ABSTRACT
The intellectual history of Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century has tended to see Conservative thought as unimportant. Britain’s social problem and the emergence of Socialism were thus taken to be two aspects of the same problem, with the solution being to reject orthodox economic thought and practice. Many Conservatives developed their own critique of classical Liberalism and presented a distinctive brand of Conservative Collectivism. That the historical economists emerged as the house intellectuals of the Edwardian Conservative party, and that they used the tariff debate to develop their critique of economic liberalism, was not an intellectual accident. If one examines the British context in more detail one can find further confirmation of historical economics as part of a more general pattern of Conservative intellectual engagement with and criticism of on the one hand classical Liberalism and on the other Socialism.
