Liberalism's cycles of crisis and renewal, with Adrian Wooldridge

First, just tell me, you've got a, many different ways to define liberalism.

You've got your own sort of three main themes that appear again and again in the history of liberalism.

Why don't you, uh, tell me about those?

Yeah, let me talk about the three things that really define the essence of liberalism, 'cause liberalism has many, many, uh, incarnations.

I think there's big government liberalism.

There is small government liberalism.

I think all of these are possible manifestations of liberalism.

But the three essential things that you must have to have a liberal regime are firstly individualism, that you start out with the individual and work upwards and outwards from the individual.

That s- socialism starts with a sort of collectivism, that traditional Toryism starts with a notion of collectivism, as it were embodied in tradition.

But liberalism will start with the individual, and, uh, that is, that, that, that, that, that is the fundamental thing that liberals, liberals will agree upon.

The second thing is, uh, tolerance, that liberals think, believe that we cannot be certain about a lot of important epistemological propositions, particularly when they're metaphysical about the meaning of life, that we have to agree to disagree, and that that must pervade all of our actions.

So we must have a belief in pluralism.

We must have a belief in open debate.

We must have a dis- a belief in discussion, all of which emanates from this, the, the, this fundamental skepticism.

And thirdly is worry about concentration of power.

That all liberals think that, that too much power in the hands of one person or a few people is in itself a very dangerous thing, even if those people are, uh, can claim to be enlightened, uh, because, uh, power corrupts.

That people get old, people become degenerate, people become drunk with power.

So liberals are always concerned with sharing power, disciplining power, dividing power, that it's something that is too dangerous to be in the hands of one person.

So those are the three definitional things that I think all liberals, all regimes must have to be called liberal.

Now, for a long time, people have thought that there is this fourth thing, which is the balance between the state and the market.

That if you're a classical liberal, you would, uh, believe in the small state, the big market.

If you were a sort of 1960s LBJ-style liberal, you'd believe in the, a compassionate state that embodied certain compassionate values.

Now, I think that those are secondary things, that you can have...

You can be a small state liberal, you can be a, a big state liberal, and we, we, we shouldn't be too hung up about the size of the state.

That's a secondary thing.