The editors of this volume call Cowling a Christian conservative. There is something to this, of course. But it is ironic considering the current condition of the Church of England that is bent on moving further and further away from traditional Christianity, where the gospel message has been translated into millennium development goals. It would be of considerable interest, no doubt eliciting both amusement and outrage, to have Cowling's analysis of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. Is there a political party or an ecclesiastical community that could conceivably be the vehicle for Cowling's ideas? The current Conservative Party? It was sometimes suggested that the only plausible candidate might be the Roman Catholic Church. It was proposed that Cowling's natural direction should be towards Rome. He would respond to this by saying that there was something to that but it would never happen. Cowling was not the recently-beatified Cardinal Newman. 

At the same time, the editors describe him as "a Tory Marxist jester with a sharp eye for absurdities and pretensions". Both of these descriptions fit some part of what Cowling said and was. But this also reveals the difficulty of defining him. Those who wished him to be more recognisably Christian than he was were disappointed. But they should remain grateful to him for putting spiritedness back into Christian analysis and for insisting that there is a religious voice which cannot be absorbed into the mushy rhetoric of fellow-feeling and "love". This avoids reality in a way that traditional Christianity never allowed itself to do. There are today among us thinkers who have offered parallel advances in faithful scepticism (and who are both continental and Catholic): Pierre Manent in his criticism of the assumptions of the EU and Rémi Brague in his defence of the "Romanitas" of the Western tradition come to mind. Eric Voegelin in his critique of modern gnosticism offers another insightful parallel. These are political philosophers as much as intellectual historians and they broaden the context of the issues Cowling addressed to a scale the issues ultimately require, without compromising the particularities of historical experience. Cowling downplayed political philosophy in his historical analysis (not because he was unaware of it). The authors of the essays in this collection properly emphasise his contribution both to the methodology of historical study, and to the substance of modern British history, sensing, without altogether admitting, that political philosophy has a role to play in systematising what Cowling has done even as their loyalty to him makes them hesitant. James Alexander approaches this when he writes:

The assumption that God is dead is one of the most objectionable assumptions of modern, secular elites. In assuming that it is false, Cowling has dramatised more effectively, if negatively, than anyone else has the continuities that lie behind the apparent discontinuities of the last few centuries; and in doing so he has sketched the elements of a philosophy of history that restores difficulty where others have judged — wrongly — that difficulty is now something of the past, only of concern to historians.

The negativity of Cowling, Alexander says, must be rendered positive but that was not for Cowling to have done. Whether he would have accepted the idea of a "philosophy of history" is an open question. The modern intellectual problem is precisely with "philosophies of history" which obscure the realities of the human condition as revealed in the basic experiences of human beings which precede philosophising. This surely is Cowling's point. Cowling as an historian would only reluctantly, if at all, ascend from the details to generalisations. Moreover, once a tradition becomes self-consciously reflective in having to defend itself, it can hardly avoid translating its meaning into principles, propositions and catechisms, into arguments over the correct philosophy of history. This is what Cowling realised when he insisted that everything is argument under our circumstances. Nothing is taken for granted. He might lament this, but he did not find a way out of it and, in the end, he accepted the ground rules of discourse in our time, albeit far more honestly and aggressively than most. To prescind from modern atheism may be to anticipate a post-secular world, but it is not clear what kind of world post-secularity entails, much less whether a return to the faith of a more innocent age is possible.