British idealism

[1] British idealism was generally marked by several broad tendencies: a belief in an Absolute (a single all-encompassing reality that in some sense formed a coherent and all-inclusive system); the assignment of a high place to reason as both the faculty by which the Absolute's structure is grasped and as that structure itself; and a fundamental unwillingness to accept a dichotomy between thought and object, reality consisting of thought-and-object together in a strongly coherent unity.

However, this situation changed in 1865 with the publication of James Hutchison Stirling's book The Secret of Hegel, which is believed to have won significant converts in Britain.

"[5] On its political side, the British idealists were largely concerned to refute what they regarded as a brittle and "atomistic" form of individualism, as espoused by e.g. Herbert Spencer, but also the utilitarianism of J.S.

On the idealist view, humans are fundamentally social beings in a manner and to a degree not adequately recognized by Spencer and his followers, yet individual initiative and 'self-realisation' are also central to their accounts.

In the late 1950s G. R. G. Mure, in his Retreat From Truth (Oxford 1958), criticized Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and aspects of analytic philosophy from an idealist point of view.

However, from the 1990s on, there has been a significant revival in interest in these ideas, as evidenced by, for instance, by the founding of the Michael Oakeshott Association, and renewed attention to the work of Collingwood, Green, and Bosanquet.