"The real objection to Professor Gould...is more far-reaching. It is that under the banner of 'liberal values' he consecrates as desirable an anarchy of opinions which ought in no way to be desired. A society ought to have opinions about which there is no fundamental disagreement and in relation to which it is not the business of universities to adopt a liberalising or questioning attitude. If England is a liberal society in Professor Gould's sense, that ought not to be turned, as he turns it, into a matter of self-congratulation. It is a matter rather for gloom and regret that anyone as clever as he is should consecrate the unthought-out pluralism in which we live, and a matter for serious reflection that, so far as Marxists see this, they perform a valuable, destructive function to disclosing the gulf that divides the doctrinaire liberal from nearly the whole of the rest of the human race."
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Historians from EnglandAcademics from the United KingdomPeople from LondonConservative Party (UK) politicians
Original Language: English
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https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Maurice_Cowling
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Maurice Cowling
Maurice John Cowling (6 September 1926 – 25 August 2005) was a British historian and a Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge.
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