Culture and Anarchy is one of the central texts of the western intellectual tradition and has helped to shape thinking about the tasks and requirements of culture and civil society. The book is particularly relevant now, however, because it articulates many issues about culture and cultural politics that are being intensely debated today. In the past decade, Culture and Anarchy has been the subject of discussion by both the cultural right and the cultural left, beloved by the one because it asserts the primacy of reason over the anarchy of doing as one likes, and despised by the other because...

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...

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.

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.