Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator, and this week I'm afraid I'm on holiday. So here's an opportunity to revisit our most popular podcast from last year. It's a conversation between myself and Francis Fukuyama about liberalism and where it went wrong.

Hello and welcome to a special edition of the Book Club podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator, and this week I'm joined on film as well as on radio by Professor Francis Fukuyama, whose new book is Liberalism and its discontents.

Professor Fukuyama, welcome. Now, liberal is a word that, as you acknowledged your introduction, means something very different in, say, Tennessee than it does in Muswell Hill. What exactly

are the parameters of what you call classical liberalism that's the subject of this book?

Sure, it does have a very different meaning in the United States than it does in Europe.

My definition of it is closer to the European one. Liberalism, in my view, is a system that's basically

a limitation of power based on a rule of law and a constitutional framework that limits the power

of executives. It's based on a number of philosophical presumptions. There's an element of

universalism because liberals believe that all

human beings have a equal set of rights, that these need to be protected by governments.

In Europe, liberal parties have been associated with a kind of center-right position that

emphasizes property rights and rule of law. And that's an important

part of classical liberalism. But I would say that it doesn't really dictate any set of

economic policies so that, for example, Scandinavia over the last couple of generations,

has been governed by social democratic parties that do a lot of

redistribution, but I would regard these all as liberal parties essentially because they all

respect basic individual rights. They tax at a higher rate than, you know, other countries,

but I don't think that that's part of my definition of liberalism. So it really does

have to do without foundation of respect for law and respect for limits to government power.

Yeah, and that idea that you can, you know, essentially you can be in a liberal society and

provided it's electorally endorsed, you can draw the line economically on the size

...