Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. He is the author or co-author of 12 books, including Centrists of the World Unite: The Lost Genius of Liberalism.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Adrian Wooldridge discuss how liberalism emerged as a solution to concrete historical problems, why the fundamental challenges liberalism addressed in the 17th and 18th centuries have returned in new forms today, and what lessons the origins of liberalism offer for defending it against contemporary threats.
We’re delighted to feature this conversation as part of our series on Liberal Virtues and Values.
That liberalism is under threat is now a cliché—yet this has done nothing to stem the global resurgence of illiberalism. Part of the problem is that liberalism is often considered too “thin” to win over the allegiance of citizens, and that liberals are too afraid of speaking in moral terms. Liberalism’s opponents, by contrast, speak to people’s passions and deepest moral sentiments.
This series, made possible with the generous support of the John Templeton Foundation, aims to change that narrative. In podcast conversations and long-form pieces, we feature content making the case that liberalism has its own distinctive set of virtues and values that are capable not only of responding to the dissatisfaction that drives authoritarianism, but also of restoring faith in liberalism as an ideology worth believing in—and defending—on its own terms.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: We have both been thinking for a good while about the travails of liberalism. We have both written books that are entrants into the genre of how to understand the roots of its troubles and how to imagine a rejuvenation of liberalism. Tell us about this political moment. What is it teaching us about the nature and the roots of liberalism?
Adrian Wooldridge: I started writing my book, Centrists of the World Unite: The Lost Genius of Liberalism, about four years ago because I was very worried about the state of liberalism. As I wrote it, things got worse; throughout the entire period of writing this book, things got worse. It is appearing just at the moment that the Middle East is in flames.
I also noticed as I was writing the book that quite a lot of other people were writing about liberalism as well—that liberalism had suddenly become a really big intellectual topic. It was not a topic of ratiocination by academics playing games with Rawls’s “original position” and things like that, but a really urgent issue because people are worried that the liberal order is fading and failing to deal with the problems we have at hand.
I think that is exactly what is happening at the moment. That sense of crisis, that sense of urgency, and that need to reconfigure and ask the question—what is liberalism and how can it be revived for the particular set of circumstances we face at the moment?—is more urgent than ever.
Mounk: In a way, what you do in your book is to go back to the origins and say: what is it that liberalism actually had to offer the modern world? How is it that it dealt with previous periods of crises? Liberalism—as I have remarked repeatedly on this podcast—has gone through very serious crises in the past and it was able to adapt to by, in some ways, reinventing itself.
How did it get into the current crisis? What set of factors have led to the weakness of liberalism at the moment?
There is a lot of instinctive anti-liberalism today; I think a lot of people just blame liberalism for everything that is wrong in the world. Going back to the origins of the modern world, how has liberalism helped to create the world we have today? How is it that it helped solve a bunch of deep problems we had?
Wooldridge: Well, there is a fundamental question here: what is liberalism? That is a question which philosophers and academics love to debate. I think what has got lost in a lot of these very abstract debates is the fact that liberalism is a set of solutions to a set of concrete, real-world problems. Those solutions change over time; they vary in time. They do not vary infinitely; there is an essence of liberalism which we have to pay attention to.
Liberalism comes into the world in the, let’s say, 17th and 18th centuries as a set of solutions to the following problems. One is the problem of collective identity. People were supposed to inherit their identity; people in traditional feudal society inherited their identities. The second is the problem of collective beliefs. People in pre-modern, pre-liberal societies were supposed to have a certain set of fixed beliefs. They belonged to confessional states and they were supposed to agree with those confessional states about fundamental things to do with the meaning of life. The third thing was economic growth. People in traditional societies lived in fairly static times. Most of human history has been fairly static. You would have one or two percent growth over a century—not 10% growth over a year as you get in some very fortunate countries today.
What you get in the late 18th century—let us say with the American Revolution or at the time of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations—is the emergence of a world that is mobile. People are moving; they are moving geographically and they are moving socially, up and down the social scale. They are moving so much that people begin to realize that mobility, or motion, is the essence of society.
