(Why) Should Churchill’s ‘Marlborough’ Be “Required Reading” for Political Scientists?

• In Event: Strauss, Arendt, Churchill, and Liberalism

Abstract

Leo Strauss famously praised Winston S. Churchill’s ‘Marlborough: His Life and Times’ as “the greatest historical work written in our century” and suggested it “should be required reading for every student of political science.” This paper investigates the meaning and validity of Strauss’s bold claim through a political-philosophical reading of the first chapter, “Ashe House (1644-1661).”

Traditionally viewed as a panegyric, military historiography, or case study in statecraft, ‘Marlborough’ is reinterpreted here as a historical-political parable of profound political-philosophical depth. The chapter juxtaposes John Churchill’s royalist father and republican grandmother, figures who personify early modern antecedents to conservatism and progressivism. In this narrative regime analysis, Churchill critiques the materialism of liberalism and the ancestralism of monarchy while pointing toward an emerging constitutional synthesis—a ‘royal republic,’ akin to Aristotle’s ‘mixed regime.’ He illustrates how the interplay between sub-political institutions (like the family and the gentry) and supra-political forces (such as the rule of law and patriotism) made this compromise, embodied by John, possible and sustainable.

‘Marlborough’ emerges from this study as an underrated contribution to 20th-century political thought. Read through a Straussian lens, this work on late-Stuart history stands out as a modern exemplar of Thucydidean ‘philosophic history;’ correspondingly, it falls into the classical tradition of the ‘common sense approach’ to political science. Ultimately, the proposed reading of Marlborough invites a reappraisal of both Leo Strauss and Winston S. Churchill: the former’s political orientation appears more liberal than often assumed, and the latter’s political thought more sophisticated than commonly recognized.

Author

• Andreas Wendlberger, Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany