are, however, notes which offer some insight here. Even though undated, Green’s use of the past tense in these notes to refer apparently to Haussmann’s renovation of Paris implies that Green was writing after the conclusion of that project in 1870 and therefore, close to the time of the Commune. In these notes, Green’s sympathies lay clearly and characteristically with the poor. Hence, he condemned Louis Napoleon’s programme of rebuilding Paris to attract wealthy people (the Haussmann renovation?), for producing ‘no permanent improvement in the condition of the labouring classes and everything to provoke them to jealousy of the rich. The same remarks apply to London and Berlin.’⁸⁴

However, apparent agreement between Mazzini and Green weakens when one reads their texts in light of their differing attitudes to modernity. Even though Green’s Weltanschauung developed over time, he never shared Mazzini’s ill-defined intellectual presuppositions and he differed markedly from Mazzini on substantive philosophical questions. Their fundamental difference stemmed from the fact that, even though their efforts were underdeveloped, Green and other British idealists grappled with modernity in a way that Mazzini, Jowett, Ruskin and others did not.⁸⁵ Certainly, Green was cautious regarding some key elements of modern social thought, for example, rejecting claims that evolutionary theory could successfully ground philosophies of consciousness or ethics.⁸⁶ Nevertheless, he emphasized the significance of other contemporaneous trends, not least those arising from what his pupil and fellow British idealist Bernard Bosanquet would later call ‘the wilderness of interests which constitutes the intricate texture of modern society.’⁸⁷ As Green wrote in one of his first articles: ‘To be free, to understand, to enjoy, is the claim of the modern spirit,’ which is becoming increasingly ‘articulate and conscious of itself. It is constantly being heard from new classes of society, and penetrating more deeply into the circumstances of life.’⁸⁸ The practical ambiguities and tensions to which this spirit had given rise were being used ‘to manipulate, to entangle, to weave into the feelings and interests of men.’ This process created confusions within the views and values that prevailed within society, thereby increasing the sense of personal alienation and weakening social coherence. Green concluded that: ‘The age, we may say, has over-talked itself: yet to prescribe a regimen of silence is but to mock the disease.’⁸⁹

Mazzini had a more homogenized understanding of the processes of social progress than that which underpinned Green’s more complex and fluid understanding. Mazzini’s republicanism was predicated on the existence of widespread agreement among citizens regarding the fundamental values of society and the practices that manifested those values, whereas Green’s republican Weltanschauung reflected his understanding of the modernist trends that were becoming increasingly prominent in his day. While there is no indication that Green had Mazzini in mind when setting out his particular analysis of modernity, that analysis goes a long way to explaining much of the difference between their respective theories of History. Mazzini understood Humanity, as he put it in ‘Faith and the Future’ (1835), as ‘a collective and continuous Being that epitomized the whole ascending series of organic creations, and in which, as the sole interpreter of the law, is not fully manifested in God’s thought on earth.’⁹⁰ In his lectures on the English civil wars (given, as noted above, in the late 1860s), Green defended a similarly progressivist theory of history. However, his theory presupposed a form of Hegelianism, albeit an ill-defined one. Mazzini never endorsed Hegel’s philosophy.⁹¹ Indeed, later in life his attitude approached something like hatred of Hegel’s influence at the universities of Naples and Oxford: ‘“One fine day,” he wrote, “we will sweep out all that stuff.”’⁹²

It is important to explore this difference in more detail. Hegel’s teleological philosophy of History placed as much if not more emphasis on the struggle for recognition between agents as it did on Mazzinian mutual helpfulness. While acknowledging the presence of ethical conflict as arising partly from the misuse of power, Green saw other conflicts as permanent features of the ethical universe as the latter existed ‘for us’ (that is, via our perceptions in the temporal realm). In the latter regard, ethical conflict resulted from the inescapable pluralism of the temporal realm, such that clashes between equally valid moral values were inescapable. Consequently, the advancement of some ethically-worthy qualities always entailed the sacrifice of other ethically-worthy qualities. As Green’s pupil, friend and fellow British idealist A.C. Bradley put it, ‘The essentially tragic fact is the self-division and intestinal warfare of the ethical substance, not much the war of good with evil as the war of good with good.’⁹³ In this Hegelian sense, earthly ethical life was inherently tragic.

This vision comes through most clearly in Green’s 1867 ‘Four Lectures on the English Commonwealth,’ which were mentioned above. A key lesson that Green taught in these lectures was that social and political reformers could not rely on their own moral purity alone to guide their struggles.⁹⁴ They had to combine their citizen virtues with an intelligent and sober assessment of the messy practical circumstances on the ground. The British idealist J.H. Muirhead extended this thought to Italy in late 1860s, writing: ‘Another interesting illustration was furnished by events going on in Italy before his [Green’s] own eyes, where the idealism of Mazzini was working as a source of discord and weakness just because of its aloofness from the general tendency of feeling and event.’⁹⁵ As noted above, Mazzini’s ethical universe was monistic. He saw ethical conflicts as being due solely to error and immorality, not to the inherently tragic nature of the ethical realm (or ‘substance’).

Certainly, both Mazzini and Green held that progress arose out of moral beings acting with a nuanced awareness of the particular circumstances of their struggles. Yet, idealism in the worst sense – action based purely on a naïve faith in the force of an ethically-pure will – played a far less prominent role in Green’s philosophy of social action, than it did in Mazzini’s. For all of Mazzini’s support for violent rebellion in Italy, such optimism was far more evident in his thought than it was in that of Green. The latter agreed with Mazzini that ‘caste, privilege, and inequality’ must be resisted and rectified if individuals are to refine a society founded on the common good.⁹⁶ Yet, Green saw pluralism and disagreement between conscientious citizens as necessary forces if social relationships were going to enable individuals to realize their higher spiritual capacities. For Green, social conflict among conscientious citizens tended to force everyone to confront alternative perspectives and interests within their society. The resulting debates and conflicts tended to make public dialogue more inclusive, and hence tended to make society’s conception of the common good more responsive to the interests and values of all sections of the community. In the lectures on the English civil wars that he gave in the late 1860s, Green saw conflict as a motor for History in a necessarily tragic world.

Yet, by the late 1870s Green had come to reject his earlier teleological theory of History. Certainly, he continued to emphasize the importance of pluralism and struggle. Moreover, he continued to echo Mazzini’s claim that God realized Himself in the world through individuals. Also like Mazzini, the mature Green insisted that individuals could develop their highest capacities only to the extent that they lived in an enabling social environment: the ‘idea’ of an ‘absolute and all-embracing end’ could have a ‘practical hold’ on individuals only to the extent that ‘we are members of a society, of which we can conceive the common good as our own’.⁹⁷ Yet, despite the practical necessity of orienting one’s life to serve the good of one’s community, by the late 1870s Green had come to insist that moral progress was only possible for individuals, and not for collective entities such as the family, nation or ‘Humanity’.⁹⁸ He rejected all attempts ‘to seek an escape [from giving a rational articulation to the notion of “progress”] by speaking as if the human spirit fulfilled its idea in the history of development of mankind as distinct from the persons whose experiences constitute that history, or who are developed in that development.’⁹⁹ Here, Green might well have had Hegel in mind, or Kant, Fichte, or Carlyle.¹⁰⁰ Mazzini was another likely candidate for Green.¹⁰¹

4. Republicanism in practice: virtue, associations, and the republican state

Despite such philosophical differences within their respective Weltanschauungen and their shared damning assessments of the virtues of the some of the poor (and indeed the rich), throughout their adult lives both men were driven by the need to fight social injustice.¹⁰² For example, in a recently rediscovered political speech of 1868, Green argued that ‘The labourer is scandalously ill paid.’¹⁰³ He continued ‘The labourer is also badly educated, this is his misfortune and not his fault; neither has he any means of providing for old age, but has to depend upon the parish, this is very painful to him, and not consistent with proper self-respect.’ The oppression of the poor was neither inevitable nor divinely-ordained, as some conservatives and capitalists believed. Rather, it was due to ‘bad laws,’ particularly those that increased and entrenched the power of the owners of ‘Great estates,’ as well as those that prevented landowners from selling land and prevented the poor from being able to acquire it.