With individuals no longer anchored in place and in social roles in the way they had been up until then, people began to ask questions. What are the fundamental constituents of society? What should we believe? Where should we get our beliefs from? How should politics be organized? Liberals come along and say society should be based on the rights and abilities of individuals. Belief systems should not be dictated by the powerful; they should not be dictated by churches. Power is something that we need to share. It should not belong to despots; it needs to be shared out. Liberalism comes along as a solution to the problem of collective beliefs, social stability versus social mobility, and the problem ultimately of power—where it comes from and how we should allocate it. That is where liberalism starts.
Mounk: Make the case for that set of things, to begin with, in that time. Why is it that that combination of things proves to have such durable appeal? Why is it that as we are looking at the problems we face today in the 21st century—with the challenge from dictators, with the rise of populism within our societies, with technological changes from the internet and social media to artificial intelligence—why should we be looking back at that particular package of pragmatic inventions and solutions devised to meet the challenges of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries?
Wooldridge: Let us say that these solutions were not without their own problems, not without bloodshed. You had the American Revolution, which is in many ways a successful solution to that problem. You divide power, you allocate rights to individuals, you constrain the power of the state, and you introduce a secular state—a wall of separation between church and state.
In the French Revolution, which was also grappling with similar problems and advancing according to similar premises about the rights of individuals, you have a very bloody solution.
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I start this book by talking about Erasmus as a sort of proto-liberal because he is trying to grapple with this idea of religious certainty and the way that religious certainty leads to persecution. Why are these insights or these arguments relevant today?
Strangely, they are more relevant today than they have been for a long time because we have the return of the notion of collective beliefs—the idea that we can just shout down people who do not agree with us, which we see in universities and on the identitarian left. We see the return of religious intolerance. You obviously have confessional states in Iran and other parts of the Middle East, but we also have communities within the West that are religiously intolerant, where if you question religious beliefs, you should be canceled. We have a teacher in the UK who has been in hiding for years because he tried to teach something about the Quran which the local community took exception to.
Regarding the issue of the division of powers and the constraint of power—which was central to liberalism—we again have the rise of strongmen. We have President Trump in the United States saying the only limit he is willing to admit to what he is going to do is his own conscience, his own set of beliefs; that might be exactly the sort of thing that Louis XVI might say. All of these issues are enormously relevant and important now.
There has been a period when people thought that the debate about liberalism was all about the relative balance of the state and the market. I do not think that is as central to liberalism as Hayekians, libertarians, or neoliberals would argue. The fight for limiting power, ensuring tolerance, ensuring open debate, and doing away with collectivist, identitarian modes of thinking are much more important to the liberal mission.
Mounk: Just a few thoughts on this. One is that in some ways, the historical forces which made this question about how to deal with genuine diversity of religious beliefs and ethnic identities very relevant in the period of the emergence of liberalism were somewhat less relevant for parts of the post-World War II history of liberal states. But now they are much more relevant again.
That is basically because when these states were emerging, they were, on one very important dimension, extremely diverse. Even though they may have all been white or had the same ethnicity, you had Catholics and Protestants, or various kinds of Protestant sects in some places, competing for political power and influence in a framework which originally said that one of these sects has to be primary and everyone else has to submit to that. That made for very high stakes for those differences.
Certainly in Europe, and in some ways in the United States for different reasons, the post-World War II period was actually quite homogeneous. It was homogeneous in Europe as a result of the ethnic cleansing of the first half of the 20th century, which created in many places societies that were much more ethnically and religiously homogeneous than they were before. At the same time, religious distinctions like that between Catholics and Protestants mattered less because the continent had secularized in various ways.
In America, which of course was more ethnically and religiously diverse, there had been a real lull in immigration throughout that period. This led to a much more homogeneous culture than America had either before the 1910s or after the period of mass migration that you got in North America and a little bit later in Western Europe—starting in the 60s and 70s, but really only gathering force in such a way that it became a principal political question a little bit later.
You joked about too much liberalism being the domain of interpretation of Rawls. I agree with you that a lot of the questions we are asking about are in some ways broader and more important than the work of John Rawls, but I think there is also an interesting shift within his work which Joseph Heath, for example, has talked about interestingly in the pages of Persuasion recently.
