Maurice Cowling

Maurice Cowling

Maurice John Cowling (6 September 1926 - 24 August 2005) was a Conservative historian based at Peterhouse, Cambridge. Referred to by The Times as 'a scourge of the liberal intelligentsia' he was an outspoken critic of social democracy and liberal politics in general, and although not a Thatcherite is thought to have had a considerable influence on the direction of Conservative thought in the 1970s and 1980s.

Political philosophy

In his biography of Michael Portillo, Michael Gove wrote:

Portillo's tutor, Maurice Cowling, was spare, crusty and the university's most reactionary don. Cowling and his fellow Right-winger Shirley Robin Letwin, the author of The Anatomy Of Thatcherism [and the mother of Oliver Letwin], introduced their students to a type of Conservatism at odds with the progressive drift of Edward Heath's government.

Cowling's Conservatism was broadly a belief in letting those born to rule get on with it, rather than succumbing to modish liberalism. He argued that, in politics, 'elites... should eschew guilt and self-doubt to perform the duties of their stations' and that politics itself was 'primarily a matter of rhetoric and manoeuvre' among the small group of leaders whose 'accepted authority constituted political leadership'.

Kenneth Minogue wrote of Cowling on the Social Affairs Unit blog that: ‘His main target was a kind of pious high mindedness that he detected lurking behind the dominant liberalism of political life and the deceptive pretence of impartiality in a lot of academic writing.’ Cowling himself described the ‘Peterhouse Right’ as ‘a small group of dons whose teaching and writing is about the history of politics, art thought and religion’ and who ‘share common prejudices - against the higher liberalism and all sorts of liberal rhetoric, including ecclesiastical liberal rhetoric’. According to Jonathan Parry, 'His resentment of the naïvety and power of the liberal intelligentsia was fuelled by its fervent opposition to the use of force, and its faith in the United Nations, particularly during the Suez crisis of 1956.'

Cowling was critical of the expansion of higher education in the '60s and 70s. In 1990 he wrote that:

The Peterhouse Right is mistrustful of higher education as it has developed in Britain in the last twenty-five years, believes that if higher education is to be extensive, it should educate practical capabilities, and wishes that the Robbins expansion could have been vocational and technological.

In the 1960s Cowling campaigned against plans to introduce a course in sociology at Cambridge, which he regarded as a vehicle for liberal dogma. This reflected his highly cynical view of intellectual debate which he believed simply reflected the interests of participants. William Rees-Mogg, who visited Cowling at Peterhouse in the late 1970s, writes that, ‘His central doctrine was that political philosophies are mere rhetoric, designed to advance the politician or his party towards power. He was a brilliant exponent of political philosophies, but he did not believe that they were real.’ Similarly Kenneth Minogue writes that Cowling ‘followed, to a fault, the cynical or Marxist line that utterances about the world are all "performatives" designed to play a persuasive role in argument… He was not averse to describing himself as a “Tory Marxist”.’ According to Jonathan Parry, Cowling 'prescribed an extraordinary variety of books [to his students], including much Marxist and post-modernist criticism.'

Influence

In the entry on Cowling in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Jonathan Parry writes that:

It was often stated that Cowling had a considerable influence on the direction of Conservative thought in the 1970s and 1980s, either personally or in association with academic and political co-conspirators in and beyond Peterhouse. The college was widely regarded as a conservative seminary, partly because several of Cowling's pupils went to work for the Conservative Research Department or Conservative newspapers. Cowling himself became a more active propagandist in the late 1970s, helping to found the Salisbury Group, which aimed to provide a forum for serious discussion of Conservative political philosophy, and editing the collection Conservative Essays (1978).

Peter Oborne cites disgraced Labour spindoctor Damian McBride, who studied under Cowling at Peterhouse, as an example of the historian's political influence along with Michael Gove and the Labour press officer Michael Ellam. According to his Times obituary, Cowling influenced Michael Portillo, Alistair Cooke, for many years a linchpin of the Conservative research department; Hywel Williams, an adviser to John Redwood; and David Ruffley, MP, an adviser to Kenneth Clarke. Others taught by him or influenced by his personality were Oliver Letwin, Charles Moore, Norman Stone, Niall Ferguson, Frank Johnson and Andrew Roberts.

Affiliations

• Conservative Party
• Salisbury Group
• Conservative Philosophy Group, member

Connections

• Herbert Butterfield
• Hugh Trevor-Roper
• George Gale
• Peregrine Worsthorne
• Colin Welch
• Edward Norman
• David Watkin
• Shirley Letwin
• Roger Scruton
• Alistair Cooke
• Hywel Williams
• David Ruffley
• Oliver Letwin
• Charles Moore
• Norman Stone
• Niall Ferguson
• Frank Johnson
• Andrew Roberts
• Hilton Kramer
• Roger Kimball