Their shared moral outrage at such poverty led Mazzini and Green to very similar practical republican conclusions. Primary amongst these were commitments to civic virtue, local decision-making, women’s rights and the common good.¹⁰⁴ Moreover, both men insisted on the central importance of what we would now call the principle of subsidiarity – that is, the practical commitment that, as far as possible, all decisions should be made directly by those people who are most immediately affected by them. It was due to these shared commitments to virtue, subsidiarity, and the common good that both men attacked (a) sectarians and (b) those who adopted ‘mechanical’ approaches to social action.¹⁰⁵

(a) Mazzini argued that socialists’ sectarianism had two sides: firstly, there was the socialists’ hostility towards each other (between ‘Saint-Simonianism, Fourierism, Communism, etc. etc.’), and, secondly, there was their doctrine of class war.¹⁰⁶ Mazzini recognized that ideological niceties were not always obvious to the general population. He noted, in 1849, that the Italian population did not know much about either socialism or communism, two movements that he saw as contradicting each other.¹⁰⁷ In 1852, he railed against the damage that he saw such socialist doctrines reeking on France.¹⁰⁸ He condemned Marxism and communism more generally as an authoritarian system. Moreover, he argued that Marxism suited neither Italy, Hungary, the Austrian empire, Poland, nor Germany, where he saw no overt class war: ‘There is no hostile, profoundly reactionary sentiment between class and class; no exaggerated abnormal development of concentrated industry; no agglomerated misery rendering urgent the instant application of the remedy; no reckless putting forth of systems and solutions.’¹⁰⁹ Mazzini approved vigorously of socialists’ concerns for the conditions of the poor, yet he held that their concerns with class war led them to neglect key universal characteristics of a free human life: ‘Among the essential elements of human life – such as Religion, Association, Liberty and others which I have alluded to … – [Private] Property is one.’¹¹⁰

Green too insisted on the vital importance of private property for the realization of the individual’s will as a conscientious member of a healthy community.¹¹¹ Moreover, as he observed in his Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation (1878–79), ‘There is nothing in the fact that their labour is hired in great masses by great capitalists to prevent them from being on a small scale capitalists themselves.’¹¹² In principle, workers could band together to raise the necessary investment to start their joint endeavour. The key obstacle to such collective self-emancipation was that the capitalists had damaged the social union, by breaking the self-reliance of many workers. Central here was the capitalists’ tactic, employed over many generations, of buying the labour of the workers and peasants ‘on the cheapest terms’ and with little security of employment. It was for these reasons, Green argued, that ‘we must ascribe the multiplication in recent times of an impoverished and reckless proletariate.’¹¹³ Green condemned the uneven development of the moral character of citizens, and the popular acquiescence to injustice and domination to which widespread failings often led. In this, he echoed Mazzini. Indeed, Green’s remark in these lectures that ‘Landless countrymen, whose ancestors were serfs, are the parents of the proletariat of great towns’¹¹⁴ accorded with Mazzini’s claim in The Duties of Man that ‘You were first slaves, then serfs. Now you are hirelings. You have emancipated yourselves from slavery and then from serfdom. Why should you not emancipate yourselves from the yoke of hire, and become free producers, and masters of the totality of production which you create?’¹¹⁵

Like Mazzini, Green noted in several of his political speeches, that while some workers did assert themselves through trade unions, cooperatives and friendly societies, many others remained unassertive co-conspirators in their own oppression.¹¹⁶ Green’s professorial lectures identified this problem among the poor of both Britain and Italy, as he had done in his 1860 letter quoted above. Nevertheless, one should not overstate Green’s reservations regarding the strength of civic virtue within Britain and Italy. There were numerous examples of his fundamental faith in the workers and peasants. For example, he cited the Northern Italians as a people who, despite Austrian occupation (1815–61), kept alive the customs that shaped their traditional ‘organized common life’. They survived as a people because ‘The social order does not depend on the foreign dominion and may survive it … [if] there is enough national unity in the subject people to prevent them from breaking up into hostile communities when the foreign dominion is removed.’¹¹⁷ Green expressed the same views regarding British workers and peasants here as he did in numerous speeches, including two (1872 and 1874) to the Agricultural Labourers’ Union, supporting their struggle for decent terms and conditions.¹¹⁸ Direct evidence of Green’s continuing commitment to Mazzinian reformism was provided by his financial contribution to the founding of the Istituto Mazzini in August 1872. Sutcliffe describes the latter as ‘a popular educational institute … [in Rome], to include evening classes, mobile libraries and a reading room[, which] … would … respond to Mazzini’s own idea that educating workers constituted the breeding ground for “association”.’¹¹⁹ (Support also came from Jowett, and the British idealists R.L. Nettleship and A.C. Bradley.)

(b) Both Green and Mazzini attacked reformers who adopted a ‘mechanical’ approach to social action of the type just outlined. Yet, reflecting their divergent reactions to modernity, they differed in their sense of ‘mechanical’ action. This was evident in many areas, not least their respective views of education in a relatively well-ordered and stable but imperfect community. Both conceived the latter as a community where there was broad agreement on the demands of civic virtue, although with reasonable disagreements regarding the practical implications of the common good. Mazzini held that education should seek to bring the population of such a society to an organic love of their nation.¹²⁰ Crucially, this approach presupposed that citizen virtue required only inculcation into the individual of definite shared values.

Like Mazzini, Green and his followers also emphasized the vital importance of education to foster the realization of the peasants and workers’ capacities for self-direction. Yet, Green’s dynamic conception of modernity led him to diverge from Mazzini in seeing a central role for education in the fostering of the citizen’s critical skills, which they would then use to interrogate and develop the greatest achievements of human civilization.¹²¹ In Greenian terms, education should liberate the individual’s inherent tendency to become an ‘intelligent patriot’ who exercised their own judgement regarding the nature and needs of their communities, rather than relying on the judgements of a well-intentioned educational vanguard.¹²² Through their complex interactions, assertive conscientious Greenian patriots would seek to develop and sustain egalitarian relationships that responded both to changing circumstances and to developing moral ideas. In this way (and recalling the position Green defended in his lectures on the English civil wars), Greenian citizens would seek to promote the common good of their community by working within institutions to challenge received civic values, rather than merely replicating them.

This implied a different approach to that of mechanical socialists and Mazzini. In fact, greater kinship can be seen between Green and Mazzini’s more progressive followers, such as Aurelio Saffi. These ‘radical democrats’ developed Mazzini’s early associational commitments in such a way that, in words of Maurizio Ridolfi, ‘Saffi came to value its [England’s] modern forms of civic and political interaction, its meetings, popular petitions, the role of public opinion in the exercise of power, the associations.’¹²³ Green himself became increasingly active in local politics, anti-corruption campaigns, temperance reform organizations, and educational institutions.¹²⁴

Throughout their careers both Mazzini and Green were driven, then, by the fundamental belief that civic virtue was widespread among the poor, but sometimes fragile and never universal. That is not to say that, once again, there were not important differences between them. For example, early in his career Mazzini placed his faith almost exclusively in patriotic citizens working within local associations, with the state functioning primarily as a regulative body charged with mitigating inter-associational conflict and ensuring practical respect for core human values by those associations. Green also placed his primary emphasis on the need for free conscientious action by groups of citizens. However, his later writings in particular show him to have been far more willing than Mazzini to accept the need for state action and legislation to correct inequalities of social and economic power. For example, Green observed in the 1881 ‘Lecture on Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract,’ given to workers at a meeting of the Leicester Liberal Association, that to the conscientious citizen

[the law] is simply a powerful friend. It gives him security for that being done which, with the best wishes, he might have much trouble in getting done efficiently if left to himself … . [I]n proportion as he is relieved of responsibilities in one direction he will [voluntarily] assume them in another.¹²⁵

Which laws were ‘powerful friends’ depended on context and could be decided only in practice by citizens collectively. Like Mazzini, Green’s heart lay with self-directed citizenship, yet he defended national legal regulation of working conditions and land tenure as well as local control of the liquor trade, in his 1881 lecture on ‘Liberal Legislation.’¹²⁶ He was a keen advocate of responsible trade union action, the workers’ formation of friendly societies, and the like. Yet, Green remained a pragmatist. For example, in his contemporaneous political speeches, he accepted the New Poor Laws as a necessary second-best arrangement, until workers were better able to pursue their interests collectively through trade union action.¹²⁷

