Peterhouse school of history

The Peterhouse school of history was named after the Cambridge college of the same name where the history taught concentrated on 'high politics'. That is, the study of 'fifty or sixty politicians in conscious tension with one another', in the words of Maurice Cowling, the most prominent member of the Peterhouse school.

Historians generally considered to be part of the Peterhouse school are Michael Bentley, Alistair B. Cooke, Maurice Cowling, Edward Norman and John Vincent. Although some are no longer at Peterhouse and Cowling himself was not comfortable with the label (preferring 'Peterhouse Right') these historians, Cowling stated, also

The Peterhouse school see politicians making policy decisions with self-interest their primary goal, and ideological principles acting as a kind of smoke screen to cover their true intentions or held because they are politically convenient at the time. Peterhouse historians reject biography as it, Cowling argues, 'abstracts a man whose public action should not be abstracted' because politicians' actions cannot be properly understood in isolation but only by their interaction with fellow politicians. Cowling also claimed that the Peterhouse school treated Parliament as an instrument of class warfare and that it borrowed from "The Spectator's" political columnist Henry Fairlie and Robert Blake's central chapters of his "The Unknown Prime Minister" the realisation of parliamentary politics as 'a spectacle of ambition and manoeuvre'. [Ibid, p. xvi.]

Maurice Cowling believed that the term had been coined by Professor Joseph Lee of Cork University. In Cowling's own words:

Notes

External links

* [https://www.nybooks.com/articles/5149 New York Review of Books]
* [http://www.electric-review.com/archives/000024.html Electric Review]