Lectureship. Cowling's first book was The Nature and Limits of Political Science. Influenced by Michael Oakeshott, this was an attack on political science and political philosophy as it was then taught. Cowling argued that social science's claim to have discovered how people behaved was false because politics was too complex and fluid to be rationalised by theorists and only fully intelligible to politicians. During six weeks of the summer of 1962 Cowling wrote Mill and Liberalism, which was published in 1963 and became one of his most contentious books. The book argued Mill was not as libertarian as he was traditionally portrayed, and that Mill resembled a "moral totalitarian". Dr. Roland Hall reviewed the book in Philosophical Quarterly (January 1965) and called it "dangerous and unpleasant", with Cowling later remarking that this "was what it was intended to be". In 1963 he was elected a Fellow to Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he advised his students to tackle liberals with "irony, geniality and malice". During the 1960s Cowling campaigned against a sociology course to be introduced at Cambridge, regarding it as a "vehicle for liberal dogma". In November 1966 Cowling was elected as a Conservative councillor on the Cambridgeshire and Isle of Ely County Council in a by-election, which he held until 1970. He was appointed the literary editor of The Spectator from 1970 to 1971, and in the early 1970s he wrote articles of a broadly Powellite nature arguing against the UK being a member of the EEC. Cowling resigned in 1971 when the editor acting in George Gale's absence refused to publish Cowling's protest against his publication of an article by Tony Palmer which suggested that the important question about Princess Anne was whether she was a virgin. It was on Cowling's suggestion that Paul Smith edited a collection of Lord Salisbury's articles from the Quarterly Review, published in 1972. In 1977 Margaret Thatcher visited the Cambridge Graduate Conservative Association of Peterhouse where she "cut through the compact subtlety and 'rational pessimism' of [Cowling]" and sharply retorted: "We don't want pessimists in our party". In 1978 he ceased to be Director of Studies in Peterhouse, and helped to found the Salisbury Group, a group of conservative thinkers named, on Michael Oakeshott's advice, after Lord Salisbury. In the same year Cowling published Conservative Essays where he said: Cowling was "instrumental" in getting the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lord Dacre of Glanton, from