Finally, both men recognized that, under extreme circumstances, lawful action could be inadequate. The High Tory newspaper John Bull reported in 1864 that Mazzini ordered the murder of Napoleon III and armed the assassins with revolvers, daggers and bombs.¹²⁸ The attempt was unsuccessful and, disingenuously, Mazzini denied any involvement. Green too was bullish regarding the benefits of armed rebellion in the face of a wider citizen-body that was generally deficient in civic virtue. In his posthumously published lectures, he cited Mazzinian rebellions as instances where the advanced members of society fulfilled their ‘duty of resistance on the part of a hopeless minority.’ Such currently-hopeless resistance served to repair ‘the public spirit’ even when it had been ‘crushed’ by oppressive governments. It could then justify extra-legal resistance.¹²⁹ In this and the other ways outlined above, Green’s republicanism remained as strong at the end of his life as it had been for Mazzini when the latter died in 1872, a decade earlier. In this sense and for all of the caveats entered above, there is much to be said for Sutcliffe’s characterization of Green as ‘a shrewd Mazzinian.’¹³⁰

Green’s legacy informed the engagements of other early British idealists with Mazzini’s writings. For example, The physician Joseph Toynbee, father of Green’s pupil, Arnold Toynbee (1852–1883) had been a great friend of Mazzini.¹³¹ In his 1881 address ‘Industry and Democracy,’ Arnold Toynbee noted Mazzini’s reconciliation of the conflicting rights of individuals through ‘the gospel of duty.’¹³² This achievement made Mazzini ‘the true teacher of our age … . Mazzini was a democrat who spent his life in struggling to free his country; but he believed in liberty not as an end but as a means – a means to a purer and nobler life for the whole people.’¹³³ In his 1882 address ‘Are Radicals Socialists?’, Toynbee noted with approval Mazzini’s critique of the materialism at the heart of Continental socialism, which Toynbee, like all British idealists, contrasted with the far less divisive and more enriching ethical basis found in English radicalism.¹³⁴ In light of this praise, it is perhaps unsurprising that Toynbee’s own preference was for a form of civic philosophy in which political power resided predominantly in local communities, with the national state playing largely secondary, supporting roles in internal matters, while retaining primacy in international affairs and the protection of the country’s borders.

Even allowing for his laudatory remarks regarding Mazzini and his family connections, Toynbee’s biographer Alon Kadish has argued that Mazzini was a much less significant influence on Toynbee than was Green.¹³⁵ Indeed, while Sutcliffe presents an insightful analysis of Mazzini’s influence on Toynbee Hall, the London university settlement created in Arnold’s honour, the British idealist Edward Caird saw Green as ‘perhaps indirectly the origin of all University settlements, since it was his instinct to some extent which induced Arnold Toynbee to make an attempt in that direction.’¹³⁶ Toynbee was not alone in owing much to Green. One can think here of Caird himself, as well as A.C. Bradley, John MacCunn, J.S. Mackenzie, R.L. Nettleship and D.G. Ritchie. This is significant because while, as argued above, both Mazzini and Green insisted that citizens should be active patriots, Green’s underlying conception of modernity led him to a (‘modern’) perspectival theory of the individual’s public conscience, in a manner that eluded Mazzini. Crucially, in line with his perspectivism Green was far more willing than Mazzini to acknowledge the benefits of social conflict between individual citizens conscientiously pursuing their respective conceptions of society’s common good. Moreover, he had greater confidence than Mazzini that the state could act as a protector of the weak and an important (but not the only) agent of social development. These commitments came to be characteristic of the British idealist movement. Nevertheless, it remains the case that, through Green as well as their own early engagements with Mazzinianism, Italian republicanism fed into their multifaceted radicalism.

Green died in March 1882 and Toynbee followed twelve months later. The period immediately afterwards saw a fundamental transformation in British public attitudes towards the proper role of mutualism and state action. The rise of collectivist solutions manifested in the passing of permissive trade union legislation in the 1880s and 1890s, as well as the rise of the Fabians and the Parliamentary Labour Party. A rear-guard action by those sceptical about state action such as Herbert Spencer and even British idealists such as Bernard Bosanquet and Helen Bosanquet, was largely unsuccessful. British idealists such as Ritchie and Sydney Ball warmly embraced the new direction of public policy, as did the wider British electorate, who voted in large numbers for New Liberal governments led by Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (1905–08) and H.H. Asquith (1908–16). This movement led to the increasing provision of state services during the First World War (1914–18). It was against this background that later British idealists engaged with Mazzini’s writings.

5. Mazzini and the later British idealists

Later British idealists including R.L. Nettleship and J.S. Mackenzie expressed their admiration for Mazzini, and in the case of the former was particularly generous in his contribution to the creation of the Istituto Mazzini in 1872.¹³⁷ Yet, only John MacCunn (1846–1928) published a sustained analysis of Mazzini's republicanism.¹³⁸ This analysis appeared in his 1907 book Six Radical Thinkers, immediately before a similar chapter on Green’s radicalism, and after related chapters on John Stuart Mill, Richard Cobden, and Thomas Carlyle.

In his chapter on Mazzini, MacCunn focused on Mazzini’s attempt to reconcile religious faith and democracy, in a materialist age in which social change was extremely rapid but not equitable in its effects. For both Mazzini and the British idealists as a movement, democracy was more than mere parliamentary institutions and the right to vote. It was also a civic ideal, based on the free actions of citizens, guided by their consciences, for social good in all corners of the lives of their communities. Rights (to free speech, to worship, to hold property, and to vote) were indispensable in a free nation.¹³⁹ MacCunn shared Mazzini’s conviction that rights could foster such a society only to the extent that they were exercised by virtuous citizens. Hence, MacCunn noted that Mazzini rightly prioritized one’s duty over one’s rights and rejected atomism. Individuals could realize their highest goods and that of their fellows only through their conscientious, democratic service of the good of their community through associational life. Here again, MacCunn’s reading of Mazzini was reminiscent of his wider British idealist social ethics, reformism and politics that derived from Green’s writings.¹⁴⁰

Mazzini argued democracy could only survive when it was grounded in religious faith and a creed. Together, faith and creed would bolster the sense of duty that would conquer the rights-worship that characterized most liberation movements. In so doing, they would empower ‘the [democratic] promise of honest livelihood and carefree home, of sound education and an unobstructed civic life, rich in many and varied forms of free association.’¹⁴¹ For this reason, MacCunn noted, Mazzini was repelled by the materialist assumptions of the Manchester School of John Bright and Richard Cobden. Similarly, Mazzini lambested the increasingly prominent form of socialism espoused by Marx and Ferdinand Lassalle, whose focus on material poverty he feared ‘would materialise and secularise the democracy in their very effort to save it.’¹⁴² MacCunn endorsed Mazzini’s condemnation of the French utopian socialists for seeking to separate their communities from the broader national life.¹⁴³ Similarly, Like Mazzini, MacCunn attacked Marxists for subordinating nationalism to the workers’ internationalism.¹⁴⁴ Both forms of socialism (utopianism and Marxism) tended to distract from the vital duty of strengthening the spiritually-enriching national bonds that should exist between mutually-respecting and supporting citizens.

MacCunn described Mazzini’s republicanism as a ‘high and heroic doctrine,’ akin to that of Kant.¹⁴⁵ Nevertheless, he saw an important difference between Kant and Mazzini, in that he regarded Kant’s ethics as an addition to his theology, whereas he saw Mazzini’s as necessarily entailed by the latter's religious faith.¹⁴⁶ For MacCunn, the centrality of such faith was a fatal flaw within Mazzini’s republicanism, because, fifty years after Mazzini had argued for the justificatory force of religious faith, such theological claims had been radically undermined by the rise of evolutionary theory. In a clear nod to one of the most important works of British idealist political theory (Ritchie’s Darwinism and Politics (1889)), MacCunn observed that ‘The drift has been towards “Darwinism in politics.”’¹⁴⁷ Modern societies had come to be understood by intellectuals and non-intellectuals alike as ‘a slowed-evolved organism within which the struggle for existence between individuals and groups is checked and softened only by the exigencies of the larger struggle for existence between nation and nation.’¹⁴⁸ Viewed in this way, ‘the passionate theism of Mazzini should seem strained, dogmatic, superstitious, antiquated, and superfluous.’¹⁴⁹ Mazzini seemed to have been left behind by the modern age.

