Wooldridge recounts the history of liberalism and the difficulties it has encountered in addressing contemporary problems.
Across the developed world, political parties of the center-left and center-right are losing ground to populist parties from the extremes of the ideological spectrum. In the intellectual sphere, the liberalism that historically has undergirded those parties is also losing ground to greater enthusiasm and energy around postliberal ideas, including National Conservatism and Integralism on the right as well as socialism and dogmatic identity politics on the left.
Adrian Wooldridge’s important new book, The Revolutionary Center: The Lost Genius of Liberalism is a concise history of the emergence of key liberal ideas — upholding the freedom and dignity of the individual against the claims of groups and the state, insisting upon tolerance in the realm of ideas, and setting laws and limits upon power — in the wake of the European wars of religion and the contributions of thinkers like Edmund Burke and John Stuart Mill during the 18th and 19th centuries.
Wooldridge is a British journalist who was the Economist magazine’s Washington bureau chief and is now the global business columnist for Bloomberg. Liberalism, in his view, is above all “a repository of political sense and practical problem-solving. More than any other political philosophy, liberalism created the modern world.” But he argues that contemporary liberalism has lost touch with its radical spirit by veering too closely toward technocracy, market fundamentalism, and identitarianism, while liberal leaders have become a complacent and out-of-touch establishment.
In this podcast discussion, Wooldridge recounts the history of liberalism and the difficulties it has encountered in addressing contemporary problems. He maintains that he is an optimist about liberalism’s prospects, because at various points in its history — particularly in the late 19th century and in the years following World War II — liberalism has successfully been re-envisioned and reanimated. He is confident that a new liberal blueprint can be devised, and he offers some suggestions for policies by which liberalism can address the discontents that drive populism including declining social mobility, government underperformance, and social anomie and isolation.