[4] James Doull (1918–2001) also developed Hegelian idealist tenets among Canadians including a philosophy of history and freedom.
Both the British and Canadian idealists draw from Georg W. F. Hegel's absolute idealism, though also from Kant, Plato, and Aristotle.
Idealists argue that the scientific reason of the Enlightenment artificially suppresses a significant dimension of human experience; that is, the cultural framework and historically inherited ideas with which we make sense of the world around us.
A wide range of subjects from economic rights to the notion of the family come into consideration, but the central question of idealists is how to reconcile civic unity (or the common good) with individual freedom.
The concept of culturally embedded knowledge and the historical approach to philosophy set the groundwork for idea of freedom as something that is achieved through a commitment to the community rather than in opposition to it, as is the case with the contract theory of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke for whom freedom is the absence of external interference with our choices (negative liberty).