Raymond Geuss in Sidecar:
Adrian Wooldridge’s recent Centrists of the World Unite!: The Lost Genius of Liberalism does not just echo The Communist Manifesto in its language, it also mirrors its basic structure. Marx and Engels’s exhortation to workers around the world was not a free-standing bit of normative admonishment, but appealed to a theoretically informed historical argument about the role which class conflict has played in creating modern (i.e., mid-19th-century Western European) society, the form that class conflict now takes (capitalists versus proletariat) and the possibility of making society freer and more productive by fully socializing production. Much of Wooldridge’s book is likewise devoted to a historical account enlisted to support his thesis that liberalism created the modern world, but that it is now under threat. Rather than, as in the Communist Manifesto, calling on workers (‘Proletarians of all countries, unite!’) to create something new, open-ended and unpredictable, Wooldridge issues a nostalgic summons to ‘centrists’ to rally around the liberalism which made the modern world such a wonderful place to live in.
Wooldridge, for many years a writer at the Economist, is well aware that ‘liberalism’ is a historically changing constellation of views, and has been, at various points, a very broad church indeed. But he nonetheless thinks it possible to discern a core of ‘eternal liberal values’; the historical variation, he thinks, is a question of shifting additions to this central stock of beliefs. He has two slightly different ways of specifying what this core is. Sometimes it is said to be the notion that ‘the individual must be cherished: his or her rights must be protected and autonomy preserved’. This general claim, of course, is almost completely vacuous until one specifies which particular rights need to be defended; there isn’t anything like a universal consensus on that.
More here.
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