Hart on Cowling

In the December 2003 issue of First Things , David B. Hart has an interesting review of the work of Maurice Cowling. Cowling, as hard right as they come in Britain, is also a Christian historian, whose magnum opus traces the decay of Christian culture in Britain. Interestingly, Hart points out that his sympathies are sometimes with people on the other end of the political spectrum: “When at the end of his history, he lists the figures he has discussed for whom ‘the reading will detect anything resembling sympathy,’ he does not simply name fellow conservatives. He mentions, for instance, the resolutely socialist theologian John Milbank became Milbank is so blithely uncompromising an enemy of modernity, as unwilling as Cowling to grant secularity any of the intellectual, moral, or historical claims it makes for itself. At the same time Roger Scruton, whom an inattentive reader might expect to appear in the same company, is excluded from it, and is treated earlier in the text as, in some sense, an accomplice of that ‘post-Christian consensus’ upon which Cowling’s trilogy pronounces so damning a verdict.”