Nevertheless, there was a significant tension within MacCunn’s assessment of Mazzini, in that MacCunn believed religion retained some place in modern times, and to that extent he saw much good in Mazzini’s republicanism. In fact, in Six Radical Thinkers, MacCunn approached without quite reaching a characterization of Mazzini’s participatory democracy as a realm of divine service, a civic church communion. This reading was strongly reminiscent of the social and political theory of such British idealists as Green, Sir Henry Jones, Henry Scott Holland, William Temple, and others.¹⁵⁰ It was reminiscent also of MacCunn’s own claim in his 1894 book Ethics of Citizenship, that ‘if Mazzini had anything at all to say to our generation, it was to insist – in every word he wrote – that not till Democracy became a religious movement could it hope to carry the victory.’¹⁵¹ Clearly then, there was a tension within MacCunn’s engagement with Mazzini, with MacCunn failing to make clear whether religious faith was a fatal barrier to, or a necessary support for, social progress. Like all of the British idealists he named, MacCunn struggled to reconcile what they saw as intellectual trends of modernity with insights from Christianity.

Moreover, MacCunn baulked at Mazzini’s justification of international violence.¹⁵² For MacCunn, Mazzini saw the nation as a passing stage in the process of creating of an international order of free nation-states. To achieve this goal, Mazzini sanctioned the use of force, something that MacCunn regarded as especially dangerous, given that Mazzini also believed that many states currently failed to coincide with the boundaries of their nations.¹⁵³ Logically, the aggressive redrawing of some borders would be required if, ultimately, one were to achieve cosmopolitan peace and justice. Such belligerence was an indispensable part of the duties of many nations. It formed an integral part of their particular national missions. While, echoing Green, MacCunn did not dispute the fact that violence could be justified in extreme circumstances, he rejected Mazzini’s claim that it was a necessary part of the progress of Humanity.

Other British idealists were closer to Mazzini on this point. Hence, Ritchie argued in an 1901 article ‘War and Peace,’ that ‘an inevitable conflict between inconsistent types of civilization’ must lead to war, given the natures of human beings and their governments.¹⁵⁴ Yet, Ritchie continued, these wars were always elements within larger historical processes that arose from ‘oppositions of different stages of human development.’¹⁵⁵ He listed several such clashes, the final one of which being ‘the statecraft of Metternich and the ideals of Mazzini.’¹⁵⁶ Suppressing current civilizational conflicts often caused worse conflicts. Ritchie concluded that:

War is a harsh form of dialectic, a rough means of solving hard problems; but war, or the genuine threat of war, is often the only way – for there are always people, especially champions of reactionary and antiquated types of rule, who will recognize no argument unless it is backed up by sufficient force.¹⁵⁷

Ritchie’s was no purely abstract argument. It brought his own theory of History together with his keen interest in the progress of the Second Boer War (1899–1902), which had been raging for approximately three months when he first published this article in January 1901.¹⁵⁸

Despite the portraits that hung in his rooms and the generous financial contribution that he made to the creation of the Istituto Mazzini in 1872, the literary scholar and British idealist A.C. Bradley was certainly not a blind admirer of Mazzini.¹⁵⁹ Notably, in 1915 he expressed great scepticism regarding the United States of Europe, a proposal in line with a scheme advocated by Mazzini more than a generation earlier.¹⁶⁰ Nevertheless, he remained a life-long admirer, praising Mazzini in 1919 as a true democrat who ‘not only believed in a democratic form of government, but believed in, liked, respected, even revered, the common man, or what Whitman called “the divine average.”’¹⁶¹ Other former members of the Old Mortality Society sought to excuse Mazzini’s justification of war. James Bryce served in various posts in Gladstonian and New Liberal governments, as well as being Britain’s ambassador to the US from 1907 to 1913. In 1921, shortly before his death, he observed that ‘One must always discount the sanguine radicalism of a thinker, who, like Mazzini, lived beneath the shadow of a despotism.’¹⁶² It was right to excuse Mazzini’s excessive zeal for reform as it was to excuse Plato’s conservatism, Bryce reminded his readers, because both had brought real improvements to the world.¹⁶³ Hence, recalling Marx, Engels and Bakunin's claim made decades earlier, Mazzinianism remained attractive to some establishment figures, even after the First World War.

6. Conclusion

As the British idealist William Wallace observed, the socialism of Karl Marx and others eventually won out over Mazziniansm among European radicals.¹⁶⁴ All of the later British idealists faced a different world from that faced by Mazzini. As noted above, following the deaths of Mazzini (1872), Green (1882) and Toynbee (1883), the underpinnings of British idealist theory moved decisively from unorthodox forms of Christianity, to evolutionary models. In this sense, such justification as Toynbee had for describing Mazzini as ‘the true teacher of our age’ in 1881 grew weaker from the late-1880s onwards, as evolutionary theories came to dominate British and Italian social and political thought. An increasing recognition of the need for judicious state action led many second-generation British idealists (Ritchie, Sydney Ball, and others) to embrace liberal socialism. Through the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s, this ideology gained additional force in Britain through L.T. Hobhouse (partly under the influence of Green and J.S. Mill) and (partly under the influence of Mazzini and Hobhouse) Carlo Rosselli in Italy.¹⁶⁵ In this way, Greenian modernist tendencies came to pervade mainstream ideological configurations, thereby rendering Mazzinian republicanism obsolete.

Declaration statement

This article is completely my own work and has not been published elsewhere.

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to the following for their comments on earlier drafts: Jim Connelly and Chris Fear of the Centre for Idealism and the New Liberalism at the University of Hull, Stéphane Guy and Marius Ostrowski, participants at 2023 Annual British Idealist Conference and the 2023 Construction of Ideologies colloquium seminar at the University of Lorraine, France, as well as the three anonymous referees. The usual disclaimer applies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes

1. See W.J. Mander, British Idealism: A history (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

2. Henry Scott Holland, ‘Introduction’ chapter, in P. Dearmer (Ed.) Lombard Street in Lent, new and revised edition (London: Robert Scott, 1911), pp. vii–xv (reprinted in Wilfrid Richmond, ‘Introduction,’ to H.S. Holland, The Philosophy of Faith and The Fourth Gospel, ed. Wilfrid Richmond (London: John Murray, 1920), pp. 8–12); M. Carter, T.H. Green and the Development of Ethical Socialism (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2003). Beveridge’s intellectual relationship to Edward Caird have been misrepresented; for a corrective, see Colin Tyler, ‘A Forgotten Hero of British Social Democracy? The historical significance of Edward Caird’, in Catherine Marshall and Stéphane Guy, eds., The Victorian Legacy in Contemporary British Political Thought (New York: Peter Lang, 2014), pp. 167–84.

3. At some point, all political movements diverge from the views of their initiators. Consequently, where appropriate this article distinguishes Mazzini’s writings from ‘Mazzinianism’ as a field of ideological positions held by others but inspired by those writings.

4. The term ‘engagement’ is used as a neutral term covering any form of reaction to a constellation of ideas, and avoids the implication that a reader necessarily endorsed and drew on the texts they read. The terms ‘influence’ and ‘reception’ are used to signal modes of engagement where a reader endorsed and drew on the texts in a particular instance.

5. M. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A conceptual approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 178–94. Samuel Moyn reflects on the distortions that can arise from (in effect) treating rights-discourse as a core concept in 19th-century political thinkers, in S. Moyn, ‘Giuseppe Mazzini in (and beyond) the history of human rights,’ in P. Slotte (Ed.) Revisiting the Origins of Human Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 131–37.

6. Freeden, ibid., pp. 89–91; M. Freeden, ‘The Morphological Analysis of Ideology,’ in M. Freeden, L.T. Sargent and M. Stears (Eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 127–28.

7. F. Engels, ‘On the History of the Communist League’ (1885), in K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, 2 vols. (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1958), vol.2, pp. 354–55.

8. M.P. Sutcliffe, Victorian Radicals and Italian Democrats (Woodbridge: Royal Historical Society Boydell Press, 2014), pp. 9, 19–20, 38, 41, 44, 87, 91–105, 110–11, 119, 124, 129, 137, 158–60, 200.

