This paper asks why the ‘Cambridge School’ of intellectual history has emerged as a relevant and appealing method of historical inquiry for a strand of Iranian intellectuals since 2014. Forged in the post-World War II era and during collapse of liberalism in the 1960s when post-structural thought jettisoned definitive ‘truths’ and social history was becoming more popular, several Cambridge professors sought to promote historical inquiry through authorial context and language. The Cambridge School, for whom a complete consensus on method does no exist, thus emerged as a mode of inquiry that attempted to ‘see things [the author’s] way’. Despite having been translated in Iran to Persian in 1994, Quentin Skinner’s Machiavelli failed to bring attention to the author’s ideas—best known among the Cambridge School—let alone instigate public debate on the merits of his methodology. Only since 2014 it seems, due to a handful of Iranian professors and intellectuals, has the School gained noticeable currency in Iran, resulting in debates on how methodologies developed for a canonized ‘Western’ narrative might be relevant to Iranian history. In May 2016 the humanities journal Farhang Emrooz published a series of articles exploring the relationship between the ‘Gangs of the Cambridge School’ and Iranian intellectual history. Neither the first nor only exploration of this relationship, this series not only constitutes what appears to be the most sophisticated exploration of this relationship to date, but also excavates, as Professor Hatem Qaderi argues, a shared historical perspective found in England and Iran, most apparent in the conservative currents of thought in both countries (which are not always aligned with conservative political parties). This paper undertakes a comparative view of the conservatism referenced by Qaderi—as well as other authors in Farhang Emrooz’s series—and that of Richard Bourke’s English conservatism, also examined in Farhang Emrooz, to ascertain the appeal and re-reading of conservatism in Iran’s contemporary intellectual context. The Cambridge School’s Iranian appeal, this paper argues, lies in its perceived role as an alternative to methods that favor political orientations. Indeed, such conservatism is marked not by a global return to but a break with the past, occasioned in the twentieth and twenty first centuries by European instability and post-modernist thought on the one hand and, on the other, by the attraction of some Iranian intellectuals to intellectual history, which, according to Anthony Grafton, is opposed to leftist or Marxist methodologies employed by social history.