PODCAST: Recovering the lost genius of liberalism, with Adrian Wooldridge (Geoff Kabaservice, 4/13/26, The Vital Center)
Adrian Wooldridge:
I think the primary thing that really defines liberalism is three things: one, individualism; second, tolerance; and three, a skepticism and worry about power. By individualism, I mean that the world starts with the individual and works upwards to the collective — the opposite of high Tory views and the opposite of socialist views. And by “the individual,” I don’t mean the notion of just allowing people the freedom to go shopping and to choose whatever they want in a free market. I think liberal individualism is a much richer and more profound philosophy than that. It’s about being our best selves. It’s about self-improvement, self-control, self-development. The essence of liberalism was to do with self-help, self-improvement, self-education. It’s a very questing, striving sort of notion of individualism.
Secondly, tolerance, that you must be tolerant of other people’s opinions. And the reason for that… It might sound like a nice thing to be, but the reason for that is a philosophy of knowledge: that we don’t know what is true, and we definitely don’t have the right to impose our theological views on other people. So the right thing to do is to be tolerant, is to be skeptical, is to be pluralistic about different knowledge claims.
And thirdly, and in some ways most importantly, is worry about power. If you’re a liberal, you’re saying that power is in itself a dangerous thing. It needs to be constrained, it needs to be disciplined, it needs to be governed by rules.
And so I think those are the three things. So you can have big state government; you can have a big-state liberalism, small-state liberalism. You can have nice liberalism, you can have tough liberalism. But you can’t have a liberalism that believes in strongmen, that believes in imposing religious beliefs on other people, and that believes that collectives matter more than individual self-development.
The genius though, is the way liberalism vindicates these concerns via republican liberty: so long as laws/rules are adopted in particapatory fashion and apply universally, we are all equally tolerated/free.