Centrists of the World Unite!: The Lost Genius of Liberalism

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 show more 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?’

Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/review/centrists-world-unite-adrian-wooldri...

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