Hi everyone and welcome. I'm joined today by Alexander Mercuris and Paul Robinson,

a professor of international affairs at the University of Ottawa.

And yeah, we're meeting today to discuss one of his most recent books, which is on Russian liberalism as a very important topic relating to Russia,

and I would say also in the West. As you point out, even in your introduction, we are seeing

a crisis, if you will, at least we're talking about a crisis in liberalism in the world.

And often a lot of these discussions

can also be related back to the discussions they've had in the past in Russia.

Anyways, I thought perhaps we could start with defining liberalism and the role it's had in Russia

to start with a very wide, wide question.

Yeah, that's, you know, it's much easier sending down. I'm now written a book on conservatism and one on liberalism.

And I think the main conclusion in my mind I've drawn is these are very bad terms,

which probably hide more than they reveal, but particularly because, you know, what is meant by liberalism has changed significantly over the decades so that, you know, some people who describe as liberals now are in direct conflict with what are called classical liberals who adhere to what you know liberalism originally met

um so it's very very hard to determine exactly what this thing is was one author i quote you

duncan bell who in a study on what is liberalism and said well you know it's it's basically

whatever people who are called

liberal say it is but i i i think you can try and talk maybe not of liberalism but the liberalisms

plural which was a related group of of ideas um which have certain things in common, but not all, you know,

service, you can identify certain features which are present in many liberalisms,

and some are present in one liberalism and not another, and they form a sort of family

of related ideologies,

which are founded at the center of which

is the idea of the person or the individual

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