9. E.A.H. Venturi, Joseph Mazzini: A memoir with two essays by Mazzini: ‘Thoughts on Democracy’ and ‘The Duties of Man’ (London: Henry S. King, 1875), for example, pp. 1–2.

10. Engels, op. cit., Ref. 7, p. 342. D. Fernbach, ‘Introduction,’ in Karl Marx, The First International and After. Political writings: Volume 3, (Ed.) D. Fernbach (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p.13.

11. S. Mastellone, Mazzini and Marx: Thoughts Upon Democracy in Europe (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003). J. Mazzini, ‘Thoughts Upon Democracy in Europe’ [1846–47], in J. Mazzini, Life and Writings, 6 vols. [ed. E.A.H. Venturi], new edition (London: Smith, Elder, 1891), vol.6, pp. 98–215.

12. Sutcliffe, op. cit., Ref. 8, pp. 126–27.

13. [K. Marx and R. Landor] ‘The Curtain Raised’ (1871), in Fernbach (Ed.), op. cit., Ref. 10, p.398.

14. M. Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, (Ed.) M. Shatz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p.5. For Proudhon on Mazzini, see P.J. Proudhon, The Principle of Federation, trans. R. Vernon (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979 [1863]), for example, chapter IX. Moyn writes that ‘Fellow exiles in London living at one point a few streets away, Mazzini and Marx were not personally close, though Mazzini had friendly relations with Mikhail Bakunin, the celebrated anarchist.’ Moyn, op. cit, Ref. 5, p.134.

15. Anon., ‘London, Sunday, March 6,’ Observer (6 March 1864), p.4.

16. Such reports also inform A. McAllister, John Bull’s Italian Snakes and Ladders: English attitudes to Italy in the mid-19th century (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007) and Sutcliffe, op. cit., Ref. 8. See also J. Allen, ‘“The Ink of the Wise”: Mazzini, British radicalism and print culture, 1848–1855,’ in N. Carter (Ed.) Britain, Ireland and the Italian Risorgimento (Houndsmill: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), pp. 55–79. Small selections of such reports are as follows. Tory attacks on Mazzini: Anon., ‘Imperial Parliament: Opening letters at the Post Office,’ John Bull, XXV:1259 (5 April 1845); Anon., ‘Foreign Intelligence: Italy,’ John Bull, XXX:1560 (2 November 1850); Anon., ‘Morning Edition: Latest news,’ John Bull, XXXVII:1913 (8 August 1857); Anon., ‘The Emperor Napoleon III. And England,’ John Bull, XXXVIII:1944 (13 March 1858); Anon., ‘Literary Review [of The Duties of Man],’ XVLII:2188 (15 November 1862), Anon., ‘Foreign Intelligence: France,’ Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle (16 January 1864). Radical or Advanced Liberal reports (neutral or laudatory): Anon., Mazzini vindicated by a sketch of his eventful life, and the struggle for Italian liberty (no publisher, 1850); Anon., ‘Weekly Retrospect,’ Newcastle Guardian and Tyne Mercury, 464 (30 December 1854); Anon., ‘Our Private Correspondent,’ Manchester Guardian (10 September 1858); Anon., ‘Weekly Resumé,’ Lady’s Newspaper and Pictorial Times, 816 (16 August 1862); Anon., ‘Garibaldi: Mazzini’s Tribute,’ Observer, (24 April 1864); Anon., ‘From Our Private Correspondent,’ Manchester Guardian (22 March 1864), 5; Anon., ‘The Magazines,’ Manchester Guardian (8 March 1871); Anon., ‘Town Talk,’ John Bull, LV:2848 (10 July 1875); Anon., ‘The Coercionist Ministry,’ Reynold’s Newspaper, 1651 (2 April 1882); ‘Sarson,’ ‘The Small Boy with a Large Heart: Chapter V. Mazzini’s Night-School,’ Juvenile Companion and Sunday School Hive (1888?). Unsurprisingly, Mazzini’s radicalism did make even some friends uncomfortable and, for example, led to resignation of as James Stansfeld as an MP in 1864: Anon., ‘Resignation of Mr. Stansfeld,’ Manchester Guardian (5 April 1864).

17. Sutcliffe, op. cit., Ref. 8, p.18.

18. See Ref. 16.

19. J. Mazzini, The Duties of Man, trans. E.A.H. Venturi (London: Chapman and Hall, 1862).

20. For example, Mazzini, op. cit., Ref. 11, vol.4; Anon., ‘Ashurst Bibliography: E.A.H. Venturi,’ The Ashurst Family 1791–1833 http://ashurstresearch.weebly.com/emilie-ashurst-hawkes-venturi.html accessed 1 August 2023.

21. B. King, Life of Mazzini, (London: J.M. Dent, 1912), p.145; D.M. Smith, Mazzini (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), p.190. C. Duggan, ‘Giuseppe Mazzini in Britain and Italy: Divergent legacies, 1837–1915’, in C.B. Bayly and E.F. Biagini (Eds.) Giuseppe Mazzini and the Globalization of Democratic Nationalism, 1830–1920 (London: British Academy, 2008), pp. 187–207.

22. D. Beales, England and Italy 1859–60 (London: Thomas Nelson, 1961), p.31.

23. In addition to those of their works cited elsewhere in this article, see E.F. Richards (Ed.) Mazzini’s Letters to an English Family, 3 vols. (London: John Lane Bodley Head, 1920).

24. T. Carlyle, ‘To the Editor of The Times,’ The Times, 18640 (19 June 1844). On Mazzini’s relationship to Carlyle including some ways in which it was inflected through the newspapers, see Sutcliffe, op. cit., Ref. 8, pp. 36, 39, 45, 68, 122, 203–04.

25. Anon., ‘The International Society,’ The Times, 27350 (13 April 1872), 6.

26. Smith, op. cit., Ref.21, p.190.

27. Sutcliffe, op. cit., Ref. 8, pp. 8, 14, 25–26, 86–88, 148–50, 160–61, 176–77.

28. Sutcliffe, op. cit., Ref. 8, pp. 87–88, 154–55.

29. Sutcliffe, op. cit., Ref. 8, pp. 26, 160–61; J. Bryce, International Relations: Eight lectures delivered in the United States in August, 1921 (New York MacMillan, 1922), pp. 29–32, 134; J. Bryce, The Hindrances to Good Citizenship (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1909), pp. 14, 127.

30. Sir H. Jones and J.H. Muirhead, The Life and Philosophy of Edward Caird, LL.D., D.C.L. (Glasgow: Maclehose, Jackson, 1921), p.134n1.

31. Letter from Benjamin Jowett to Miss Elliot, 4 August 1861, in E. Abbot and L. Campbell (Ed.) Benjamin Jowett: Life and Letters, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1897), vol.1, p.354.

32. Ibid., vol.2, p.10.

33. G.C. Monsman, ‘Old Mortality at Oxford,’ Studies in Philology, 67:3 (July 1970), pp. 372–73. A. de Sanctis, ‘Puritan’ Democracy of Thomas Hill Green (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2005), pp. 29–31.

34. The full membership appears in Monsman, op. cit., Ref. 33, p.360.

35. A.V. Dicey, ‘Recollection 2: Albert Venn Dicey (17 September 1882),’ in C. Tyler (Ed.) ‘Recollections regarding T.H. Green,’ Collingwood and British Idealism Studies, 14:2 (Summer 2008), p.21.

36. C. Harvie, The Lights of Liberalism: University liberals and the challenge of democracy 1860–1886 (London: Allen Lane, 1976), p.102.

37. Anon., ‘The Refugee Question,’ Morning Chronicle (13 February 1858), p.3.

38. T.H. Green, letter, autumn 1860, quoted in R.L. Nettleship, ‘Memoir,’ in T.H. Green, Collected Works, 5 vols., (Eds.) R.L. Nettleship and P.P. Nicholson (Bristol: Thoemmes, 1997), vol.3, p.xlii.

39. S. Patriarca, ‘Indolence and Regeneration: Tropes and tensions of Risorgimento patriotism,’ American Historical Review, 110:2 (April 2005), pp. 391–95; D. Leighton, The Greenian Moment: T.H. Green, religion and political argument in Victorian Britain (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2004), p.40n29.

