In spite of the widespread interest in the intellectual history of neoliberalism, other historians have nonetheless expressed reservations about how influential such ideas really were. This chapter responds to this scholarship by reformulating the importance of intellectual history to our understanding of Britain after the 1970s. It do so in a way that steers the debate away from the more exuberantly idealist accounts of the 1980s towards a more constrained account of how the history of ideas can complement the important insights that we can glean from the study of high politics, the economy and social change.
