“A humdinger of a book”: Lord Howell reviews 'Centrists of the World Unite!'
February 2026: Satirical carnival float featuring Xi Jinping, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin | Image by: ZUMA Press / Alamy
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With its urgent call to repair and revive the liberal world order, this illuminating book strikes the perfect note for our troubled times
Here comes a humdinger of a book which strikes the perfect note for our troubled times. Authored by British scholar and journalist Adrian Wooldridge (Balliol and All Souls, no less) it dives deep into both the American and British political and intellectual scenes to illuminate what has gone so disappointingly wrong.
Its central message is that the liberal world order – built almost from scratch from the rubble of the Second World War and on which, despite checks and setbacks over the years since, most of our progress, prosperity and indeed ordered civilisation has come to rest – is in a state of disintegration and in urgent need of repair and revival.
Even the book’s title strikes an immediate refreshing note, and should help alert all but the doziest to the real sources of our present discontent – and to the great heaps of anxiety and pessimism which keep piling up in, and polluting, our intellectual avenues of public discussion and advancement.
Crisis after crisis, large and small, some domestic, some global, seem to tumble down on us, sending experts scurrying like disturbed ants in every direction with their solutions and calls for ‘total mind resets’ and all the clichéd rest. Books on how Britain is broken pour out (some of them seemingly no more than tepid rehashes of Look Back in Anger).
The economy, moan the headlines, has stopped growing, productivity is falling, investment is shrinking, business confidence is on the floor, trains are late, schools crumbling, strikes are brewing again, funds short for every conceivable cause, government debt soaring, defence budgets hopelessly underfunded, the energy crisis costly and unending, with an even worse one about to visit us…
It dives deep into both the American and British political and intellectual scenes to illuminate what has gone so disappointingly wrong
But stand back and one begins to see, helped by this volume, that most of these setbacks, national or global, whether real or just media-exaggerated, are second order outcomes of something much deeper that has gone missing.
That ‘something’ is a world view inspired by a broadly liberal social order, and liberally inclined institutions – and a liberal order’s genuine champions. Constant talk there may be of ‘values’ but scarcely never an acknowledgement that in a completely digitalised world they require completely fresh interpretation or they go under – and drag us down with them.
The revival message in this volume, from this interpreter of this global turning point, is there for the receiving (and acting on) and long overdue it is. But is it being heeded?
The era we are now entering, in which machines start thinking for themselves, could be a time for the world coming together as much as, or even more, than in those bold post-1945 decades of high hopes. Both survival and progress are still in reach if we have the wisdom to keep control and escape the stale cliché-ridden ideologies and dogmas of the past. And there is a time ahead of utter disorder and destruction if we fail.
Nothing of the great doctrines of left and right politics will help much here, whether collective and individualist, state versus market, Karl Marx versus Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman, bureaucratic empires versus the unpredictable mosaic of capitalism.
How much relevance is left in facing or comprehending the new disruptions of the digital age we all now have to confront at every level, from home and daily life up to the highest dealings between nations, guarded by once trusted global institutions and by the international rules of law and freedom?
How many experts and commentators have grasped this? How many political leaders, policy gurus, influencers in the whole political galère have seen through the fog and mist of the old dishonesties to the new realities?
Well, there is a book here to start from. It may be not too late to change course.
Lord Howell is a Conservative peer
Centrists of the World Unite!: The Lost Genius of Liberalism
By: Adrian Wooldridge
Publisher: Allen Lane