A Theory of Justice, his most famous work, is really about what the right principle of distribution is. It is all about those economic questions and claiming to have one kind of hegemonic answer: “I have found the right principle of distribution and you should all get on the same page.” Then he realizes that liberal societies and contemporary societies are sufficiently diverse and variegated that you are not going to be able to get agreement about that. Just as the brilliant philosophers of the past were not able to persuade all of their contemporaries of their particular positions, John Rawls was not going to be able to persuade all of his contemporaries of the great wisdom of the “difference principle,” his particular distributive principle.
He has a real shift in how he talks about things when he writes Political Liberalism, which is all about how we manage the fact of “reasonable pluralism” in society—the fact that reasonable, well-meaning, intelligent people are going to come to very different beliefs about what the most meaningful way of leading a life is. What can we say about building a society that is able to accommodate all of that diversity without opening the gates to the illiberals who want to destroy it?
Wooldridge: Absolutely. I joked a little bit about John Rawls, but I am not really joking about John Rawls so much as the “John Rawls industry.” I remember when I was an undergraduate at Oxford in the late 1970s and lots of my friends were doing PPE—Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. They all read John Rawls; they all read A Theory of Justice; they all endlessly debated it. Liberalism became all about a sort of procedural game—a game about discussing distribution.
Some of the bigger issues of liberal society were ignored, and most of all, the issue that was ignored was the clash of values and fundamental beliefs—the fact that people disagree about very, very fundamental things. This was because society at that point was very, very homogeneous.
You were talking about religion. What happens with religion is two things. One is secularization—people do not believe it that much. The second is privatization—people retreat into the private sphere. Consequently, religion does not really engage in politics that much, and everybody agrees that politics needs to be discussed in secular terms. The sort of religion that survives tends to be—what was it somebody said about Unitarianism? That Unitarians believe in one God, if that. That sort of thing triumphs.
Mounk: The other thing that I love and respect—to cite the culture of your country, Adrian—is in Yes, Prime Minister. The Prime Minister, as is the duty of an office holder, or at least was, has to appoint a bishop. Sir Humphrey, the civil servant, tells him, “You do not want to appoint this bishop, Prime Minister. He is a theological radical.” The Prime Minister asks, “What do you mean? He believes that God created the earth in six days, evolution is false—that kind of thing?” Humphrey says, “No, no, no, nothing as crazy as that. He believes in God.”
Wooldridge: It is very good; I had forgotten that. It is such a wonderful resource. With the dawn of the 21st century, particularly with September 11, religion returns in a very fundamental way. Religion returns as a “hard” religion that people are willing to die for, and it returns because it needs to speak and act in the public sphere.
Now we have a return to these fundamental liberal problems. How do we live together when we disagree about fundamental things? That is particularly important in pluralistic societies because, in the simplest terms, we have had a huge injection of Muslim populations into Europe particularly, but also to some extent in the United States. There is a clash of faiths going on which, in many ways, re-echoes the clash of faiths between Protestants and Catholics in the era when liberalism was first formed.
In my book, I talk about the Salman Rushdie affair. The Salman Rushdie affair is a sort of pre-modern thing; people are burning books because they regard those books as sacrilegious and blasphemous. This is exactly the sort of thing that happened in the 17th century and exactly the sort of thing that upset the great philosophers of liberalism. The liberal solution to this is that you dial politics down, you lower the temperature of politics, and you say that we must agree to disagree about fundamental things. We must put limits on the power of believers to impose their beliefs on other people. We must create, if not an entirely neutral public sphere, a public sphere where we can engage in conversation.
So, that is one fundamental way. What we have argued so far is that liberalism arrives in the world as a solution to some very pressing, urgent problems. Many of these urgent problems have revived and returned. One of the interesting things about liberalism is the way it reconstitutes itself over time. I am emphasizing this because I think we need to engage in another important process of rethinking, rearticulating, and reconfiguring liberalism now.
