Maurice Cowling
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Maurice John Cowling (September 6, 1926 – August 24, 2005) was a British historian and a Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge.
Cowling was born in Norwood, South London to a lower middle-class family. His family then moved to Streatham where Cowling attended an LCC elementary school and from 1937 the Battersea Grammar School. When the Second World War started in 1939 the school moved to Worthing and then from 1940 to Hertford where Cowling attended sixth-form.
Cowling won a scholarship to Jesus College, Cambridge in 1943. He took preliminary examinations in June 1944 but was called up for military service in September 1944, where he joined the Queen's Royal Regiment. In 1945, after training and serving in a holding battalion, he was sent to Bangalore as an officer-cadet.
In 1946 Cowling was attached to the Kumaon regiment and the next year-and-a-half he travelled to Agra, Razmak on the North-West Frontier and Assam. As independence for India neared in 1947, Cowling was dispatched to Egypt as a camp adjutant to the British HQ there. Cowling was then promoted to captain in Libya. By the end of 1947 Cowling was finally demobilised and in 1948 he went back to Jesus College to complete his Historical Tripos, where he got a Double First.
In 1954 Cowling worked at the British Foreign Office for six months at the Jordan department and in early 1955, The Times gave him the job of foreign leader-writer which he held for three years. He stood unsuccessfully for the parliamentary seat of Bassetlaw during the General Election of 1959.
In 1961 Cowling was elected a Fellow of Jesus College and Director of Studies in Economics, shortly before the History Faculty appointed him to an Assistant Lectureship. During six weeks of the summer of 1962 Cowling wrote Mill and Liberalism, which became one of his best known books and was reprinted in 1990 with a new Preface. During this time he was elected to Peterhouse, Cambridge where he advised his students to tackle liberals with "irony, geniality and malice".
He was appointed the literary editor of The Spectator for a year in 1970 and in the early 1970s wrote articles of a broadly Powellite nature arguing against the UK being a member of the EEC. In 1978 he ceased to be Director of Studies in Peterhouse and in the same year published Conservative Essays where he said:
"If there is a class war - and there is - it is important that it should be handled with subtlety and skill. ... it is not freedom that Conservatives want; what they want is the sort of freedom that will maintain existing inequalities or restore lost ones."
In Cowling's political history books he developed what became known as "high politics" and was the leader of the Peterhouse school of history. This meant political events were interpreted through the study of around 40 eminent persons such as politicians, civil servants and servicemen who played a role in government. Class struggle is a running theme throughout the three political books. In Cowling's The Impact of Hitler, for example, party conflict is to Cowling class conflict with the Labour party the party of change and the Conservatives the party of resistance to change and socialism while being dedicated to preserving the existing social order.
Cowling was by his own admission an 'isolationist imperialist' who thought that Britain was wrong to go to war with Germany in 1939 as he viewed it as a liberal war driven by moral indignation which Britain could not afford to wage and which resulted in a Labour landslide and a greatly expanded welfare state along with the liquidation of the British Empire.
Books
- The Nature and Limits of Political Science by Maurice Cowling (Cambridge, 1963)
- Mill and Liberalism by Maurice Cowling (Cambridge, 1963)
- 1867: Disraeli, Gladstone and Revolution by Maurice Cowling (Cambridge, 1967)
- Selected Writings of John Stuart Mill edited by Maurice Cowling (New American Library, 1968)
- The Impact of Labour 1920-1924. The Beginning of Modern British Politics by Maurice Cowling (Cambridge, 1971)
- The Impact of Hitler. British Politics and British Policy 1933-40. by Maurice Cowling (Cambridge, 1975)
- Conservative Essays edited by Maurice Cowling (Cassell, 1978)
- Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England Volume I by Maurice Cowling (Cambridge, 1980)
- Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England. Volume II: Assaults by Maurice Cowling (Cambridge, 1985)
- Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England. Volume III: Accommodations by Maurice Cowling (Cambridge, 2001)
