This book suggests ways in which political studies can be rescued from the confusion into which they have fallen in England in the last sixty years and indicates the turns they should take if the gains which have been made in the past ten years are to be extended into the future.

In Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England, Maurice Cowling defines the principles according to which the intellectual history of modern England should be written and argue that the history of Christianity is of primary importance. In this volume, which is self-contained, he makes a further contribution to understanding the role which Christianity has played in modern English thought. There are critical accounts of the thought of Toynbee, T. S. Eliot, Collingwood, Butterfield, Oakeshott, David Knowles, Evelyn Waugh and Churchill. It also contains less extended accounts of the thought of A. N. Whitehead, of Enoch Powell Minister. The book is given coherence by the connected ideas of the ubiquity of religion, of literature as an instrument of religious indoctrination, and of the intimacy of the connections between the political, philosophical, literary and religious assumptions that are to be found among the leaders of the English intelligentsia.

The Nature and Limits of Political Science was Maurice Cowling's first book, originally published in 1963. In the author's words, 'it is designed to suggest ways in which political studies can be rescued from the confusion into which they have fallen in England in the last sixty years and to indicate the turns they should take if the gains which have been made in the last ten years are to be extended into the future'. It manifests the mixture of wit, candour, ironic polemic, suspicion of liberal cant and rigour of thought that was to be characteristic of all of Cowling's subsequent work, and provides a fascinating and critical overview of the study of political subjects within English universities in the mid-twentieth-century, and the strengths and weaknesses of certain patterns of thinking. It is informed by the belief that an essential preliminary to serious political explanation is to abandon the belief that those who write but do not rule would be rather better at ruling (if they had the chance) than those who do. It is about as far removed from the orthodoxies of much contemporary political science as it is possible to be.

The passage of the Reform Bill of 1867 is one of the major problems in nineteenth-century British history. Mr Cowling provides a full-scale explanation, based on a wide range of archive material, including four major manuscript collections not previously used. Mr Cowling pays equal attention to the view taken by Parliament of the class structure and to the ambitions and strategies of politicians in Parliament and outside. He sets this detailed historical narrative in an analytical framework, the assumptions of which he discusses at length.

In his book, Mr Cowling describes the relationship between British party politics and the conduct of British foreign policy between Hitler's arrival in office in 1933 and Chamberlain's resignation in May 1940. He sets British policy in the context of European, Imperial, League, national and isolational sentiments and takes account of the strategic and financial limitations within which decisions were made. He shows how far prime ministers, foreign secretaries and the cabinet responded to parliamentary criticism, and argues that, from mid 1936 onwards, foreign policy and the prospects of the party system were so intimately connected that neither can be understood in isolation from the other.

Modern British politics begins with the Labour victory at the Spen Valley by-election in early 1920. In the next four years, the challenge presented by its arrival as a major electoral force enabled the Conservative leaders to destroy the Coalition, the Liberal Party, and Lloyd George, to triumph as guardians of the social order under Baldwin at the General Election of 1924 and to establish the Labour-Conservative polarisation in the form which has persisted since. This conclusion emerges from Mr Cowling's detailed study of the high politics of these years, in which the various attempts to end and replace the Coalition are shown to have hinged on 'resistance to socialism'. This book is primarily an account of the initiatives of politicians and their reactions to one another. Mr Cowling's book is unique in the sources used; it is also the only study of this period to examine all three political parties in detail.

The third and concluding volume of Maurice Cowling's magisterial sequence examines three related strands of English thought - latitudinarianism, the Christian thought which has assumed that latitudinarianism gives away too much, and the post-Christian thought which has assumed that Christianity is irrelevant or anachronistic. As in previous volumes, Maurice Cowling conducts his argument through a series of encounters with individual thinkers, including Burke, Disraeli, the Arnolds, Tennyson and Tawney in the first half, and Darwin, Keynes, Orwell, Leavis and Berlin in the second. Central to the whole is Mr Cowling's contention that the modern mind cannot escape from religion. Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England represents a massive contribution to the intellectual and cultural history of modern England, of interest to historians, literary and cultural critics, theologians, philosophers, economists, as well as to that broader reading public with a serious interest in the making of the English mental landscape.

In Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England, Maurice Cowling defines the principles according to which the intellectual history of modern England should be written and argue that the history of Christianity is of primary importance. In this volume, which is self-contained, he makes a further contribution to understanding the role which Christianity has played in modern English thought. There are critical accounts of the thought of Toynbee, T. S. Eliot, Collingwood, Butterfield, Oakeshott, David Knowles, Evelyn Waugh and Churchill. It also contains less extended accounts of the thought of A. N. Whitehead, of Enoch Powell Minister. The book is given coherence by the connected ideas of the ubiquity of religion, of literature as an instrument of religious indoctrination, and of the intimacy of the connections between the political, philosophical, literary and religious assumptions that are to be found among the leaders of the English intelligentsia.

In Volume 1 of Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England, Maurice Cowling defined the principles according to which the intellectual history of modern England should be written and argued that the history of Christianity was of primary importance. In this volume, which is self-contained, he makes a further contribution to understanding the role which Christianity has played in modern English thought. The book is unusual in its concentration on argument. Cowling relates Christian argument to secular argument and secular argument to Christian argument, discussing Tractarianism and Ultramontanism in the context of secular humanism and pessimistic illusionlessness, and vice versa. The roles of science and history are discussed. The book is given coherence by the connected ideas of the ubiquity of religion, of literature as an instrument of religious indoctrination, and of the intimacy of the connections between the political, philosophical, literary and religious assumptions that are to be found among the leaders of the English intelligentsia.

Mill and Liberalism was first published in 1963. Initial reactions varied from the uncomprehending to the splenetic. In the intervening quarter-century the intellectual climate has changed as reflected by its greatest exemplar, to warrant fresh consideration. Unlike many commentators, before or subsequently, Maurice Cowling endeavours to view Mill's thought as a coherent whole with a specific proselytising purpose, geared to the emasculation of Christianity and its replacement by a libertarian public doctrine. This interpretation aroused much contemporary hostility, and in a new introduction Cowling locates Mill and Liberalism within the broader intellectual history of post-war Britain, looking at the various strands of the 'new Right' and relating the academic to more specifically journalistic or political manifestations.

A two volume work on the history of the national consciousness of England since 1840. Analyzes the ideas of the most influential thinkers of the last century and a half who have shaped the framework of thought accepted by those involved in public action.

The concluding volume of Maurice Cowling's magisterial sequence examines three related strands of thought--latitudinarianism, the Christian thought that has assumed that latitudinarianism gives away too much, and the post-Christian thought that has assumed that Christianity is irrelevant or anachronistic. Cowling conducts his argument through a series of encounters with individual thinkers, including Burke, Disraeli, the Arnolds, and Tennyson in the first half, and Darwin, Keynes, Orwell and Leavis in the second.