The roots of British Idealism were established in Scotland and Oxford during the middle of the nineteenth century and rapidly became the dominant philosophy, through the writings and personal influence of such exponents as Fraser Campbell, Edward Caird, T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet, Henry Jones, Andrew Seth, D. G. Ritchie, J. S. Mackenzie, William Wallace, W. R. Sorley, J. M. E. McTaggart and John Watson, until the turn of the century when its fundamental doctrines were challenged by John Cook Wilson, G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell. From this time the march of Idealism was halted, and by the end of the First World War it was decidedly on the retreat. Through their teaching, personal influence and patronage, the British Idealists managed to permeate the whole English-speaking world with their doctrines. Even after the death of its leading surviving exponents, Bradley, Bosanquet, Jones and McTaggart, in the mid 1920s, it continued to dominate the professoriate and was able to count in its ranks able young converts such as R. G. Collingwood in Oxford, who published Speculum Mentis in 1925, and Michael Oakeshott in Cambridge, who published Experience and its Modes in 1933.

The social and political philosophy of British Idealism continues to resonate, and is invoked, often without discrimination, for both positive and negative reasons. On the one hand it provides a philosophical basis for opposing the extreme view that society is no more than the sum of its parts, while emphasising the socially constitutedcharacter of personality and morality.