40. Letter from J.A. Symonds to C.B. Green (née Symonds), 6 April 1873, in A.K. Regis (Ed.) Memoirs of John Addington Symonds (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016), p.544.

41. H. Hare, Swinburne: A biographical approach (London: H.F. and G. Witherby, 1949), p.36.

42. Gosse, E. Gosse, The Life of Charles Algernon Swinburne (London: Cheswick Press, 1912), p.40, quoted in Monsman, op. cit., Ref. 33, p.378; T.H. Green, ‘Essay on Christian Dogma,’ in Green, op. cit., Ref. 38, vol.3, pp. 161–85.

43. Gosse, op. cit., Ref. 42, p.38n1.

44. Gosse, op. cit., Ref. 42, p.13. Cf. E. Gosse, ‘Ode to Mazzini: Preface,’ in A.C. Swinburne, Ode to Mazzini. The Saviour of Society. Liberty and Loyalty (Boston: Mass.: Bibliophile Society, 1913), p.9; Sutcliffe, op. cit., Ref. 8, pp. 107–08.

45. Hare, op. cit., Ref. 42, pp. viii–xi.

46. Abbot and Campbell (Ed.) op. cit., Ref. 31, vol.2, pp. 10–11; G. Faber, Jowett: A portrait with background (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), p.366. Abbott and Campbell date this meeting to 1871, while Faber dates it to 1868. Acknowledging Swinburne: W.M Sinclair, ‘Recollections of the Speeches at the banquet at the opening of the New Hall in Balliol College, Jan. 16. 1877. For the Rev. The Master’ (IE24/6, Jowett Papers, Balliol College, University of Oxford).

47. Hare, op. cit., Ref. 41, p.138.

48. Letter from G. Mazzini to A.C. Swinburne, March 1867, quoted in Hare, ibid., p.138.

49. Letter from Mazzini to Swinburne, March 1867, quoted in Hare, ibid., p.138.

50. Letter from Mazzini to Swinburne, March 1867, quoted in Hare, ibid., p.139.

51. Letter from Swinburne to G. Powell, 31 March 1867, in A.C. Swinburne, Letters, 6 vols., (Ed.) C.Y. Lang (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), vol.1, p.236.

52. Letter from Swinburne to T. Purnell, 2 February 1877, ibid., vol.3, p.266.

53. Letter from Swinburne to W.M. Rossetti, 6 October 1867, ibid., vol.1, p.268. It would be interesting to consider this project in light of the analysis of this period of Italian nationalism presented in A.M. Banti, The Nation of the Risorgimento: Kinship, sanctity, and honour in the origins of unified Italy, trans. Stephen Oglethorpe (London: Routledge, 2020).

54. Letter from G. Mazzini to E.A. Venturi, 12 January 1869, in Richards (Ed.) op. cit., Ref. 23, vol.3, p.207.

55. Hare, op. cit., Ref. 41, pp. x, 159–86.

56. Sutcliffe, op. cit., Ref. 8, pp. 163–64.

57. A.C. Swinburne, ‘Dedicatory Epistle,’ in A.C. Swinburne, Poems, 6 vols. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1911 [1904]), vol.1, p.xvi.

58. Harvie, op. cit., Ref. 36, pp. 100–05, 156.

59. Sutcliffe, op. cit., Ref. 8, p.88.

60. See A. Seth and R.B. Haldane (Eds.) Essays in Philosophical Criticism (London: Longmans, Green, 1883); Mander, op. cit., Ref. 1. Sutcliffe, op. cit., Ref. 8, p.150.

61. Colin Tyler, ‘British Idealism,’ in Kipton Jensen and Jennifer O’Keefe, eds., British and American Philosophy in the 19th century (Schwabe Verlag, forthcoming).

62. R. Scruton, The Palgrave MacMillan Dictionary of Political Thought, third edition (Houndsmill: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), p.733.

63. T.H. Green, ‘Philosophy of Aristotle,’ in Green, op. cit., Ref. 38, vol.3, pp. 46–91; R.L. Nettleship, ‘Professor T.H. Green. In Memoriam,’ Contemporary Review (May 1882), p.862; see ibid., pp. 862–66.

64. The instances are legion, for example, Nettleship, ibid., pp. 862–66; B. Bosanquet, ‘On the True Conception of Another World’ (1886), in B. Bosanquet, Science and Philosophy, and other essays (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1927), pp. 320–332; E. Caird, ‘Biographical Introduction,’ in E. Caird (Ed.) William Wallace: Lectures and Essays on Natural Theology and Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1898), pp. xxvii-xxxvii; D.G. Ritchie, ‘The Rationality of History,’ in Seth and Haldane (Eds.) op. cit., Ref. 50, pp. 126–58; D.G. Ritchie, Philosophical Studies (Ed.) R. Latta (London: MacMillan, 1905), pp. 120–21; Jones and Muirhead, op. cit., Ref. 30, pp. 245–48.

65. G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, (Trans.) H.B. Nisbet, (Ed.) Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p.21.

66. Jones and Muirhead, op. cit., Ref. 30, p.252.

67. Jones and Muirhead, op. cit., Ref. 30, pp. 252–53; see further ibid., pp. 245–59. D.G. Ritchie, Principles of State Interference: Four essays on the political philosophy of Mr. Herbert Spencer, J.S. Mill, and T.H. Green (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1902), pp. 139–45.

68. J. MacCunn, Six Radical Thinkers: Bentham, J.S. Mill, Cobden, Carlyle, Mazzini, T.H. Green (London: Edward Arnold, 1907), pp. 216–17.

69. E. Caird, ‘The Genius of Carlyle,’ in E. Caird, Essays on Literature and Philosophy, 2 vols. (Glasgow: James MacLehose, 1892), vol.1, pp. 230–67. Little work has been done in this area, but see Colin Tyler, Civil Society, Capitalism and the State: Part 2 of The Liberal Socialism of Thomas Hill Green (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2012), pp. 129–39; Colin Tyler, ‘Individuality, freedom and socialism: The British idealists’ critiques of the Fichtean state,’ Political Studies, 63:2 (June 2015), pp. 319–335; Colin Tyler, Common Good Politics: British idealism and social justice in the contemporary world (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017), chapter 2; Colin Tyler, ‘Forms, dialectics and the healthy community: Recovering the British idealists’ reception of Plato’, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 100:1 (March 2018), pp. 76–105.

70. For example, Freeden, op. cit., Ref. 5.

71. For other comparative analyses of Mazzini and Green, see Tyler, Civil, ibid., pp. 107–16, 245–51. See also Colin Tyler, ‘“A State by a Sort of Courtesy”: T.H Green’s theory of the state as a critique of Tsarism’, in Giacomo Rinaldi and Giacomo Cerratani, ed., Etica, Politica, Stoira Universale [Ethics, Politics and World History] (Roma: Aracne Editrice, 2020), pp. 247–81.

72. For example, Mazzini, op. cit., Ref. 11, vol. 4, pp. 204–45; Moyn, op. cit., Ref. 5, pp. 134–39; T.H. Green, ‘Introductions to Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature: Part II Introduction to the Moral Part of Hume’s Treatise’, in Green, op. cit., Ref. 35, vol.1, section 64. T.H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, (Ed.) A.C. Bradley (Oxford: Clarendon, 1883), sections 329–82. Holland, ‘Introduction,’ op. cit., Ref 2.

73. Moyn, op. cit., Ref. 5, p.134.

74. MacCunn, op. cit., Ref. 68, p.252; see further p.217.

75. Colin Tyler, ‘Contesting the Common Good: T.H. Green and Contemporary Republicanism,’ in M. Dimova-Cookson and W.J. Mander, eds., T.H. Green: Ethics, Metaphysics and Political Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), pp. 262–91.