What you get at the end of the 19th century—we started talking about the 19th century—is the way liberalism has difficulty being born. The American Revolution was largely a successful revolution; the French Revolution was largely a failed revolution. England is a strange case because you preserve an official church, but it is basically a liberal regime that you create. By the end of the 19th century, you have, particularly in Britain, a regime of laissez-faire liberalism in which liberals have agreed to establish a free-market economy. They have agreed to dial down politics so they are no longer burning each other, and they are trying to create a reasonable degree of tolerance.
Then, at the end of the 19th century, many people came along and said, as they are saying today, that liberalism is a dead philosophy. It is a dead philosophy because it is an individualistic philosophy at a time when the world is being reorganized according to great masses of people and the state is becoming more powerful. It is a dead philosophy because we are discovering that individuals are not rational agents, as they have unconscious minds. It is a dead philosophy because we have huge power blocks emerging in the world, such as conscript armies. There is a whole series of challenges, and many of the cleverest people of the time are admitting that liberalism is dead.
Finally, it is a dead philosophy because capitalism—the wonderful twin of liberalism—is changing from the sole proprietor or the small company to the world of massive giant companies like Carnegie and Rockefeller. These companies are refining votes as well as oil and controlling the political system, leading people to say that liberalism does not really exist in this world or address these problems.
A group of liberals in both the United States and Britain comes along and says, No, we have to reinvent liberalism for this new age. We have to reinvent liberalism so it is more active in dealing with things like pollution, sewage, and the lack of education of the working class. We have to reinvent liberalism so it can deal with big military threats from conscript armies. We need to reinvent liberalism so it can deal with the inheritance of vast fortunes which concentrate enormous amounts of power in the hands of small groups of businessmen. We need to reinvent it in a way that salvages the core principles of liberalism—which are individualism, reason, and open debate—rather than destroying them.
Mounk: Let us go a little bit into this crisis because I think that is really interesting. I have said on this podcast before that it feels to me like there have been three big crises of liberalism. One was around the middle and late 19th century with the emergence of industrial capitalism and the inability of liberalism to really deal with how you govern places like industrial Manchester. The second is the rise of totalitarianism in the form of fascism and communism and the kind of competing claims on political allegiance that those ideologies make, as well as the ways in which they reject bourgeois parliamentary democracy on principle. The third, I think, is the crisis we are going through right now, and we will get back to that.
You presented this a little bit more, I think, as one unified crisis. I do not know whether you would agree that there was really a separate 19th-century crisis and a separate mid-20th-century crisis, or whether you are thinking about them as part of one broader crisis; perhaps that ultimately becomes a semantic question. Tell us a little bit more about these crises and, in particular, how liberalism responds to these charges.
Wooldridge: There is an ongoing crisis from the middle of the 19th century whereby you have mass industrialization, you have the massification of society, and you have obvious huge pools of poverty. Most of the reactions to those crises come from overt left-wing people who say that we need to do something very fundamental about this. Or they come from novelists and writers who say that this is almost a spiritual crisis; we have to do something, we have to grasp what is going on, and we have to do something in terms of reconstituting our whole civilization.
You have Marx writing wonderful stuff about this, but you also have Thomas Carlyle writing wonderful things and Dickens writing wonderful things about all of these problems. Nevertheless, the broad liberal elite—the politicians and the key liberal thinkers—are basically saying we should stick with it. Bagehot would be a classic example of this, saying we should stick with parliamentary democracy, limited government, and laissez-faire economics.
What really happens at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, which fascinates me, is you get a whole bunch of liberal thinkers—self-consciously liberal thinkers—saying actually laissez-faire is not working anymore, and the limited state is not working anymore. You have people like Graham Wallas, who writes a wonderful book called The Great Society, which is later taken up for fascinating reasons in the United States. Or you get somebody like Hobhouse writing books called Liberalism. They are thinking within a liberal framework, and T.H. Green is reading Hegel and beginning to grapple with big questions about how to reconstitute liberalism.
These people are self-conscious liberals who say, “Let us take this philosophy, which has been so good for Britain, and reconstitute it.” They do so through something called “New Liberalism,” which argues for a more active role of the state, particularly in providing welfare and in resisting the rise of Germany, but which also says that we must not sacrifice fundamental liberal principles when we are doing all of these things.
