I suspect that F. H. Bradley is more important in the history of philosophy than it might appear.
Bradley hovers in the background of all of that first generation of Analytic philosophers. Officially, of course, they rejected Bradley, and Bradley's quasi-Hegelianism. A.J. Ayer was particularly vicious towards him. (Was Bradley really a Hegelian? I'd say it's debatable at best. Ultimately, personally, I would say, no - Bradley's idealism was quite different from Hegel's - maybe even, in some ways, superior to it. But I'm willing to listen to opposing views on this point.)
But Bradley is there, lurking, almost as a kind of unconscious for the Analytics. Russell, of course, openly admitted his intellectual debt to Bradley. I see Bradley's influence even more acutely in Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein's entire oeuvre looks to me like the return of the repressed. From his early philosophy to his late philosophy, I see a gradual revival of Bradleyan ideas. When Wittgenstein writes "Not how the world is is the mystical, but that it is," this strikes me as a very Bradleyan sentiment. "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence." What Wittgenstein is passing over in silence is Bradleyan mysticism. And what kind of mysticism is this?
Bradleyan mysticism is a mysticism of everydayness. For him, our everyday conceptions of reality contain contradictions that inevitably reveal themselves when we try to think out their consequences. I think this can be thought in tandem with a kind of metaphysical non-dualism almost reminiscent of certain Eastern traditions. Many people often think about mysticism in terms of the ecstatic experience - only for a certain elect of people, and even for those members of the elect, transcendental, but only momentary, ultimately inevitably degrading back into the mundane, the base, etc.. For Bradley and the unrecognized tradition that he brought about, on the other hand, a mysticism that still frames reality into a binary opposition between the privileged moments of the mystics and the grubby world of everybody else has not yet worked through all of its dualistic conceptions. Thus, for Bradley, rightly conceived, the everyday is the mystical. So much so that to put the word "mystical" on the experience is already to fall into a dualistic error. Indeed, it may be impossible to put into words, and that is why we must pass it over in silence. We cannot "speak" about it, we may only "show" it - through poetry, perhaps, as T. S. Eliot did.
Something similar was happening across the channel, in France: a revival of interest in the everyday, la Quotidienne. French historians became interested in "everyday life" among the Romans, the Greeks, various ancient people - not just the events that are considered "historical". Eventually, you get Henri Lefebvre's Critique of Everyday Life, and then Raoul Vaneigem's Revolution of Everyday Life. Derrideans, too, learned to deconstruct binary oppositions, dualities, any notion of a privileged access to reality, a transcendental signified. Even in Lacan's conception of the Real I see an echo of Bradley's (non?-)mystical monism.
I could go on and on. The underground current of Bradleyan everydayness spreads everywhere, if you have eyes to see it.
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