Maurice Cowling - The Politics of British Democracy

Cowling wrote three books on British high politics, the sequence he called The Politics of British Democracy. Cowling claimed that "In the future there will be an introduction bearing the sequence-title which will deal in its widest aspects with the period from 1850 to 1940 and will assess the methods used in the volumes which have now been published". However this never appeared. Cowling wrote a letter to The Times Literary Supplement on 3 June 1977 claiming the need for "a different emphasis" to that on high politics.

The first of these was his work on the Reform Act 1867, published during its centenary and dedicated to "the Prime Minister", Labour leader Harold Wilson. Cowling challenged the traditional liberal assumptions over the reform crisis of the 1860s by claiming that the Liberal Party was not the straightforward progressive party that wanted to hand political power to the working-class and that the Conservatives did not promote reform in reaction to working-class pressure. Cowling instead placed much more importance on parliamentary manoeuvres. Robert Blake claimed that this book "gives the most convincing account of what happened".

In 1971 appeared The Impact of Labour, which dealt with the years between 1920 when Labour won the Spen Valley by-election and 1924 when the Conservatives won the general election of that year and ended the Liberal Party as a realistic party of government, with the Labour Party emerging as the Opposition.

In 1975 appeared The Impact of Hitler, dealing with 1933 to 1940. Cowling was an "isolationist imperialist" who argued that from Britain's point-of-view the Second World War was a "liberal war which had been entered into in a condition of moral indignation without the resources to fight it" and that it had been "providential good fortune which had placed the burden of fighting on the Russians and the Americans". He disapproved of the fact that the war was followed by a Labour electoral landslide, a greatly expanded welfare state and the liquidation of the British Empire. The policy making process for Cowling is heavily influenced by party politics. Cowling was well known for his Primat der Innenpolitik ("primacy of domestic politics") explanations for British foreign policy; for example, he argued that the British “guarantee” of Poland issued on March 31, 1939 was advanced to improve the Conservatives’ chances against Labour, and had nothing to do with foreign policy considerations. Cowling's approach is the opposite of the Primat der Außenpolitik ("primacy of foreign politics") thesis.