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This paper aims to retrieve relevant aspects of the work of idealist thinker T.H. Green to improve comprehension of, and policy responses to, various dilemmas facing contemporary “information societies”.

The paper is an exercise in interdisciplinary conceptual research, seeking a new synthesis that draws upon a range of ethical, metaphysical, empirical and policy texts and ideas. It is an application of moral and political principles to post-industrial problems, part of an ongoing international effort to develop viable normative approaches to the emergent information society. The background research included in situ study of archival papers.

Green’s version of idealism illuminates current, technologically induced shifts in our understandings of important categories such as self, substance and space. The paper finds that Green’s doctrine of the common good, his alternative to the (still prevalent) school of utilitarian welfarism, combined with his famously “positive” theory of the state, is highly relevant as a normative template for applied philosophy and policy. The article demonstrates its applicability to three vital contemporary issues: freedom of information, intellectual property and personal privacy. It concludes that Green’s work provides exceptional resources for an original, anti-technocratic, theory of the information society as good society.

It is hoped that, as part of the wider rediscovery of the work of Green and other idealists, the paper will have some impact on public policy.

The paper contains a new scholarly interpretation of Green’s theories of the common good and of the state. In addition, it is believed to be the first major attempt to apply idealism to the information society and its problems.

The paper establishes that Edward Caird developed a distinctive form of liberal Hegelianism out of his critical responses to Kant, the romantic tradition of Rousseau, Goethe and Wordsworth and indeed Hegel himself.

The paper presents a philosophical reconstruction of Caird's social economics that is based on a close reading of a very wide range of Caird's writings including his recently published lectures on social ethics and political economy.

Caird's theory of historical development underpinned his writings on social economics. One of his greatest debts in this regard was to his interpretation of the romantics, which introduced a rich conception of higher human capacities into his critical analysis of capitalism. When combined with his critique of Kantian formalism, this led Caird towards Hegel. Yet, Caird's concerns regarding corporatism's stultifying tendencies led him to develop a dynamic form of liberal Hegelianism, which placed far greater trust than had Hegel in the ability of free conscientious citizens to restructure and enrich established social categories (classes, professions, gender roles and so on) and the system of nations which those categories helped to constitute.

If Caird's liberal Hegelianism were to be adopted today, we could live in much freer, fairer and enriching communities than we do at present.

Edward Caird has been wrongly neglected in intellectual histories of Anglo‐American political theory, and while his writings on Kant's critical philosophy have received some scholarly attention, his critique of romanticism has never received the attention it deserves. This also draws on manuscripts that have been published only within the past five years, having been edited for the first time by the author of this paper.

This article aims to provide a response to the papers in this issue.

The methodology employed is philosophical.

In her response, Nussbaum thanks the authors for their contributions and addresses their most salient arguments.

Nussbaum in this article responds to the papers in this issue of IJSE and addresses the authors' most salient arguments.

The paper aims to examine and compare two understandings of liberty that have dealt successfully with the normative and analytical challenge of reconciling liberty with social justice: Philip Pettit's republican liberty as nondomination and Hobhouse's concept of liberty as personal growth available to all. The paper focuses on one particular question: how successful each of these thinkers has been in resolving the tension between voluntariness of action, implicit in the “primary” meaning of liberty (as defined by T.H. Green), with the often heavy demands of social justice policies aiming at social equality and entailing economic redistribution.

The paper analyses two theories of liberty by spelling out the difficulties they aimed to deal with and by assessing the level of success they have achieved in resolving these difficulties, with the objective to demonstrate their originality in the broader context of conceptualising liberty.

The paper criticises Pettit's republican theory from a new perspective and develops an original critique of it; it spells out the achievements of Hobhouse's understanding of liberty in a new light – related to the specific critique of Pettit's republican liberty; and by spelling out the analytical and normative achievements of Hobhouse's liberty as “personal growth available to all” it offers a viable concept of liberty that fits with contemporary conceptualisations but overcomes their shortcomings.

As the project is based on analysing texts that have been easy to access, there have not been significant research limitations.

The two theories of freedom assessed here (the contemporary republican and the “new liberal”) entail some subtle, but potentially significant differences in public policy implications. While both can justify extended state action, the latter could tailor specific policies in a manner more mindful of the well-being of all parties, even those on the wrong side of social justice.

The paper makes an original contribution in three areas: contemporary republican theory of liberty, Hobhouse's theory of liberty and conceptualisations of liberty in general.

The paper aims to examine the relationship between creating capabilities and political liberalism. It argues that the reality of climate change calls for the capabilities approach to be more rooted in a relational anthropology which the Aristotelian ethical tradition is more akin to.

It discusses how traces of this ethical tradition can be found in Nussbaum's capabilities approach itself: affiliation as an architectonic capability leads to the common good being the end of political action, and practical reason as an architectonic capability leads to reasoning being structured by concerns for the common good.

The paper suggests some practical implications of an Aristotelian version of the capabilities approach.

The paper seeks to build an account of social justice based on the capabilities approach with Aristotelian roots.