Maurice Cowling

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Maurice Cowling bigraphy, stories - Historian

Maurice Cowling : biography

September 6, 1926 – August 24, 2005

Maurice John Cowling (6 September 1926 – 24 August 2005) was a British historian and a Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge.

Life

Cowling was born in West 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.Michael Bentley, ‘Prologue: The retiring Mr Cowling’, in Bentley (ed.), Public and Private Doctrine. Essays in British History Presented to Maurice Cowling (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 3.

In 1943 Cowling won a scholarship to Jesus College, Cambridge, 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.Bentley, p. 3.

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 History Tripos, where he received a Double First.Bentley, pp. 3-4. Cowling later remembered that he fell in love with Cambridge.Naim Attallah, Singular Encounters (London: Quartet Books, 1990), p. 129. He toyed with the idea of being ordained and went to college chapel, possessing "a strong polemical Christianity". Of his religion, Cowling later claimed: "I’m not sure of the depth or reality of my religious conviction. It could well be that it was a polemical conviction against liberalism rather than a real conviction of the truth of Christianity…I suppose on a census I would describe myself as a member of the Church of England. If you ask me, do I think I ought to be an Anglican, the answer is that I probably ought to be a Roman Catholic, but I don’t see any prospect of that happening…I have a very Protestant mind".Attallah, pp. 129-131.

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. In 1957 Cowling was invited by the Director of the Conservative Political Centre to write a pamphlet on the Suez Crisis; it was never published however, as the party wanted to move on from Suez as quickly as possible. He stood unsuccessfully for the parliamentary seat of Bassetlaw during the General Election of 1959 for the Conservative Party.Bentley, p. 5. Cowling later said that "I enjoyed being a candidate, though it was very hard work and elections are like what I imagine having all your teeth out is like".Attallah, p. 134.

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. Cowling’s first book was The Nature and Limits of Political Science. Influenced by Michael Oakeshott, this was an attack on political science and political philosophy as it was then taught. Cowling argued that social science’s claim to have discovered how people behaved was false because politics was too complex and fluid to be rationalised by theorists and only fully intelligible to politicians.Jonathan Parry, ‘’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, online edn, May 2009, accessed 15 May 2010.

During six weeks of the summer of 1962 Cowling wrote Mill and Liberalism, which was published in 1963 and became one of his most contentious books.Bentley, p. 6. The book claimed Mill was not as libertarian as he was traditionally portrayed, and that Mill resembled a "moral totalitarian". Dr. Roland Hill reviewed the book in Philosophical Quarterly (January 1965) and called it "dangerous and unpleasant", with Cowling later remarking that this "was what it was intended to be".Maurice Cowling, Mill and Liberalism. Second Edition (Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. xii.