Cowling also argued that no one is free from assumptions and practical motives. Oakeshott's ideal type of the detached historian, in love with the past for its own sake, is just as impossible and misleading as is the Marxist aspiration to a "scientific" explanation of history's direction uniting theory and praxis. Marx might have been shrewd about the distortions of one's views in accordance with one's social position, but Marx and the Marxists needed to turn the analysis on themselves, too. One makes an existential choice of orientation and proceeds accordingly, but one should never forget that this is what one has done. There is a Socratic quality to what Cowling did (although he would not have accepted such a lofty association) in showing the weaknesses of what are taken to be strong arguments, and the strength of arguments taken by the establishment to be marginal. Cowling thought that we all have hidden agendas, himself included. He tried to make these unhidden and then overwhelm the opposition by the prodigious thoroughness of his excavations. Thus, in the first volume of Religion and Public Doctrine, he goes out of his way to unmask his own prejudices, treating, sometimes generously and sometimes not, those through whom he formed his own intellectual life. This was preparation for the broadside assault on nearly every important thinker in modern England. 

Cowling was fearful above all of self-deception. He loathed it in others and he turned this loathing on himself as well. There was in him an Augustinian sense of sin though little sense of the grace of redemption. Cowling clearly saw the importance of religion for public life, and he documented this more assiduously perhaps than any other modern historian, but he himself apparently could not make a leap of faith. The historian's task is to face the brutal actualities of life without flinching. Like Machiavelli he wished to show the "effectual truth" of things, not lingering over imaginary republics, much less the "end of history". 

Cowling had a profound sense of the evanescence of dominant perspectives. The progressive view could and will come to an end, to be supplanted by something different. The Christian perspective, as he appropriated it, could return to prominence. Secularisation is a highly misleading term. It certainly does not mean the disappearance of religiosity from the world. The decline of traditional Christianity's authority leads to the translation of the quest for religious meaning into alternative vocabularies that disguise the ever-present religious motive to find meaning. Cowling chose to document this in English history over the past two centuries, and one can easily see this in the efforts of thinkers such as Kant, Hegel, Mill and Marx to compose a story of history's direction which is fully apprehended in the study of history as unfolding progress, replacing what is alleged to be the outmoded notion of God's providential rule with a "religion of humanity". 

His attack on this 19th-century development parallels Nietzsche's assault in the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, a classic rage of disenchantment with progressive thought. But Cowling was a conservative, not a Dionysian revolutionary. Oakeshott had said that to be conservative was to enjoy the opportunities of the present moment, to be preoccupied neither with guilt for the past nor anxiety for the future. This reserve, this cultivation of detachment, was not for Cowling. He was an activist of a certain kind as Oakeshott was not. This seems paradoxical in that one lesson to be taken from Cowling's work might be to retire to the contemplative life. But this is not what he did. There is anger in his work that must in part explain his political argument and indefatigable scholarship of a sort rarely seen. Even those who detested his views had to admit that he was tireless in his research, and that he read through archives and documents in a way to rival Namier. On the other hand, there is in Cowling distance from practical politics: to the extent that liberal progressivism remains dominant in the politics of modern democratic societies — a sort of civil religion — it is hard to see a way to present Cowling's views effectively in today's practical political context. Cowling's work is essentially deconstructive. The reconstruction, whatever it may be, is for others to figure out. That does not make him any less important. On the contrary, his importance lies in the fact that he was willing fearlessly to pave the way for something new to emerge, to hint at a promised land to which he would not gain entrance.