Adrian Wooldridge: Can Liberalism Save Itself?

Thomas Small (0:06)

Liberalism For centuries, liberalism promised to liberate the individual from inherited hierarchies, to restrain the abuse of power, and to create a society in which disagreement could flourish without descending into violence.

But today, the liberal order is under pressure. From populism, identity politics, economic disruption, and a growing sense that freedom itself has become unmoored from responsibility. So did the creed that helped make the modern West possible, ultimately contain the seeds of its own undoing? Adrian Wooldridge is a distinguished journalist who spent more than three decades at The Economist and now writes for Bloomberg. In his new book, Centrists of the World Unite, he argues that liberalism's virtues can survive, but only by rediscovering its deeper traditions of individual self-government, moral formation, and elites formed by an ethic of cultural excellence. So, can liberalism reform itself? And can it do so without recovering the Christian civilization from which so many of its virtues emerged? I'm Thomas Small. This is my Conflicted Conversation with Adrian Wooldridge.

Hello Adrian, my goodness, what an honor it is to meet you. Thank you so much for coming on Conflicted.

Adrian Wooldridge (1:45)

You're extremely kind. It's great to be here.

Thomas Small (1:47)

Adrian, you are a tremendously distinguished journalist. You worked for The Economist for 32 years. You wrote its Lexington column on America, its Schumpeter column on capitalism, and its Badget column on Britain, which you began just as the Brexit crisis broke out, and Brexit was not something The Economist thought much of. So what a time to write that column. You've also published oodles of books on lots and lots of subjects. You're now at Bloomberg. Just a huge career. The idea of a conversation with you is rather daunting, I must admit.

Adrian Wooldridge (2:23)

You're very flattering.

Thomas Small (2:25)

Your new book Centrists of the World Unite is a sort of summation, I think, of your whole career and of your life as an intellectual. Its subtitle is The Lost Genius of Liberalism.

Adrian, what is The Lost Genius of Liberalism?

Adrian Wooldridge (2:44)

Liberalism now means to people two sorts of things. To people on the left, liberalism means being kind to people, being generous, being nice. That's left liberalism, being tolerant and all of those things. To people on the right, liberalism means essentially shrinking the state, having a free market, letting business do its own thing.

I think those two definitions of liberalism have become problematic or have become constricting in certain very important ways. Why I'm talking about the lost genius of liberalism is to say that we need to go back over the history of liberalism and discover its much richer history than is summarized in those two manifestations of liberalism. Much richer in two ways. Firstly, because I think the essence of liberalism doesn't lie in either the free market or in infinite tolerance and secondly, because I think the essence of liberalism or the manifestations of liberalism shift in significant ways that liberalism is a solution to problems, not something that's fixed and many contemporary people who regard themselves as liberals are forgetting to change what they believe in the light of new problems.

Thomas Small (4:05)

That's very interesting. Now here on Conflicted, and we've been going for about eight years, I think at times people listening to us, and we focus mainly on geopolitics, on Middle Eastern history, and all of that. But we try, at the moment especially, to document our changing world order. Sometimes it seems like the collapse of our world order frankly. But people listening to us over those eight years would probably pigeonhole us into the post-liberal space, a sense following Brexit and Trump and all of that, that neoliberalism or liberalism had failed or wasn't enough. So that's the furrow that we've been plowing. And so your book was, in many ways, challenging, certainly thought-provoking. You write in it that liberalism is first and foremost, a response to the transition from a largely static world to a progressively mobile one.

And by that largely static world, you mean the pre-modern world.

So first, was the world before modernity really static, or is that actually a liberal or liberalist caricature? Then second, if the world became more mobile in the modern era, and I think that's undoubtedly so, what caused that, if not liberalism itself? Because often the genealogy of liberalism stretches back to Renaissance humanism, as far back as that, so that modernity itself is seen as liberal, but of course that can't be true as you make clear in the book. So what is modernity as a concept? And how does it differ from liberalism as a concept since you say liberalism is a response to modernity?