This article is taken from the March 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
Not many journalists in history have been as revered, not only by contemporaries but by posterity, as Walter Bagehot. Insofar as there is a British constitution, it is still best encapsulated by his book of that title. En route to the Continent, Woodrow Wilson made a detour to Bagehot’s grave at Langport to pay his respects to the “seer”.
Though he no longer writes a column for the Economist, Adrian Wooldridge is the nearest thing we have to that paper’s founding editor. His latest book attempts something no less ambitious than Bagehot: to rally the liberals of all parties to resist the onward march of strongmen and illiberal anarchy.
To a great extent, Wooldridge succeeds. His narrative of how we got here is persuasive, his diagnosis of the malaise of the Western elites is fresh, and he offers convincing reasons for believing that “the lost genius of liberalism” will make a comeback.
The only thing I don’t like about this book is the title. “Centrists of the World Unite!” is of course a direct allusion to The Communist Manifesto — the sacred text of Marxism, the most murderous and sustained onslaught on liberalism in history. Irony has its place in book titles — the Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgård named his six-volume autobiographical epic after Mein Kampf, though that too is in execrable taste.
The real problem with Wooldridge’s title is the word “centrist”. It isn’t a synonym for “liberal” any more than the “centre ground” is the same as the “common ground”, where most people stand. Pretending that all liberals are centrists implies that those who see themselves as conservatives or socialists, say, are necessarily illiberal. But Winston Churchill and George Orwell, even though they called themselves Tory or Labour, were just as authentically liberal-minded as Lloyd George, who led the Liberal Party, or John Maynard Keynes, who wrote that “in truth I am still a Liberal”.
To stand up for liberal principles, it is sometimes necessary to break with the consensus of those who like to think of themselves as liberals. The French Revolution divided English liberals between those, such as Thomas Paine or Charles James Fox, who supported the revolutionaries even during the Terror; and those, such as Edmond Burke or William Pitt, who fought them to the death.
The abolition of the slave trade — liberal England’s supreme achievement — was conceived, campaigned for and executed largely by Tories. In the Cold War, liberals who denounced communism and befriended dissidents were often ostracised by centrist friends.
When Margaret Thatcher championed the classical liberal ideas of Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman, her fiercest critics were the centrists: the One-Nation Tories, the Social Democratic defectors from Labour led by Roy Jenkins and Shirley Williams, and the Liberal Party of Jeremy Thorpe and David Steel.
So badly have liberal ideas been defended by self-described liberals on both sides of the Atlantic that the very word “liberal” has become suspect. In America it is often shorthand for “left-wing” (except amongst Leftists themselves). In France it means “right-wing”, especially on economics. In Britain, it can mean either, but often implies what Tony Blair (following Bill Clinton) called “the middle way” — itself an old slogan, dating back to Harold Macmillan’s 1938 book of that name.
Wooldridge’s polemic draws together the disparate traditions of liberal thought and action. The “lost genius” of his subtitle takes in a vast array of thinkers, writers and politicians both before and after 1797, when Benjamin Constant first used the word “liberal” to denote a political position. It is notable that “conservative” and “socialist”, “left” and “right” were also forged in this post-Revolutionary furnace.
Yet “liberty”, in the sense of political freedom or a civil right, emerged in the crucible of the 17th century battles between king and parliament. The late Larry Siedentop showed that medieval canon lawyers had already developed the prerequisites of liberalism: the apotheosis of the individual (“Renaissance man”), equality before the law and representative government.
Wooldridge singles out Erasmus, Hobbes and Montesquieu as key figures in the transition to liberalism as a coherent political philosophy. One might hazard the view that Erasmus teaches us to beware of polarisation and intolerance, Hobbes to enforce our implicit contract with the sovereign against both anarchy and tyranny, whilst Montesquieu’s doctrine of the separation of powers guards against the usurpation of the state by an overmighty executive branch, or what Lord Hailsham called “elective dictatorship”.
The story Wooldridge tells is full of dialectical twists and turns. He sees the efflorescence of liberalism in the 19th century as “an antidote to the twin evils of economic stagnation and religious war”. Yet industrialisation and nationalism, accelerated by liberal ideas, brought their own evils. He has an excellent chapter on liberal imperialism, both a blessing and a curse for the rest of humanity — although today we ignore the more benign legacies of empire.
By 1900, laissez-faire liberalism — beset by trusts, cartels and monopolies — was reinventing itself in an interventionist direction. Wooldridge is an admirer of the New Liberalism (represented in America by Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Party and later by his distant cousin FDR’s New Deal), but on the European stage, at least, the fusion of capitalism, socialism and democracy was incapable of resisting the resurgence of dictatorship.
After the Second World War, liberal thinkers and politicians were forced to improvise again, this time with greater success. Christian Democracy in Europe and the Liberal Democrats in Japan, though not particularly democratic, at least provided stability and prosperity. The European project promised the benefits of democratic capitalism but without national rivalry.
Americans, replacing the British as the liberal superpower, shed some of their illiberal excrescences. The West’s decades-long duel with the Soviet Union was won almost without a shot, largely because those denied meaningful freedom voted with their feet: first by leaving the country, then by occupying the streets and refusing to leave.
Once again, however, the forces of illiberalism fought back. Intellectuals wrongly concluded that liberalism had won the battle of ideas once and for all, ignoring the fact that authoritarians too could harness technology and exploit discontent. For the past two decades, the free world has been in retreat. But this time the threat comes at least as much from within. The “people power” that had been so effective in bringing down communism has proved equally dangerous in the hands of national populists.
How does Wooldridge want liberalism to mutate this time? His first proposal is to emulate John Stuart Mill. Under the influence of Coleridge, De Tocqueville and Harriet Taylor, the author of On Liberty abandoned his father’s narrow version of utilitarianism and “moved simultaneously to the Right and to the Left”.
Wooldridge thinks today’s liberals must do the same, by cracking down on the corporate elite and the ruling classes, whilst also rediscovering the original meaning of liberalism, from the Latin liber, which means both “free” and “generous”; and liberalis, the public virtue that befits a free-born person. Conservatives can teach liberals, he says, about excellence and greatness, about education and culture, about legitimate authority and good character.
Such a “rebalancing” would, Wooldridge hopes, lead liberals to be less arrogant and elitist, less global and more local, less prone to what Oakeshott called “cosmic optimism” and more sceptical. He wants a dose of Plato, the darling of the Victorian liberals but the bane of their postwar progeny, to cure us of our decadence. The epidemic of urban disorder, drug addiction and mental illness cry out, he thinks, for liberal paternalism. A staunch Remainer, he nevertheless espouses “taking back control” of borders and a degree of compulsion in the integration of migrants.
Liberals tend to be tone-deaf to religion. “Now I only hear / Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,” wrote Matthew Arnold in 1867. If there is a weakness of this book, it is the mistaken assumption that Arnold was right. But the world we inhabit is “post-secular”, and unless liberals can survive in “the Sea of Faith”, it may become “post-liberal” too.
It is hard to disagree with Wooldridge when he concedes that liberals have aided and abetted their enemies. He wants to rid liberals of their taste for extremism, to persuade them to take populism seriously and take the fight to the autocrats.
He denies that liberalism is shallow or banal, as its critics from Carlyle to Houellebecq have scoffed. Wooldridge has done an outstanding job of making a fresh, compelling case for liberalism. It remains to be seen whether liberals will listen to the Bagehot of our day.