That happens in America too. You get a simultaneous movement in the United States of New Liberals. The foundation of the magazine called The New Republic was an offshoot of this whole movement. You have Teddy Roosevelt saying that we have to save capitalism from itself. Capitalism is being destroyed by gigantism—by gigantic corporations and gigantic wealth—which is turning what should be a democratic republic into an aristocratic business oligarchy. Because business is much bigger in the United States than it is in Britain, his solution is antitrust—break up the big trusts—and inheritance taxes; let us try and dilute these huge fortunes.
In the heart of the Anglo-Saxon world, which is really the laissez-faire world, you get thinkers saying that we must change things. The reason I am emphasizing thinkers so much is that what happens with this new paradigm—developed largely by intellectuals, people at the LSE, at my old college at Oxford, Balliol, and to some extent at Harvard—is that it sends electricity and energy to reinvigorate the political class. Walter Lippmann is one of the communicators of this new philosophy.
Mounk: What most interests me about this moment is actually the ways in which liberals had to sacrifice some of their genuine taboos in order to reinvent themselves. The idea that private property was very important and that you needed to protect it from government overreach was central to liberalism, and for very good reasons. For centuries, it was the crown that tried to appropriate for itself all of the property of its citizens and subjects for its own purposes. Centuries of European politics were about the attempts of first the aristocracy and then the bourgeoisie to create some protections for their properties against arbitrary taxation and arbitrary extraction.
That is not just what created a lot of the space for political liberty; it is what created a lot of the growth of the 18th and 19th centuries, because it took those secure property rights to be able to have a system of large-scale investments and so on. Now you suddenly have new demands of the state saying we should tax people a lot in order to create these new social benefits. For a lot of liberals—for reasons that at that point in history seemed very profound—that seemed like a form of surrender. It seemed like the thin end of the wedge, and that we were going to go back to losing all of that security of tenure of property with terrible consequences, both for the subjection of the individual to the whim of the state and for the inability of people to invest. Who would invest if the moment you do that, you can have your property expropriated?
At the same time, you have this mounting social crisis. You have workers who do not have the benefit of regulation and therefore work incredibly long hours, children being pressed into service, and people having industrial accidents for which they are not appropriately compensated and becoming destitute overnight as a result. You have this incredible need for some of those economic changes. I think that liberalism found a way of incorporating a defense of a welfare state and a defense of a mixed economy within the constraints of liberal theory in a very productive way. This ensures that we still have enough property rights, that we have more giant corporations than we have had before, and an incredible amount of capital that is able to invest, reasonably confident that it will be able to enjoy the returns of that investment. That is a lot of what has created the continued economic growth we have had over the last 100 years.
We also have pretty generous welfare states that make sure that if you have an industrial accident, it will still affect your life negatively, but you are not going to be destitute as a result—even in the United States, where the welfare state is in some ways the least complete out of the advanced economies. But it took a real kind of wrangling with principles. I both want you to take us inside that wrangling with principles and, either now or later, to answer the question: what does that mean for us? What are the sacred cows of liberalism that we might need to slaughter in this moment in order to rejuvenate the tradition?
Wooldridge: Absolutely. I have painted a picture of a decadent liberal elite in the Reform Club and House of Commons sitting on their laurels, followed by a dynamic group like Churchill, Asquith, and Lloyd George coming along and solving problems. You are absolutely right to pick me up on that and ask: Is there not a real debate here, and are real sacrifices not being made?
Many liberals really thought that by opening the door to the welfare state, massed armies, antitrust legislation, and other compromises with a different sort of world, you were sacrificing too much. You were sacrificing the precious things which had made liberalism such a dynamic set of beliefs in the 19th century. There is a book published in 1905 by A.V. Dicey, the great British theorist, who says that liberalism is basically dead and finished because you have destroyed it. He argued that all of these pieces of legislation were destroying this great individualist philosophy.
I think we now would recognize that is not the case. What the liberals managed to do was take certain precious liberal principles, weigh them against other precious liberal principles, and create a new mixture—a new compromise. It is not as though you are moving from a world of perfection into a world of imperfection; you are balancing things against each other to create a new sort of balance.
