The Revolutionary Center: Adrian Wooldridge on the Lost Genius of Liberalism

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“Liberalism was founded in the middle of the eighteenth century as a revolutionary philosophy — a philosophy that tried to subvert the old world. That set of beliefs has continued to be radical and revolutionary. When liberalism fell into decadence, it examined itself, subverted itself, and became once again a revolutionary faith.” — Adrian Wooldridge

We’ve lost our revolutionary center. At least according to Adrian Wooldridge, the distinguished British political writer. That revolution, Wooldridge insists, is the genius of liberalism — the radical eighteenth-century ideology that shaped the modern world. Today, however, he argues in The Revolutionary Center: The Lost Genius of Liberalism, “liberalism” has become conservative, perhaps even reactionary, in its senescent infatuation with cultural identity. Meanwhile, the biggest threat to liberal individualism is big tech: fragmenting attention, spreading misinformation, manipulating choices through algorithms designed to excite emotion rather than inform reason. Rather than making us geniuses, Silicon Valley is turning all of us into idiots.

To the ramparts then, Wooldridge pronounces. Liberals need to seize back the revolutionary center. Or, as Wooldridge, a Fellow of All Souls, would spell it, centre.

Five Takeaways

• Erasmus and the Liberal Way of Life: Liberalism begins not as an ideology but as a way of living. Erasmus, charting a middle path between the Reformation and the counter-Reformation, offers the founding insight: a good life involves reading books, drinking wine, having discussions, and not bullying people to adopt your faith. What liberalism adds to this is intellectual skepticism — the recognition that you can’t be absolutely certain of your beliefs, and therefore that power must be constrained by constitutions. When liberalism became purely associated with political philosophy, Wooldridge argues, it lost this sense of liberalism as a way of life — and that loss is part of what needs to be recovered.

• Bobo Orthodoxy and Its Wounds: The liberalism of the last forty years has been Bobo liberalism — bohemian bourgeois, David Brooks’ term. Maximum individual freedom in both the marketplace and personal conduct; no judgementalism on lifestyle choices; celebration of diversity and immigration as ipso facto goods. It did a great deal of good. Gay marriage. The dismantling of corporatist economics. But it also created problems it couldn’t see, because its own philosophy prevented it from acknowledging them. In Britain: the Bobo establishment’s inability to confront the grooming gangs, because its multiculturalist assumptions made it terrified of accusations of racism. In America: tent cities, drug addiction, the social costs of choices that nobody felt entitled to criticize.

• Big Tech Is a Bigger Threat Than Putin: Wooldridge’s most provocative claim: the biggest threat to liberalism is not Putin or Xi but the tech oligarchy. Putin is a dictator; that system will eventually collapse. But big tech is dismantling liberal individualism from within. Liberalism’s foundational premise is that individuals, as the building blocks of society, must be well-informed, capable of self-control, and able to act as rational agents. What information capitalism is deliberately engineering — through algorithms designed to excite emotion, fragment attention, and spread misinformation — is the destruction of all three of those conditions. These companies need to be broken up. Not on socialist grounds. On liberal ones.