‘Centrists of the World Unite!’ by Adrian Wooldridge review

In 1944 the historian Herbert Butterfield lamented that ‘whatever it may have done to our history’ the Whiggish version of it had ‘had a wonderful effect on English politics’. A decade earlier Butterfield had published his great critique The Whig Interpretation of History (1931), which delineated and criticised both a prevalent approach to British history that lauded the role of Whigs in extending constitutional liberties, and a more general tendency in the writing of history which was overly simplistic, one-sided, and present-minded. What we have here, in Centrists of the World Unite!, is perhaps best described as a kind of Whig history. Liberalism, we are told, was born, saved the world, then corrupted, and must now be re-energised to save the world again.

This would certainly be a noble task; the world really does need saving. Britain, we often hear, is ‘broken’, facing what Adam Tooze has described as a ‘polycrisis’ – climate, population, industrial, democratic – and now war. Institutional trust is at an all-time low. Adrian Wooldridge is quite correct when he states that neoliberalism has failed as a governing philosophy. To rescue us from political extremes Wooldridge asks: ‘How can we bring liberalism back to life from its current coma?’

He begins by outlining what, for him, are the two key liberal principles: individualism and freedom. Through concepts such as the sovereign individual and tolerance, liberalism first ‘made’ the modern world in the 19th century and then, by adapting these principles to new social, economic, and totalitarian regimes in the 20th century, ‘saved’ the world that it had made. The ‘corruption’ of liberalism occurred relatively recently. With the fall of the Soviet Bloc, a triumphalist liberal ‘end of history’ was declared. Modernisation and globalisation replaced older modes of political thinking and argument. Liberals are thus called to arms: recall and modify these great principles, and the world can be saved once more. Wooldridge recommends a Mazzinian ‘liberal nationalism’ which stresses duties as well as rights, a revived form of ‘meritocracy’ (anachronistically applied), and restoring a sense that liberal democracy requires constant vigilance (i.e. an active citizenry) and a very Victorian sense that progress also carries the potential for degeneration, over ‘end of history’-style complacency.

There are two books struggling for mastery here. The first is a more nuanced, historicist story. When liberalism in Britain (and elsewhere) was first conceived, the central concern was constitutional: to place limits on power, of both monarchy and Church. A primary task for liberals was thus devising (or, in Britain, reforming) constitutional and political systems and practices that would guarantee political stability and a specific conception of freedom: liberty with order. This was no abstract concept. Civil and religious liberty required the dismantling of Anglican (or Catholic) privileges and a limited freedom which was seen to underpin civil society. Hence, even rather unrepresentative Liberals such as John Stuart Mill understood that liberty was not licence and, as in his On Liberty (1859), the central concern was how to delineate the parameters of social compromise: to safeguard individual and societal progress without causing ‘harm’ to others. We should also remember that the more significant contemporary figure of William Gladstone liked to spend his free time walking the streets of London attempting to ‘save’ female prostitutes, and later self-flagellated if he experienced impure thoughts. Many Liberals were staunch teetotallers who campaigned to restrict pub opening times.

The book does contain glimmers of deeper understanding and nuance throughout, yet the analysis comes undone, often on the following page, via a sweeping generalisation, a kind of literary tug-of-war between Wooldridge’s historical and journalistic lives. Most concerning is how the reader is misled into thinking that liberals alone ‘saved the world’. Often the fudge is to simply make everyone a liberal, or a proto-liberal. Some eyebrow-raising examples include Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Robert Peel, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We are told that ‘all modern history is the history of liberal thought and the response to it’. Yet the tendency to claim all for liberalism and reactive scraps for the rest reveals a great deal about the problems with modern political argument.

Tories were concerned with the condition of the people, often through an interpretation of their Christian faith – see, for example, the early factory reformers (especially Lord Ashley), novelists such as Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, and John Ruskin. When New Liberals were reorienting their party around new schemes of taxation and welfare reform at the turn of the 20th century, Labourites and Conservatives argued that liberalism had the least convincing claim to be trusted with social policy. It was here that the myths of ‘classical’ laissez faire liberalism were widely constructed and circulated, by both opponents and supporters of the increasing role of the state. Liberalism was reconstructed at the turn of the 20th century, during a period which might be likened to our own ‘polycrisis’ – but so was conservatism and, in fact, a great deal of 19th-century history. Across the political spectrum, it was understood that the creation of new historical genealogies was central to the task of political and ideological reconstruction, including ‘citizenship education’.

The central problem of an approach which assumes readers today simply need reminding of how great liberalism was is that it fails to delineate effective ways to connect, engage, and persuade others. It is a mode born of the historical context blamed for liberalism’s ‘corruption’, but will a revived Whiggism land in a context craving ‘authenticity’? Wooldridge is not quite asking us to dismantle the master’s house, but the reader is left at a loss as to what tools they need to complete the job.

• Centrists of the World Unite! The Lost Genius of Liberalism
  Adrian Wooldridge
  Allen Lane, 416pp, £25
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Emily Jones is Senior Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Manchester.