I would say the interesting example of this is the meaning of freedom. We have Isaiah Berlin’s classic statement distinguishing between “freedom to” and “freedom from,” where he argues that the Hegelians and people in the late 19th century played an intellectual sleight of hand. He believed that freedom really means the old liberal classic sense of not being interfered with by the state. I think that is the “thin end of the wedge” argument gone too far.
When people like T. H. Green—whom Berlin rather mocks—tried to marry Hegelianism with liberalism, the New Liberals were right to say that providing certain goods through the state, such as free education, advances the cause of freedom. That is not an attack on individualism or freedom; it is enabling people to exercise their individual abilities and rights in a way that is commensurate with freedom. In other words, they were actually expanding the world of freedom.
Mounk: But Isaiah Berlin didn’t object to universal primary and secondary schooling, for example, right?
Wooldridge: No, he did not object to that, but he was saying that you should not justify it in the name of freedom. You should justify it in the name of other things. He argued that there is a confusion regarding this word “freedom.” I do not think that is true.
One of the things I argue in this book is that our notion of the individual has been impoverished by pure, Hayekian-style neoliberals who say that individualism is about allowing the individual not to be interfered with by other people. To them, the freedom that comes from that is essentially the freedom to go shopping. I do not think that is really what individualism and individual freedom are about. There are higher ends and lower ends; there is a whole process of self-development and self-improvement which is essential to what the liberal means by individualism.
Isaiah Berlin’s argument is that you are confusing terms. He would be in favor of primary education through the welfare state, but he would not be in favor of using the word “freedom” to justify it. I do not agree with that. Positive freedom can obviously be taken to ridiculous lengths, but I think the freedom to realize your abilities and exercise your talents is a very important form of individual freedom.
Mounk: I think that in different ways, both the identitarian left and the post-liberal right really attack the individualist core of liberalism. I had one leading post-liberal thinker on the podcast who was arguing that the problem with liberalism is that its essence is trying to maximize autonomy above all other considerations, and that is a huge problem. Then on the left you have somebody like Zohran Mamdani who has been ruling in a way that is not particularly liberal, using a phrase like “the joys of collectivism” in his inaugural speech to contrast with the supposed cold, joyless evils of individualism.
Look, I agree with you that this is based in part on the most extreme renderings of that individualism within the liberal tradition by people like Ayn Rand—who I think are not representative of a wider tradition—and in part even on caricatures of what those people think. The beginning of this is: why do you care about individualism? That goes back to the history of liberalism that you lay out in your book and that we laid out at the beginning of this conversation.
When liberals started caring about the ability of the individual to make their own choices about the world and to be true to their conscience, it was not the idea that you should be an egoist who does not care about anyone else and that true meaning consists in buying cheap clothes. It was that each individual has a very different idea of the highest goods and of community. I want to be in community with the people who share my religious beliefs, and you want to be in community with people who share yours. Those religious beliefs are not the same. If we both think that we can only be happy if everyone else follows our tune, we are going to have a giant civil war, as Europe did for over a century.
The way to think about this is that we need to make sure the state does not interfere with our conscience, our worship, or our forms of being in community, precisely so that different kinds of communities can thrive. Each person can then make their own decision about the extent to which they want to be part of this community or that community, or the extent to which they want to have a community-focused life. Some individuals are going to choose lives deeply embedded in the community they grew up in. Others are going to choose lives embedded in different communities they choose later. Others may choose lives that are autonomy-seeking and in search of self-expression. That is their right, too. Liberals do not have a preference between those three options. They do not say a good society is one where everyone abandons the religion of their ancestors. A good society is one where the state and the pressures of society do not impose that decision on you.
It is not clear to me—to go back to Isaiah Berlin, though we do not need to make it a debate about him—that this is not compatible with a broadly negative conception of liberty. I think everything I have said so far is perfectly compatible with a negative conception of liberty. It is also compatible to say that in order for people to grow up to be adults who can exercise those kinds of choices, you need primary and secondary education and a basic welfare state. You need this so people do not grow up in such poverty that intellectual development is stunted. It is good for everyone to educate future citizens so they can defend the political system and earn good incomes that keep society affluent. I think you can derive all of that from negative liberty.