76. Sutcliffe, op. cit., Ref. 8, p.139.

77. R.L. Nettleship, Memoir, in Green, op. cit., Ref. 38, vol.5, vol.3, pp .xv, xxii, xxix, xxxviii, lviii-lix, cviii-cix; T.H. Green, ‘The Influence of Civilisation on Genius,’ in Green, ibid., vol.3, p.17–19; Henry Sidgwick, ‘Recollection 1: Henry Sidgwick (1 August 1882),’ in Tyler (Ed.) op. cit., Ref. 35, pp. 10–11; Dicey, op. cit., Ref. 37, pp. 20–21; John St Loe Strachey, ‘Recollection 8: John St Loe Strachey (1888),’ in Tyler (Ed.) op. cit., Ref. 35, p.61.) Strachey further remembered that Green’s ‘acquaintance was most minute with [Carlyle’s] the Life of Cromwell, and was he proud of it.’ (Strachey, ibid., p.61) Green’s 1867 lectures on the English civil wars are replete with laudatory references to both Cromwell and Milton, and in speech of 27 May 1880 he named them as ‘the great men in literature and politics.’ T.H. Green, ‘Congregationalism,’ 27 May 1880, op. cit., Ref. 38, vol.5, p.367 See also letter from Green to Henry Scott Holland, 9 January 1869, ibid., p.428; letter to Charlotte Symonds, 22 February 1871, ibid., p.436. D. Kelly, ‘Idealism and Revolution: T.H. Green’s “Four Lectures on the English Commonwealth”,’ History of Political Thought, 27:3 (Autumn 2006), pp. 524–27; M. Ritcher, Politics of Conscience: T.H. Green and his age (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964), pp. 40–41, 45–47, 246–47.

78. Kelly, ‘Idealism,’ op. cit., Ref. 77, esp. pp. 512–14, 530–31. Green employs the terms ‘reason’ and ‘spirit’ in passage Kelly quotes. ‘Conscience’ is the richer idea to which Green takes these terms to be equivalent (see Tyler, Civil, op. cit., Ref. 69, chapter four).

79. Colin Tyler, ‘“God, Man, and Nature”: Neo-Aristotelian naturalism in T.H. Green’s faith and philosophy’, Collingwood and British Idealism Studies, 25:1 (2019), pp. 45–73.

80. Green, ‘English Commonwealth,’ op. cit., Ref. 38, vol.5, pp. 290–364 passim; Kelly, ‘Idealism,’ op. cit., Ref. 77, pp. 514–17.

81. Green, ibid., p.336.

82. Green, ibid., pp. 323–24, quoting Ludlow. On Milton’s republicanism, see ibid., pp. 333–34. See also Colin Tyler, Idealist Political Philosophy: Pluralism and conflict in the absolute idealist tradition (London and New York: Continuum, 2006), chapter two.

83. Sutcliffe, op. cit., Ref. 8, p.138.

84. T.H. Green, ‘Notes on Ancient and Modern Political Economy,’ in Green, op. cit., Ref. 38, vol.5, p.187.

85. Holland, ‘Introduction,’ op. cit., Ref. 2; T. Hilton, John Ruskin: The later years (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 457–58.

86. Green, Prolegomena, op. cit., Ref. 72, sections 7–8.

87. B. Bosanquet, ‘The Duties of Citizenship’ [1895], in Bosanquet, op. cit., Ref. 64, p.281.

88. T.H. Green, ‘Popular Philosophy in its Relation to Life’ [1868], in Green, op. cit., Ref. 38, vol.3, p.94.

89. Green, ibid., p.94.

90. Mazzini, ‘Faith and the Future,’ in Mazzini, op. cit., Ref. 11, vol.3, p.175; see also Mazzini, op cit. Ref. 11, p.303.

91. Bolton King notes that Mazzini ‘read something of Hegel, whom he did not understand.’ B. King, Mazzini (London: J.M. Dent, 1903), p.10.

92. King, ibid., p.275, partially quoted in MacCunn, op. cit., Ref. 68, p.190.

93. A.C. Bradley, ‘Hegel’s Theory of Tragedy,’ in his Oxford Lectures on Poetry (London: MacMillan, 1965 [1909]), p.71.

94. T.H. Green, ‘Four Lectures on the English Commonwealth,’ in Green, op. cit., Ref. 38, vol.3, pp. 277–364. See de Sanctis, op. cit., Ref. 33, passim; Kelly, op. cit., Ref. 77; Colin Tyler, ‘ “All History is the History of Thought”: Competing British idealist historiographies,’ British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 28:3 (May 2020), 573–93.

95. J.H. Muirhead, The Service of the State: Four lectures on the political teaching of T.H. Green (London: John Murray, 1908), p.62n3.

96. Mazzini, op cit., Ref. 11, p.278.

97. T.H. Green, ‘Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation,’ in his Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, and other writings, (Eds.) P. Harris and J. Morrow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), section 183.

98. Green, op. cit., Ref. 72, sections 183–87; Tyler, Civil, op. cit., Ref. 69, pp. 107–16.

99. Green, ibid., section 185; Tyler, ibid., pp. 106–122.

100. Tyler, op. cit., Ref. 82, pp. 1–20.

101. Mazzini, ‘Duties,’ op. cit., Ref. 20, vol.4, pp. 258–73.

102. This is a recurring theme of the writings of both men. See, for example, Mazzini, ‘Duties,’ in op. cit., Ref. 11, vol.4, pp. 335–78; Leighton, op. cit., Ref. 39, pp. 319–20; S. Paget, (Ed.) Henry Scott Holland. Memoirs and Letters (London: John Murray, 1921), p.65.

103. T.H. Green, ‘The Condition of the Labouring Classes, What it is and What is Might be,’ Bicester Herald, Friday 30 October 1868, p.7. The speech was rediscovered by Peter Nicholson (personal communication).

104. These themes are prominent throughout their respective writings, not least Mazzini, op. cit., vol.4, pp. 245–58, 325–34; Green, Prolegomena, op. cit., Ref. 72, sections 180–290; T.H. Green, ‘Lecture on Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract,’ in Green, op. cit., Ref. 97, pp. 194–212; Federica Falchi, ‘Democracy and the Rights of Women in the Thinking of Giuseppe Mazzini,’ Modern Italy, 17 (2012), pp. 1–30; Olive Anderson, ‘The Feminism of T.H. Green: A Late-Victorian Success Story?,’ History of Political Thought, 12:4 (Winter 1991), pp. 671–94

105. There is no evidence that Green engaged with the writings of either Marx, Engels or Bakunin, or indeed that he was aware of them. Until at least the 1880s, outside of radical political circles Mazzini’s profile was far greater in Britain than was that of Marx, Engels and Bakunin. K. Willis, ‘The introduction and Critical Reception of Marxist Thought in Britain, 1850–1900,’ Historical Journal, 20:2 (June 1977), pp. 417–59; Mark Bevir, The Making of British Socialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), pp. 45–48; Babk Amini, ‘A Brief History of the Dissemination and Reception of Karl Marx’s Capital in the United States and Britain,’ World Review of Political Economy, 17:3 (Fall 2016), pp. 334–49.

106. Mazzini, ‘Duties,’ in op. cit., Ref. 11, vol.4, p.344; see also Mazzini, ‘Autobiographical Notes continued (1861)’, in ibid., vol.1, pp. 222–23. See further Tyler, ‘State,’ op. cit., Ref. 71.

107. J. Mazzini, ‘On the Encyclica of Pope Pius IX (Thoughts addressed to the Priests of Italy)’, in Mazzini, op cit., Ref.5, vol.5, pp. 332–33.

108. J. Mazzini, ‘Europe: Its condition and prospects’ (1852), in Mazzini, op. cit., Ref. 11, vol.6, pp. 243–51.

109. Mazzini, ibid., p.244.

110. Mazzini, ‘Duties,’ op. cit., Ref. 11, p.346. See further Nadia Urbinati, ‘“A Common Law of Nations”: Giuseppe Mazzini’s democratic nationality,’ Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 1:2 (1996), pp. 197–222; Alberto Mario Banti, ‘Sacrality and the Aesthetics of Politics: Mazzini’s concept of the nation,’ in Bayly and Biagini (Eds.) op. cit., Ref. 21, pp. 59–74.

111. Green, op. cit., Ref. 97, sections 211–26.

112. Green, op. cit., Ref. 97, section 227.

113. Green, op. cit., Ref. 97, section 227.

114. Green, op. cit., Ref. 71, section 229.

115. Mazzini, op. cit., Ref. 20, p.343.

116. T.H. Green, ‘Parliamentary Reform,’ Oxford Chronicle (29 February 1868), reprinted in Green, op. cit., Ref. 38, vol.5, pp. 234–35; Green, ‘To the Agricultural Labourers,’ Oxford Chronicle (26 October 1872), reprinted ibid., vol.5, pp. 238–241; Green, ‘To the Agricultural Labourers,’ Oxford Chronicle and other Oxford newspapers (19 December 1874), reprinted ibid., vol.5, pp. 246–50.

