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Victorian Kulturkritik and Philosophical Idealism in Britain: Matthew Arnold and T. H. Green

Machimoto, Akihiro; (2021) Victorian Kulturkritik and Philosophical Idealism in Britain: Matthew Arnold and T. H. Green. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London). Green open access

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Abstract

In the history of British philosophy, the period from the 1870s to the First World War is characterized by the dominance of English and Scottish universities by Idealism. Despite the renewed interest in this intellectual movement since the Anglophone Hegel revival in the 1970s in various fields, including philosophy, political theory, or religious thought, the school of British Idealism has received scant attention in literary studies. To redress this situation, this thesis addresses a comparative study of Matthew Arnold and T. H. Green – the epitome of the literary ‘genre’ of cultural criticism and the acknowledged inaugurator of the philosophical movement, respectively. British Idealism was not just an importation from the Continent alien to the indigenous intellectual soil. Green’s moral conception of the State, alongside Arnold’s, was partly a development from the liberal Anglican tradition of thinking on the national community with the Established Church at its moral centre. Although Green’s arguments in epistemology were largely framed by the reading of German philosophers, they could be interpreted as a version of Kulturkritik, originating from his desire, stimulated by Arnold’s inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry, for a vantage point from which to command a comprehensive view of the confused spectacle of modernity. Besides, unlike many other Victorian intellectuals, what Arnold inherited from the French historian and public figure François Guizot was a liberalism with an emphasis on governability, which was congenial to the Idealist political ideas presented by Green, one of the ‘University Liberals’ who departed from the whiggish thinking on constitutional liberty. Green has been often described as a Hebraist champion of dissenting conscience in contrast to Arnold as a Hellenist apostle of catholic, cosmopolitan culture. This thesis presents a more nuanced view by addressing the two thinkers’ underappreciated affinities in their literary, philosophical, political, and religious arguments.

Type: Thesis (Doctoral)
Qualification: Ph.D
Title: Victorian Kulturkritik and Philosophical Idealism in Britain: Matthew Arnold and T. H. Green
Event: UCL (University College London)
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
Language: English
Additional information: Copyright © The Author 2021. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request.
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10136146
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