Then you can say other things matter too; it is not just liberty that matters, which is one point Berlin makes. Then it comes to the question of positive liberty. As I recall Berlin’s concern, it is really one about coercion. Once you say you do not just understand liberty as an absence of constraints, but as living life in the “right” ways or fully exercising your autonomy, you enter a danger zone. According to Berlin, it is actually the positive conception of liberty that is autonomy-seeking in that sense. It becomes very easy to say: “I know you think you want to be secular, but that is not how to lead a meaningful life. The way to lead a meaningful life is to be a good Christian, so in your interest, we are going to force you to be a good Christian.” Or you say: “You think all you want is to be a private individual who enjoys playing computer games, but the truly meaningful life is to be a part of the proletariat as a universal class. We are going to force you to partake in the political activities of the proletariat because that is where true freedom lies.”
Isaiah Berlin is precisely responding to the pressures of a totalitarian age—to the sense that the “joys of collectiveness” really define society and you need to partake in them to have a meaningful life. That is where you get into a danger zone where the claim of political elites that they know what true freedom consists in for you creates the fig leaf for the worst forms of state coercion. From the perspective of Berlin, we have just lived through that with fascism and communism.
Wooldridge: Of course, and I can sympathize with that, but it is a sort of “thin end of the wedge” argument in the sense that obviously some terrible state actors have used the notion of positive freedom to coerce people. They say, “Unless you agree with me, you are a terrible person and doing the wrong things.”
However, I think there is a sense in which our freedom to pursue our own preferences is not enough in itself, because there is a question of what those preferences are. Those preferences can be high or low. What liberal education is all about—and I am going to talk about this a little bit—is shaping our preferences so that they are aesthetically and socially good rather than bad.
To revert to your original point about the people you have talked to—post-liberals and left-wing identitarians who are critical of liberalism—if they say that the problem with liberalism is that it is a shallow philosophy that does not address meaning or deal with interesting questions, I sympathize with them. That has been the position of all too many parts of the liberal establishment, particularly the neoliberal and libertarian establishments. They have said that we must maximize autonomy and construct a society which gives primary aim to consumer choice.
If you think about our education policies in the last few years, there has been an enormous emphasis on vouchers, choice, or internal markets, treating the parent or the child as a consumer. I sympathize with the critics, but I think they are attacking something which is not fundamental to liberalism and is based on a misreading of it.
If you go back to John Stuart Mill—a wonderful, brilliant writer—and look at what he says in On Liberty and in his autobiography, he has a much richer notion of what personal autonomy means. He has a radical break with the utilitarians and with Jeremy Bentham in particular. Bentham famously said basically that there is no difference between “pushpin”—which we might call video games today—and poetry. In that view, the individual is a machine seeking satisfaction, and that is all there is to the world. That is a view that re-emerges with modern neoliberalism.
Mill says, “No, poetry is better than pushpin.” He believes there are certain preferences that we should have, and his view is that you need to educate those preferences. You need to make sure that as the child grows up, they are taught that certain things are good and certain aesthetic values are worth pursuing because they make our life more fulfilling.
He is also very influenced by Coleridge, who has this notion of the “clerisy.” These are people who devote their lives to transmitting the higher values of culture, teaching in schools and universities the value of the true, the just, and the beautiful. Liberal education is a movement of taking people with a bunch of basic desires and turning them into fully formed human beings. In order to make them free, you have to educate them, and that education must be sustained by a culture kept alive by intellectual traditions. I think that is what T. H. Green is arguing for.
That is something that really matters in our defense of liberalism against the post-liberals and the identitarian left. If you are concerned about the meaning of life, liberalism has an answer, but the answer does not lie in imposing beliefs from the outside. It does not lie in getting rid of all property, nationalizing things, or forced community. It lies in the cultivated individual who is treated as an individual. This notion of Bildung—self-development—in thinkers like Humboldt is absolutely central to what liberalism is about.
In the rest of this conversation, Adrian and Yascha discuss where liberalism has gone wrong and how to fix it. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