117. Green, op. cit., Ref. 71, section 89; see Green, ibid., sections 102, 129.

118. Green, ‘Agricultural Labourers, 23 October 1872,’ Green, op. cit., Ref. 38, vol.5, pp. 238–41; Green, ‘Agricultural Labourers, 9 December 1874,’ ibid., pp. 246–50.

119. Sutcliffe, op. cit., Ref. 8, pp. 148–50. Approximately £40 was needed to set up the institution. Green and Jowett gave £1 each, Bradley £2 and Nettleship £5, with others contributing another £11 between them.

120. Mazzini, ‘Duties,’ op. cit., Ref. 11, vol.4, pp. 315–25; Nick Carter, ‘Mazzini and Education,’ Annali di storia dell’educazione a delle istituzioni scolastiche, 26 (2019), pp. 6–16.

121. This is a vast topic. Green, op. cit., Ref. 38, pp. 387–476. P. Gordon and J. White, Philosophers as Educational Reformers: The influence of idealism on British educational thought and practice (London: Routledge, 1979). De Sanctis sees Green and Mazzini as being rather closer on the education question (de Sanctis, op. cit., Ref. 33, pp. 98–100). See, also, Sutcliffe, op. cit., Ref. 8, pp. 144–96.

122. T.H. Green, ‘National Loss and Gain under a Conservative Government,’ speech at Liberal Hall, Abingdon (5 December 1879), in Green, op. cit., Ref. 38, vol.5, p.352; Tyler, Civil, op. cit., Ref. 69, pp. 77–105, 190–212.

123. Maurizio Ridolfi, ‘Visions of Republicanism in the writings of Giuseppe Mazzini,’ Journal of Italian Studies, 13:4 (2008), 474, 475.

124. Green, op. cit., Ref. 38, vol.5, pp. 195–404.

125. T.H. Green, ‘Lecture on Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract,’ in Green, op. cit., Ref. 97, p.203.

126. Green, op. cit., Ref. 97, sections 228–31; Green, ‘Liberal,’ ibid.

127. Tyler, op. cit., Ref. 69, pp. 231–261.

128. Anon., ‘Foreign Intelligence: France,’ John Bull, XLIV:2249 (16 January 1864), p.36a.

129. Green, op. cit., Ref. 97, section 108.

130. Sutcliffe, op. cit., Ref. 8, p.129.

131. A. Kadish, The Life and Death of Arnold Toynbee 1852–1883 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1986), pp. 2, 6.

132. A. Toynbee, Lectures on The Industrial Revolution of the 18^th Century in England. Popular addresses, notes and other fragments, second edition (London: Rivingtons, 1887), p.200.

133. Toynbee, ibid., p.200.

134. Toynbee, ibid., p.220.

135. Kadish, op. cit., Ref. 131, p.109.

136. Sutcliffe, op. cit., Ref. 8, pp. 175–96; E. Caird, ‘Address on the Opening of the Mansfield-House University Settlement, London, 17 December 1896,’ in C. Tyler (Ed.) ‘Edward Caird Miscellanea,’ Collingwood and British Idealism Studies, 29:1 (2023), 140–41.

137. Sutcliffe, op. cit., Ref. 8, pp. 148–50. Nettleship gave £5 out of the approximately £40 required to set up the institution.

138. MacCunn, op. cit., Ref. 68, pp. 185–214.

139. MacCunn, ibid., p.192.

140. MacCunn, ibid., p.202–04. Moreover, it anticipates scholars such as S. Mattarelli, ‘Duties and Rights in the Thought of Giuseppe Mazzini,’ Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 13:4 (2008): pp. 48–85; Moyn, op. cit., Ref. 5.

141. MacCunn, ibid., p.191.

142. MacCunn, ibid., p.187.

143. MacCunn, ibid., pp. 206–208.

144. On Mazzini’s internationalism, see M. Isabella, ‘Mazzini’s Internationalism in Context: From the cosmopolitan patriotism of the Italian Carbonari to Mazzini’s Europe of Nations,’ in Bayly and Biagini ed., op. cit., Ref. 21, pp. 36–58.

145. MacCunn, op. cit., Ref. 68, p.194.

146. MacCunn, ibid., pp. 194–95.

147. D.G. Ritchie, Darwinism and Politics (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1889; second edition 1890). For the wider context, see D. Boucher, The Limits of Ethics in International Relations: Natural law, natural rights, and human rights in transition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), chapter 8.

148. MacCunn, op. cit., Ref. 68, pp. 195–96.

149. MacCunn, ibid., p. 196.

150. MacCunn, ibid., pp. 197–202.

151. J. MacCunn, Ethics of Citizenship, third edition (Glasgow: James MacLehose, 1896 [1894]) p.54. See further ibid., pp. 60–67; J. MacCunn, Political Philosophy of Burke (London: Edward Arnold, 1913), pp. 89–90, 242.

152. J. MacCunn, Liverpool Addresses on the Ethics of Social Work (Liverpool: University Press and London: Constable, 1911), pp. 143–44; MacCunn, Burke, op. cit., Ref. 151, pp. 31–35 passim.

153. MacCunn, op. cit., Ref. 68, pp. 208–11; Moyn, op. cit., Ref. 5.

154. D.G. Ritchie, Studies in Social and Political Ethics (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1902), p.155.

155. Ritchie, ibid., p.155.

156. Ritchie, ibid., p.155.

157. Ritchie, ibid., p.56.

158. Ritchie, op. cit., Ref. 64; Colin Tyler, ‘D.G. Ritchie on socialism, History and Locke,’ Journal of Political Ideologies, 17:3 (October 2012), pp. 259–80.

159. Sutcliffe, op. cit., Ref. 8, pp. 148–50.

160. A.C. Bradley, ‘International Morality: The United States of Europe,’ in Various authors, The International Crisis in its Ethical and Psychological Aspects (London: Humphrey Milford Oxford University Press, 1915), pp. 67, 72–73.

161. A.C. Bradley, ‘Shelley and Arnold’s Critique of his Poetry,’ in his A Miscellany (London: MacMillan, 1929), p.153. Letter from J.A. Symonds to C.B. Green (née Symonds), 6 April 1873, in Regis (Ed.), op. cit., Ref.40. A.C. Bradley, ‘Biographical Sketch,’ in R.L. Nettleship, Philosophical Remains, (Ed.) A.C. Bradley, second edition (London: MacMillan, 1901), pp. xxix, xliv-xlv. J.S. Mackenzie, ‘The Dangers of Democracy’ (1906), in D. Boucher (Ed.) The British Idealists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 156, 170. See also Sir H. Jones, Browning as Philosophical and Religious Teacher (London: Thomas Nelson, 1891), p.80.

162. J. Bryce, Modern Democracies, 2 vols. (London: MacMillan, 1921), vol.1, p.18; see further J. Bryce, Studies in History and Jurisprudence, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1901), vol.2, p.497; J. Bryce, Essays and Addresses in War Time (1918), p.114.

163. Bryce, International, op cit., Ref. 29, p.30; see further Bryce, Modern, op. cit., Ref. 162, vol.2, pp. 583, 623, 664, 666; J. Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire, eighth edition (New York: MacMillan, 1880 [first ed. 1864]), pp. 437, 440; J. Bryce, University and Historical Addresses: Delivered during a residence in the United States as ambassador of Great Britain (New York: MacMillan, 1913), pp. 262–63, 363; Bryce, Essays, op. cit., Ref. 163, pp. 23–24, 131.

164. William Wallace, ‘The Ethics of Socialism,’ in Caird (Ed.) op cit., Ref. 64, p.412.

165. See Colin Tyler, ‘Carlo Rosselli and British Anti-fascist Thought,’ in Patricia Chiantera-Stutte and Maurizio Pagano, eds., La Forza della Libertà: L’Antifascismo Dall’Aventino alla Seconda Guerra Mondiale (Pisa: Pacini Editore, 2023), pp. 221–32.