Volume 2, Number 1 · February 20, 1964
The Enigma of J. S. Mill
By Gertrude Himmelfarb
The Nature and Limits of Political Science
by Maurice Cowling
Cambridge, 214 pp., $4.75
Mill and Liberalism
by Maurice Cowling
Cambridge, 161 pp., $5.00
The Earlier Letters of John Stuart Mill, 1812-1848
edited by Francis E. Mineka
Toronto, 784, (2 vols.) pp., $20.00
Among the epigraphs prefacing The Nature and Limits of Political Science is Cardinal Newman's famous definition of liberalism: 'By liberalism I mean…the exercise of thought upon matter, in which from the constitution of the human mind, thought cannot be brought to any successful issue and is therefore out of place.' Maurice Cowling, in his extremely contentious book, convicts political science, as well as contemporary politics, of this liberal heresy. The proper mode of political science, he insists, is contemplative rather than practical, metaphysical rather than ethical; but the prevailing mode he finds to be practical and ethical. Political scientists have been unable to resist the illicit 'exercise of thought,' the illusion that what they have to say matters in the world of affairs.
Review, 2291 words
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