The Nature and Limits of Political Science

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.